Courses in this MPP core sequence examine how social categories, group-based cleavages, and inequalities shape contemporary leadership and policy challenges. The modules equip students with core knowledge, analytic approaches, and professional skills to understand and navigate how institutions and policies interact with dynamic, contested, and conflictual group-based identities and hierarchies. Through a diverse set of complementary module-length courses addressing race, ethnicity, gender, indigeneity, caste, class, and more, this sequence grounds questions and debates about identity, intergroup conflict, unequal treatment, and shifting social and political boundaries in rigorous empirical and historical perspective. This course is a four-credit sequence in which you'll take two half-semester modules selected out of seven options (note: some modules are offered twice). See full list of options here.
Section G (Spring 2): Roya Talibova. Ethnicity, Identity, and Conflict
This module examines how ethnic identities become politically salient and how they shape inequality, political behavior, and conflict. Drawing on comparative and historical cases, students will explore how institutions, political actors, and policy choices can construct, reinforce, or mitigate group-based divisions and their consequences.
This course is required of all MPP1 students.