Universal Aspects of QCD-like Theories

In these lectures I review some basic examples of how the concepts of universality and scaling can be used to study aspects of the chiral and the deconfinement transition, if not in QCD directly but in QCD-like theories. As an example for flavor dynamics I discuss a quark-hadron model to describe the phase diagram of two-color QCD with the functional renormalization group. Universal aspects of deconfinement are illustrated mainly in the 2 + 1 dimensional SU(N) gauge theories with second order transition where many exact results from spin models can be exploited.