Politics in the Global South

Political development examines how states acquire authority, build institutions, generate legitimacy, and manage conflict and distribution under conditions of economic and social transformation. Traditionally associated with questions of modernization, state formation, and democratization, the field is centrally concerned with why political order, institutional capacity, representation, and development trajectories vary across countries and regions.

This course approaches political development from the perspective of the Global South. Rather than treating development as a linear or universal process, it asks how colonial legacies, unequal insertion into the international economy, commodity dependence, late industrialization, and geopolitical competition have shaped different trajectories of political and economic change. We will examine how these forces affect state formation, institutional capacity, democratization, authoritarianism, populism, resource-dependent democracies, organized violence, corruption, clientelism, and political order.

A central theme of the course is the tension between commodity dependence and industrialization. We will compare regions and cases in which primary commodity exports, extractive economies, and external vulnerability have constrained development with cases in which states built industrial capacity, governed markets, and reshaped their position in the international economy.

The course closes by returning to this question in the context of climate change and green neo-extractivism, asking whether the green transition creates new development opportunities or reproduces older patterns of dependence, extraction, and unequal environmental costs.

The course does not aim to cover every region of the Global South in every topic. Instead, it uses regional literatures strategically, pairing major themes in political development with the cases and debates in which those themes have generated especially important theoretical and empirical contributions.

Throughout the semester, students will engage with comparative cases and empirical evidence to evaluate competing explanations for political development and underdevelopment. The course is designed for students with interests in comparative politics, international development, political economy, public policy, and global governance. While theoretically grounded, it emphasizes analytical application to contemporary policy challenges facing emerging and developing countries.