Course Meeting Times
Seminars: 1 session/week, 2 hours/session
Course Enrollment
This seminar is designed for students who are enrolled in MIT’s Political Science PhD Program. We reserve the right to approve other students.
Course Description
This course explores the political implications of the ethnic differences embedded within states and societies. We will be seeking to understand the nature of collective identities, the driving forces underlying their persistence and change, their mobilization, and their intersection with and effect on the nation-state system, which remains the basis for political organization around the world today. Our discussions will be comparative and theoretical, while also engaging concrete examples. The study of identity politics intersects with all of the fields of political science, and the theory and literature learned in this seminar will have relevance for anyone working on identity-related issues in any part of the discipline.
Course Objectives
Our central purpose will be to explore the major conceptual approaches and theoretical debates relating to the causes and consequences of ethnic politics to prepare students to conduct original scholarly work in this field. The seminar will be a collective project, in that everyone will be expected to contribute to our discussions and debates. Although the primary focus of the course is political, our discussions will include key literature from other social scientific disciplines (anthropology, psychology, economics, sociology, and history), as the questions with which we are dealing cut across disciplinary boundaries and are of broad social scientific concern. The course aims to provide students with the intellectual resources to construct their own framework to understand these phenomena, as well as an opportunity to apply this knowledge to concrete situations. It seeks to expose students to a broad range of approaches in the study of identity politics and to provide them with the theoretical and analytical tools to be able to design and conduct research in this area.
Grading Policy
| ACTIVITIES | PERCENTAGES |
|---|---|
| Book review (1000–1500 words) | 20% |
| Research proposal memo (1000–1500 words) | 20% |
| Research and proposal presentation (15 minutes) | 10% |
| Research paper (4,000–6,000 words) | 35% |
|
Class participation Beyond faithful attendance at class, each student will be expected to contribute to class discussions and to have completed the readings assigned for each session prior to class. All students are responsible for reading all of the core readings for each week and for being prepared to discuss them. |
15% |
For detail on the activities above, see the Assignments section.
Generative AI Policy
This course permits the use of AI for collecting or cleaning data, coding, and checking grammar and style. These tools may NOT be used for writing the research proposal/paper, book review, or preparing for seminar (i.e. in lieu of reading, identifying critiques or questions about work). Violations of this policy will be considered academic misconduct.
Calendar
[VC] = Taught by Professor Volha Charnysh
[EL] = Taught by Professor Evan Lieberman
Session 1: Introduction: Scholarly and substantive motivation for the study of ethnic politics and some overview of the field [EL]
Session 2: What is it? Concepts and definitions [EL]
Session 3: Research tools for the study of ethnic politics [VC]
- 8–10 min. of presentation followed by Q&A, of articles that introduce the new tools/innovations to the class. See Session 3 in Readings section for further detail.
Session 4: The origins of diversity and ethnic salience [VC]
Session 5: The psychology of prejudice [VC]
- Assignment due: Book review
Session 6: How institutions shape identities and ethnic relations [EL]
- Assignment due: Research proposal memo
Session 7: Explaining the rise of nations, nationalism [VC]
Session 8: Group attachment, sacrifice, and state-building (EL)
Session 9: Diversity, state capacity, and public goods provision [VC]
Session 10: Ethnic parties and ethnic voting [EL]
Session 11: Research and proposal presentation
Session 12: Violence: Civil wars, genocide, pogroms [VC]
Session 13: Overcoming ethnic conflict and violence [EL]
- Assignment due: Research paper
