Decolonizing the Comparative Politics Syllabus After U.S. Exceptionalism

• In Event: Pluralism Meets Pluralism: Ethnography, Decolonization, and Civic Engagement

Abstract

My paper discusses how to decolonize the comparative politics syllabus in the context of an introductory course for general education, inspired by the diminished grounds for US exceptionalism. By decolonizing the syllabus, I mean that the pedagogical goals of the course serve to produce knowledge that does not participate in the dehumanized representations of people due to race, gender and social class. I also mean deploying critical pedagogies to help develop analytical thinking skills to interpret politics, culture and power, instead of thinking about teaching as delivering knowledge and testing it. Decolonizing the syllabus begins by acknowledging the particular historical development of comparative politics as a subfield of political science. This subfield emerged to aid the understanding of US foreign policy decision makers during the Cold War. As such, decolonizing the syllabus has to deal with past literatures that was constructed upon presuppositions that depict a world of white supremacy. Examples are abundant in the canonical works of modernization school, democratization studies and institutional political economy. These works depict a world of white supremacy; not because they believe in racial domination but due to the fact that they naturalize the political infrastructure of USA. Additionally, these works assign values such as developed, democratic, advanced and industrialized to countries like USA without critically analyzing their oppressive components. Although they contain pedagogically problematic material, nonetheless these studies ask important questions that constitute the backbone of comparative politics: What is political power and how do we understand political violence? Why are certain states more powerful, wealthy and industrialized, while others are not? What are the different ways that societies govern themselves, grant rights to their citizens and elect their leaders? A world depicting white supremacy answers these questions in a way that naturalizes the outcome, without explaining key connections. To counter, I incorporate new material that corrects the narratives that these past works have naturalized to the extent that they make up the mean public opinion. Instead of teaching the works of Samuel Huntington, Robert Dahl and Douglas North, I turn to indigenous scholars who criticize modernization school and turn the conventional understanding of sovereignty upside down, women scholars who criticize democratization literatures as well as Marxist authors who happen to be majority man, ethnographies that follow people and commodities such as cotton all over the world while advancing a critical account of the failed development discourses perpetuated by western scholars. In conclusion, decolonizing comparative politics is necessary for providing the kind of critical thinking and understanding needed to address emerging contemporary issues in politics centered on political conflict and violence shaped by social class, gender and race.

Author

• Bilgesu Sumer, University of Massachusetts, Amherst