The Case for a Postcolonial Approach to the Study of Politics

Abstract

Postcolonialism is now an extensive body of knowledge that draws on Edward Said's Orientalism, the Subaltern Studies collective, and other critical anti-colonial scholarship. While postcolonial scholars have significantly shaped humanistic disciplines such as history, comparative literature, and anthropology, their impact on political science has been limited. The resistance to postcolonialism is strongly associated with the perpetuation of Eurocentric perspectives on ex-colonial territories. Dominant theories of democracy and civil wars, for example, remain trapped in outdated Eurocentric theory that sheds scarcely any light on postcolonial realities. The case for a postcolonial approach to the study of politics is thus stronger than ever before. Such an approach calls for a sustained engagement with specific non-Western contexts as well as an openness to anthropological, historical, and area studies knowledge about them. Decolonizing knowledge within political science, in sum, ought to be seen as part of a wider project of decentering the discipline by undermining what is seen today as “mainstream.”

Notes

¹ See, for example, Robert Adcock, Mark Bevir, and Shannon Stimson (eds), Modern Political Science: Anglo-American Exchanges since 1870 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

³ Edward Schatz and Elena Maltseva, “Assumed to be Universal: The Leap from Data to Knowledge in the American Political Science Review,” Polity 44 (2012), pp. 446–472.

² On the origins and context of the American social sciences, especially political science as a discipline, see Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991); see also Bernard Crick, The American Science of Politics: Its Origin and Conditions (London, UK: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1959).

⁴ See, in particular, S.M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003); and Ido Oren, Our Enemies and US: America's Rivalries and the Making of Political Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).

⁵ For a deeper exploration of what is meant by postcolonialism, see Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London, UK: Routledge, 1998); and Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 1998).

⁶ See, for example, M.K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); see also Franz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks (New York: Grove Books, 1967); and The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1963).

⁷ Ashis Nandy, The Romance of the State and the Fate of Dissent in the Tropics (New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 2003); see also Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001).

⁸ Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), p. 5.

⁹ Ibid., 7.

¹⁰ For a succinct summary of these notions, see Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Study of Total Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957).

¹¹ Said, Orientalism, pp. 7, 9.

¹² Ibid., 284, 290.

¹³ Bernard Crick, The American Science of Politics: Its Origin and Conditions (London, UK: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1959), p. 231.

¹⁴ Ranajit Guha, “The Small Voice of History,” in Subaltern Studies IX (New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 1–12.

¹⁵ Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (eds), Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

¹⁶ Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); see also Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (Chennai, India: Orient Longman, 1996); and David Arnold, “Gramsci and Peasant Subalternity in India,” Journal of Peasant Studies 11:4 (1984), pp. 155–177.

¹⁷ See, for example, Ileana Rodríguez (ed.), The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989); and Frederick Cooper, “Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History,” The American Historical Review 99:5 (1994), pp. 1516–1545.

¹⁸ James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); and James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990); see also Ben Kerkvliet, Everyday Politics in the Philippines: Class and Status Relations in a Central Luzon Village (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990); Lisa Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Elisabeth J. Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

¹⁹ Gyan Prakash, “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism,” American Historical Review 99:5 (1994), p. 1475.

²⁰ Veena Das, “Subaltern as Perspective,” in Subaltern Studies VI (New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 310–324.

²¹ Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 20.

²² Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for “Indian” Pasts?,” Representations 37 (Winter 1992), pp. 1–26.

²³ Talal Asad (ed.), Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (New York: Humanities Press, 1973); see also Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); and James Clifford and George E. Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research, 1986).

²⁴ James Clifford and George E. Marcus, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); see also Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997); and George E. Marcus, Ethnography Through Thick and Thin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

²⁵ James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); see also Akhil Gupta, Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); and Arturo Escobar, Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

²⁶ See, for example, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffins, and Helen Tiffin (eds), The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (London, UK: Routledge, 1995); Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); and Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (London, UK: Routledge, 2004).

