Global Ethnic Politics

This course offers a comparative, global exploration of race and ethnicity, examining how ideas about difference are created, institutionalized, and contested across time and place. The course is designed to help students understand the history, dynamics, and political salience of ethnic inequality and introduces key concepts and debates around defining race and ethnicity, colonization and empire, and the formation of modern nations. Topics under consideration include the politics and political history of indigenous peoples; the history and ongoing structures of white supremacy; multiculturalism and the legacies of slavery; ethnic political mobilization, panethnicity, diasporas, and transnationalism; and the role of migration in reshaping identities and hierarchies. We also analyze examine cleansing and genocide, contemporary patterns of racial stratification, and competing explanations for ethnic conflict and violence, as well as the range of institutional and grassroots responses to conflict around the world.