Democratization Dublin City University - Full Curriculum Program Fall 2022 Semester - Dublin

The course has two main goals. The first is to introduce students to the major issues, theories, concepts, and arguments in the literature on recent democratization. The second goal of the course is to give students a comparative perspective on some of the major cases of transitions from dictatorship to democracy. In practice, this will mean focusing primarily but far from entirely on the post communist Eurasian states (both Eastern Europe and former Soviet states) and Sub-Saharan Africa. These two regions feature a very large number of cases; each region exhibits unusual diversity in both causes and effects, thereby making for instructive comparisons (in direct contrast to Latin America, for example, where variations in regime outcomes are limited); and these two areas share, nonetheless, some important characteristics, such as weak states, long experiences with colonial rule, and far from ideal correlations between national and state boundaries.