Summer Sessions | Courses | Political Science

We can lean heavily on the concepts of reason and rationality to justify and criticize political thought, speech, and conduct. But we also find it difficult to explain what it means to be reasonable or rational in politics. What is reason? What does it mean to have a reason for a belief or an action? If someone behaves unreasonably, what are they failing to do? Is reason at odds with passion, rhetoric, authority, or religious conviction? Are there spcial ways in which citizens and public officials should reason in public life? Is it realistic to expect people to exercise "public" forms of reason in a culturally diverse and politically polarized society that sometimes seems indifferent to rational argument? What is the relationship between "reasonable" political discourse and familiar contemporary concepts like "political correctness"? This course studies some influential classical and contemporary answers to these and related questions drawn from a variety of thinkers, especially Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas, Onora O'niell, and Christine Korsgaard. 

This course provides an introduction to the politics of war termination and peace consolidation. The course examines the challenges posed by ending wars and the process by which parties to a conflict arrive at victory, ceasefires, and peace negotiations. It explores how peace is sustained, why peace lasts in some cases and breaks down in others and what can be done to make peace more stable, focusing on the role of international interventions, power-sharing arrangements, reconciliation between adversaries, and reconstruction.

Prerequisites: POLS UN1201 or the equivalent, and the instructors permission. Pre-registration is not permitted. Seminar in American Politics. Students who would like to register should join the electronic wait list. For list of topics and descriptions see: https://polisci.columbia.edu/content/undergraduate-seminars

Prerequisites: POLS UN1201 or the equivalent, and the instructors permission. Pre-registration is not permitted. Seminar in American Politics. Students who would like to register should join the electronic wait list. For list of topics and descriptions see: https://polisci.columbia.edu/content/undergraduate-seminars

Prerequisites: POLS UN1201 or the equivalent, and the instructors permission. Pre-registration is not permitted. Seminar in American Politics. Students who would like to register should join the electronic wait list. For list of topics and descriptions see: https://polisci.columbia.edu/content/undergraduate-seminars

Prerequisites: POLS UN1601 or the equivalent, and the instructors permission. Seminar in International Relations. Students who would like to register should join the electronic wait list. For list of topics and descriptions see: https://polisci.columbia.edu/content/undergraduate-seminars

Prerequisites: POLS UN1601 or the equivalent, and the instructors permission. Seminar in International Relations. Students who would like to register should join the electronic wait list. For list of topics and descriptions see: https://polisci.columbia.edu/content/undergraduate-seminars

Why are some nations able to grow and prosper while others mired in conflicts and poverty? What are the political factors that shape countries’ success in growing their economies? How does economic progress affect a regime’s ability to stay in power and the prospects and directions of political changes? This course addresses these questions by introducing students to major ideas and findings from both classical and cutting-edge scholarship on political economy of development.The first part of the course will review major episodes of growth (or the lack thereof) in human history and how they influenced the theoretical paradigms for studying development. The second half of the course will be devoted to more specialized topics, examining how different institutions, strategies, and contingencies affect countries’ economic fortunes. The goal of the course is to help you acquire the necessary conceptual and empirical toolkit for digesting and producing scholarly knowledge about the origins and consequences of economic development.

This course explores the causes, dynamics and outcomes of civil wars and insurgencies. It addresses when and why violence is employed in place of peaceful solutions to conflict and what accounts for individual and mass recruitment into armed organizations. It aims to understand variation in warring groups’ cohesion, repertoires of violence, and relations with civilians, state counterinsurgency methods, and the political economy of conflict. The course concludes by examining war duration and termination. Students will be pushed to grapple with research written in many traditions including philosophical, statistical, game theoretic, and qualitative materials.