GV4D3 Half Unit
Local Power in an Era of Globalization, Democratization, and Decentralization
This information is for the 2024/25 session.
Teacher responsible
Prof John Sidel
Availability
This course is available on the MSc in Political Science (Conflict Studies and Comparative Politics) and MSc in Political Science (Global Politics). This course is not available as an outside option.
This course has limited availability, and it is necessary for students (regardless of MSc programme) to obtain permission from the teacher responsible. The course is capped at 1 group.
Course content
Over the course of the past three decades, the inter-related processes of globalization, democratization, and decentralization are said to have generated new social forces and political freedoms in localities around the world. Market reforms and village elections in China, the end of Communist Party rule in Russia and Eastern Europe, and trends of (re)democratization in Asia, Africa, and Latin America have all offered new opportunities for local people to effect change in local politics around the world. Yet academic, journalistic, and policy accounts have highlighted the rise and resilience of "local despotisms" – "authoritarian enclaves," "bosses", "caciques", "chiefs", "clans", "local strongmen", "mafias", "warlords" – in the midst of this reworking of market, electoral, and administrative circuitries. This course focuses on this phenomenon of what scholars have come to call "subnational authoritarianism", and competing explanations for its emergence and entrenchment, the diversity of its manifestations, and various challenges mounted against its perpetuation.
The goals of the course are twofold. First, the course offers a critical examination of competing accounts of and explanations for the phenomenon of "subnational authoritarianism" in the developing world. Second, the course helps students to think more carefully, critically, and creatively about local politics more broadly, and to do so with an eye towards the comparative analysis of local power structures rooted in local economies and societies. The course begins with an examination of an emerging new political-science literature on "subnational authoritarianism" and a more established body of scholarship on clientelism and machine politics. The course then turns to case studies in diverse settings, ranging from southern Italy to China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Russia, and extending to cases of "warlordism" in contexts such as contemporary A