Letter to the Editor

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 Dominant theories of democracy and civil wars, for example, remain trapped in outdated Eurocentric theory that sheds scarcely any light on postcolonial realities.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.”     

Letter to the editor

Summary The above points are by no means exhaustive of major policy developments which should concern the policy community and academics who teach students or who do research. We therefore make two recommendations: first, that the Ford Foundation or some other group consider convening a meeting drawing together people who have worked on the above problems and who have taught at the second and third tier schools which are more closely related to these problems; second, we would hope that your journal would undertake to do something to effectively redress the academic imbalance in our premier schools as reflected in the Yates report of the Ford Conference. Perhaps you could announce that the king(s) is naked.