Global Authoritarianism

This is a senior-level IR seminar on why democracies erode and how autocracies persist, treating authoritarianism less as a regime type and more as a global phenomenon shaped by public opinion, elite strategy, and cross-border cooperation among non-democratic states. Expect to engage primarily through writing rather than exams: short reading responses, a data memo, and a research paper you present at the end. It sits late in the IR curriculum because it asks you to apply comparative politics and IR theory you already know to one of the defining questions of the current decade — why the post-Cold War democratic consensus is unraveling.