POL 227 Politics and Society in East Asia
Providing an introduction to the politics and society of East Asia, this course takes a comparative approach and considers East Asia as a region composed of multifaceted political entities sharing some unifying features. It asks how East Asia can be defined, what are its political specificities and its social and cultural characteristics. Students are introduced to the political history of the region, types of states and governments (from North Korea to the Philippines), questions of political economy (development models or regional division of labor), social problems (such as inequalities in global East Asian cities), and cultural debates (such as the controversy over the existence of Asian values).