Courses at UCLA

PS M152 / IDS M150: Political Economy of Climate Change

This undergraduate course helps explain how governments at the international, national, and regional levels are addressing – or not addressing – the extraordinary challenge of climate change.

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PS M167C / IDS 120: Political Economy of Development

This course addresses fundamental questions about economic and political development around the world: why some countries are prosperous and others are not, why some governments are democratic and others authoritarian, why some advance the rights of women and others do not, and why some are afflicted by civil war while others remain peaceful.

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IDS 191: Carbon Politics

This course is designed to both impart substantive knowledge about fossil fuels and politics, and to help students become more skillful listeners, thinkers, writers, and speakers. Substantively, this course will focus on a handful of fundamental problems and debates: how global politics is shaped by the distribution of, and trade in, fossil fuels; the strange, upside-down world of the resource curse; why petroleum wealth and coal wealth tend to have different effects on politics; and what can be done to address these issues.

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PS 240 A&B: Comparative Politics Seminar

PS 240A-B is a two-course sequence designed to introduce graduate students to comparative politics, surveying a broad range of different literatures.

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PS 259: The Politics of Climate Change

This course introduces graduate students to recent scholarship on the political dimensions of climate change. Although this is nominally a Comparative Politics course, it pays equal attention to research in other subfields, notably American Politics and International Relations. The politics of fossil fuels is at the center of the course, which considers its significance from a variety of angles – as a source of undemocratic power and corruption in oil and gas producing countries, as a conduit for extraordinary corporate influence in oil and gas-consuming countries, and as a profound but often hidden impediment to climate action at all levels.

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