Description:

EDGS Speaker Series: “Society and Politics in the Asia-Pacific”

Co-sponsored with Political Science and WCAS

Karrie Koesel, Notre Dame

How do authoritarian regimes attempt to build loyalty among a globally-minded youth? How do they educate students to be supportive of those in power, and how do strategies of political legitimation change overtime? This talk explores how China and Russia use schools to socialize students and the future elite to be patriotic; whether these strategies free those in power from the need to be politically accountable; and when and why political education turns to cultural and ethnic identity as opposed to economic and ideological principles to foster national unity and popular legitimacy.

Karrie J. Koesel is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame where she specializes in the study of contemporary Chinese and Russian politics, authoritarianism, and religion and politics. She is the author of Religion and Authoritarianism: Cooperation, Conflict and the Consequences (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and her work has appeared in Perspectives on Politics, The China Quarterly, Post-Soviet Affairs, Economics and Politics, and Review of Religion and Chinese Society.