between. Many textbooks present Aristotle as the philosopher of the good life – the examiner of the citizen in the polis. But that vision would only reveal to you half of the story. Aristotle examines a polis under threat from imperialism; and the independence he wishes to preserve for its citizens is one that is settler-colonial in its origin.
We are now starting to talk about the second maneuver. The act of recontextualizing thinkers by reference to imperialism and colonialism must make a difference to how we understand the logics of these thinkers’ arguments. To put it pithily, recontextualization leads to reconceptualization. For example, instead of just presenting the citizen in and of himself, we have to understand citizenship by figuring out, as Aristotle actually did, the relationship of the citizen to the metic, the wife, the slave, and the barbarian. The citizen can no longer be considered a stand-alone category.
This means that reconceptualization is also an issue of epistemology – what counts as valid knowledge. Reconceptualizing especially involves tracking the connecting tissue that arranges concepts and categories in a logical fashion. For instance, Aristotle’s hierarchies are not comprised of fixed objects in fixed positions. Instead, hierarchies are comprised of positions that can be occupied differently by different objects. The stakes at play in this reconceptualization must always be clarified by reference to empire and colonialism: for instance, Aristotle is trying to warn Athenian citizens that imperialism might force upon them the position of slaves.
So, decolonizing politics can’t just be about retrieving histories of imperialism and colonialism. It must also be about finding concealed or ignored logics in popular and conventional arguments. And in the chapters that follow I will keep coming back to the way in which “colonial logics” animate concepts and categories in political science. Principally, you have to come out of this thing thinking differently. But that moves us to the third and most difficult maneuver: reimagining.
Let me introduce you to this maneuver by talking about “canons.” The idea of a canon is at root a religious one, referring to a selection of scriptures considered to be true and sacred. When applied to academia, a canon refers to the set of authors and texts that are supposed to faithfully induct the student into the discipline. All disciplines have canons and political science is no exception. The so-called father of political science, Aristotle, often sits at the head of the canon.
But canons necessarily limit our understandings and imaginations. A critical evaluation of works within the canon – a task we have just undertaken with Aristotle – is necessary but not sufficient for the decolonizing mission. We must also try to glean the margins of power. We must imagine, at least in principle, that those who dwell in these marginalized positions have traditions of thought that are generally edifying. Why would we not imagine this to be the case, at least in principle?
That said, it’s not always easy to find an author, a collective, or a movement that directly corresponds with or speaks back to the canon. The reason is simple but disturbing. Imperial centers talk to colonial margins but rarely listen back to them: that is broadly the case in academia as well as politics proper. And, because centers rarely listen back, you will not usually find colonial voices articulating themselves in the repositories and archives of politics, that is, the mainstream recorded history of politics.
Chinua Achebe, famous Nigerian novelist, once recanted an Igbo proverb when recalling why he became a writer: “until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter” (Brooks 1994). Think for instance of the anti-slavery movement that Aristotle was writing against. There are hardly any records of it. What do I do, then: just let the slave masters tell the story? Pretend as if no slave has ever contested or had a thought about her slavery? No. I have to creatively seek out resonances, perhaps in unlikely places, and bring together the responses that I can find. The Mande Hunters can illuminate the issue of natural slavery, and they do not need to have read Aristotle to do so.
With this third maneuver we do not merely illustrate the ways in which some of the key arguments in political science have evolved with colonial logics and meanings. We also move those arguments into marginal locations – intellectually, conceptually, and/or empirically. We could even imagine that these marginal locations connect to each other, despite the wishes of the imperial center.
Thinking in this audacious manner allows us to place scholarly debates within broader constellations of logic and meaning. We gain a fuller understanding of the same issues. The master presumed he never had to know what the slave was thinking. After all, everyone told him that slaves couldn’t think. But, in order to survive creatively, the slave had to know what she thought and how the master thought. Who would you turn to for an explanation of slavery: him or her? Put another way, studying only the center does not reveal to you the margins; but studying from the margins can inform you of the margins, the center, and their relationality; that is, the larger constellation of political activity (see Davis and Fido 1990).
Together, these three maneuvers are of what I take the project of decolonizing politics to consist. In what follows, I recontextualize, reconceptualize, and reimagine four popular subfields of political science: political theory, political behavior, comparative politics, and international relations. In each chapter I focus on a key theme associated with each subfield: universal rights in political theory, citizenship in political behavior, development in comparative politics, and war and peace in international relations. In the next section, I’ll give you a short description of the aims of each chapter. But, before that, I want to make some general points about the aims and purposes of the book, as well as to come clean with at least one of its limitations.
It is absolutely not the case that all politics in the world have a colonial heritage or logic. This is not the claim of the book. But I do maintain that political science is formed as a discipline from imperial heritages and with abiding colonial logics. In short, the purpose of this book is to decolonize the academic study of politics, not politics per se. That said, you’ll see by the end of the book that to pursue such a decolonization of knowledge requires us to commit to broader programs of global justice outside of the academy, narrowly conceived.
In pursuit of this decolonizing “impulse” I have selected various thinkers and themes not as true and full representations of every subfield: that would be impossible. Rather, I’ve picked them because I think they bring the imperial heritages and colonial logics of the discipline into sharp relief; and I’ve selected their interlocutors from the margins in the way described above – imaginatively. In other words, don’t read this book as if it is the authoritative account of political science. Read it to gain some practice in the art of decolonizing knowledge.
On this note, I want to justify to you the style of the book’s prose. Often, social science is written in the third person – as an impersonal register of the outsider looking in. I’m hoping you’ll have caught the problem with this register before you’ve even finished this sentence. Remember, we are involved in an uncanny enterprise. Uncanny enterprises require intimacy. You and I are taking this journey together.
Journeys are best represented as stories. Telling stories usually means, in some way, dwelling in the past. Most of the material that we’ll work through is historical – from the fifteenth century up to the 1980s. But this is not a history book. We are using this material to recontextualize, reconceptualize, and reimagine the study of politics. I’ve picked stories that are heavily implicated in the formation of political science’s subfields and which help to highlight the colonial logics that are integral to these formations. I’ve also picked stories that just as much bring to life different logics that contest these formations – in the academy and beyond. I’ll provide some suggestions along the way, but it’s going to be up to you to think about how all these stories resonate in the present. That’s the “decolonizing” work that you’ll have to do.
At this point you might be wondering if this book is a guide, a survey, or a series of provocations? Often, books that offer broad introductions