²⁷ Two exemplary works of each kind are Ania Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deane Williams (eds), Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

²⁸ See, in particular, Leela Fernandes, India's New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Lisa Wedeen, Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008); and Daniel Vukovich, China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the PRC (London, UK: Routledge, 2011).

²⁹ Dvora Yanow, “Neither Rigorous Nor Objective: Interrogating Criteria for Knowledge Claims in Interpretive Science,” in Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea (eds), Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn (New York: M.E. Sharpe Inc., 2006), p. 68.

³⁰ James Mahoney, Colonialism and Postcolonial Development: Spanish America in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

³¹ John G. Gunnell, Imagining the American Polity: Political Science and the Discourse of Democracy (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004).

³² Robert A. Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961).

³³ See, for example, Gabriel A. Almond and James S. Coleman (eds), The Politics of Developing Areas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960); and Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958).

³⁴ Selig S. Harrison, India: The Most Dangerous Decades (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960).

³⁵ Barrington Moore, Jr., The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1966), pp. 314–412.

³⁶ Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968).

³⁷ See, for example, Adam Przeworski, Michael E. Alvarez, Jose Antonio Cheibub and Fernando Limongi, Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, 1950–1990 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); see also Carles Boix, Democracy and Redistribution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

³⁸ See, in particular, Talcott Parsons, Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966); and Talcott Parsons, Politics and Social Structure (New York: Free Press, 1969); see also Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: Free Press, 1968); and David Easton, A Systems Analysis of Political Life (New York: Wiley, 1965).

³⁹ Henry A. Kissinger, American Foreign Policy (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1974), pp. 48–49.

⁴⁰ J.S. Mill, On Liberty (Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martins, 2008 [1862]), p. 13.

⁴¹ Fabian, Time and the Other, pp. 25–70.

⁴² Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, p. 8.

⁴³ For illuminating theoretical discussions on this point, see Jonathan Spencer, “Post-Colonialism and the Political Imagination,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 3:1 (1997), pp. 1–19; and Julia Paley (ed.), Democracy: Anthropological Approaches (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2008). For exemplary country specific studies of the workings of vernacular democracy, see Frederic C. Schaffer, Democracy in Translation: Understanding Politics in an Unfamiliar Culture (New York: Cornell University Press, 1997); see also Matthew C. Gutmann, The Romance of Democracy: Compliant Defiance in Contemporary Mexico (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002); Harry G. West, Kupilikula: Governance and the Invisible Realm in Mozambique (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and Lucia Michelutti, The Vernacularisation of Democracy: Politics, Caste and Religion in India (London, UK: Routledge, 2008).

⁴⁴ Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), pp. 27–80.

⁴⁵ See, for example, Francine R. Frankel, Zoya Hasan, Rajeev Bhargava, and Balveer Arora (eds), Transforming India: Social and Political Dynamics of Democracy (New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 1–25, 60–175; see also David N. Gellner (ed.), Ethnic Activism and Civil Society in South Asia (New Delhi, India: Sage Publications, 2009).

⁴⁶ Przeworski et al., Democracy and Development, p. 34.

⁴⁷ Wedeen, Peripheral Visions, pp. 103–147.

⁴⁸ Michelutti, The Vernacularisation of Democracy, p. 3.

⁴⁹ Lisa Wedeen, “Concepts and Commitments in the Study of Democracy,” in Ian Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith, and Tarek Masoud (eds), Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

⁵⁰ Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, “Greed and Grievance in Civil War,” Oxford Economic Papers 56 (2004), pp. 563–595.

⁵¹ David D. Laitin and James D. Fearon, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” American Political Science Review 97 (2003), pp. 75–86.

⁵² Ibid., 75–76.

⁵³ Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 386.

⁵⁴ Stathis N. Kalyvas, “Civil Wars,” in Carles Boix and Susan Stokes (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 417.

