Decolonizing Politics. Robbie Shilliam
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to dispose of her own person as she sees fit, to act in the way she wishes, and to utilize the fruit of her labor as she decides. For these reasons, the Oath asserts that both hunger and enslavement must be banned. While the Oath is supposed to apply to Mande peoples in particular, it is proclaimed “for the ears of the whole world.”
The Oath is best understood as part of a shifting tradition of inquiry into fundamental conceptions of human nature and politics. It is enunciated in an intentionally universal register, one that matches that of Alcidamas: all humans have equally valuable and valid lives. Furthermore, the rights the Oath affirms are “negative” in the sense that no one can take away a human’s independence, as well as “positive” in the sense that resources must be distributed among humans. In these ways, the Oath of the Hunters provides a conception of the good life that, unlike Aristotle’s, cannot abide slavery and must be based upon an equitable satiation of human needs and human spirit beyond household hierarchies.
The Oath is said to appear three hundred years before the beginning of the so-called Atlantic “slave trade,” and over five hundred and fifty years before the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. Neither Declaration, as celebrated as they are, matched the radical universality and equity of the Oath, although the revolutionary constitution of Hayti in 1805 certainly did. Remember that the Oath is orally recounted in various forms across this time span. It does not simply disappear, although it is not heard by all. Nowadays you might hear it in the proclamation that Black Lives Matter. Who, then, invented the idea of human freedom?
In our own time, some scholars have claimed that decolonizing the study of politics can only be a vulgar act of racial silencing, i.e. a muting of white European men just because they are white, European and men. I would hope you might now agree that decolonizing politics presents a far deeper challenge to us all: how expansive do we dare to make our conversation about politics? How deeply do we wish to critique what is presented to us as convention? How democratic do we wish our study of politics to be?
Organization of the Book
In making Aristotle uncanny, I’ve introduced you to some key maneuvers that we will be making in each chapter of the book as we seek to decolonize the study of politics, that is, the discipline of political science. Let me clarify these moves for you.
Firstly, in each chapter we will recontextualize political thinkers within the imperial and colonial contexts that form the backdrop to their ruminations. For instance, Aristotle is writing from within an imperial epoch where not one but two imperial powers are encroaching upon Athenians. Moreover, settler colonialism has created the very polities in which Aristotle teaches and that he moves 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.