⁵⁵ Giovanni Sartori, “Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics,” American Political Science Review 64:4 (1970), pp. 1033–1053; see also David Collier and James E. Mahon, Jr., “Conceptual ‘Stretching’ Revisited: Adapting Categories in Comparative Analysis,” American Political Science Review 87:4 (1993), pp. 845–55. Trivially, even sibling fights would appear to fall into the same category as social revolutions!

⁵⁶ Stathis N. Kalyvas and Paul D. Kenny, “Civil Wars,” in Robert A. Denemark (ed.), The International Studies Encyclopedia (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2010), pp. 2–3.

⁵⁷ For a representative sample of this literature, see Macartan Humphreys, “Natural Resources, Conflict, and Conflict Resolution: Uncovering the Mechanisms,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 49 (2005), pp. 508–537; see also Jeremy M. Weinstein, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Claire M. Metelits, Inside Insurgency: Violence, Civilians, and Revolutionary Group Behavior (New York: New York University Press, 2009).

⁵⁸ See, for example, Halvard Buhaug and Päivi Lujala, “Accounting for Scale: Measuring Geography in Quantitative Studies of Civil War,” Political Geography 24:4 (2005), pp. 399–418; see also Nils Weidmann, “Geography as Motivation and Opportunity: Group Concentration and Ethnic Conflict,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 53 (2009), pp. 526–543.

⁵⁹ Monica D. Toft, The Geography of Ethnic Violence: Identity, Interests, and the Indivisibility of Territory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); see also Lars-Erik Cederman and L. Girardin, “Beyond Fractionalization: Mapping Ethnicity onto Nationalist Insurgencies,” American Political Science Review 101:1 (2007), pp. 173–185.

⁶⁰ See, for example, Lael Brainard and Derek Chollet (eds), Too Poor for Peace? Global Poverty, Conflict, and Security in the 21st Century (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2007); see also Gudrun Østby, “Polarization, Horizontal Inequalities, and Violent Civil Conflict,” Journal of Peace Research 45:1 (2008), pp. 143–162; and Lars-Erik Cederman, Nils B. Weidmann and Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, “Horizontal Inequalities and Ethnonationalist Civil War: A Global Comparison,” American Political Science Review 105:3 (2011), pp. 478–495.

⁶¹ The leading work of this genre is Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War. See also Stathis N. Kalyvas, “Promises and Pitfalls of an Emerging Research Program: The Microdynamics of Civil War,” in S.N. Kalyvas, I. Shapiro, and T.E. Masoud (eds), Order, Conflict, and Violence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 397–421; see also Stathis N. Kalyvas and Matthew A. Kocher, “The Dynamics of Violence in Vietnam: An Analysis of the Hamlet Evaluation System (HES),” Journal of Peace Research, 46:3 (2009), pp. 335–355; and Abbey Steele, “Electing Displacement: Political Cleansing in Apartadó, Columbia,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 55:3 (2011), pp. 423–445.

⁶² Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, pp. 67, 136.

⁶³ See, in particular, Ted R. Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970); see also Barrington Moore, Jr., Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1978); James C. Scott, Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976); Roger D. Petersen, Resistance and Rebellion: Lessons from Eastern Europe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Elisabeth J. Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

⁶⁴ Three recent examples are Lee Ann Fujii, Killing Neighbours: Webs of Violence in Rwanda (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009); see also Meghan Lynch, “When Victims Don't Become Killers: The Effects of Local Memories of Violence in Burundi,” paper presented at the African Studies Association Annual Conference (November 2012); and Uday Chandra, “Beyond Subalternity: Land, Community, and the State in Contemporary Jharkhand,” Contemporary South Asia 21:1 (2013), pp. 52–61.

⁶⁵ Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); see also Andreas Wimmer, Nationalist Exclusion and Ethnic Conflict: Shadows of Modernity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Courtney Jung, The Moral Force of Indigenous Politics: Critical Liberalism and the Zapatistas (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008).