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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. 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 into a field of study are presented in survey form, as non-committed and impartial engagements with various authors, issues, and arguments. I understand why. The writer does not want to tell you what to think but rather to guide you through the options. Once again, though, that strategy might not best fit a decolonizing agenda.

Stories always invoke some kind of travel – whether that be physical, intellectual, or ethical. We will be traveling from the center to the margins, from the imperial heartlands to the peripheral colonies, from the arenas of citizens to the spaces of migrants, from the offices of the powerful to the movements of the oppressed, and across physical, psychical, and social borders. Now, in order to journey, you have to commit somewhat to those whom you travel with, even if they annoy you. This commitment might sometimes mean taking their side, for a while at least. It’s fine, by the way, to be critical of your traveling companions. I’m not trying to convert you or recruit you to anything. I’m simply suggesting: it’s the journey that’s critically instructive, not the destination.

Now for the limitations. I’m sure you’ll find a number. But let me suggest one, right away. Most of the spaces that we will move in and through are Anglophone ones, that is, relics of Britain’s 450-year empire: beginning with the plantations of Ireland in the 1550s and continuing to this day with the struggle over possession of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. More than that, when we do venture into non-Anglophone territory (for instance, French Algeria), it is to engage with a thinker who is extremely well known in the English-speaking academy (i.e. Frantz Fanon). There is both a centering of English-speaking sources in the global academy, and beyond that, a centering of colonizer (European) languages. You should think about how we might need to decenter this colonial language preference in decolonizing work. That is Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o famous message in Decolonising the Mind (1986).

Let me now sketch out for you the chapters that follow.

In chapter 2 we investigate the subfield of political theory. We focus on the question of what it means to be human, and how the capacity to reason is implicated in this question, especially as it pertains to the justification of rights. Political theory draws upon conversations that took place in the eras of the European Renaissance and subsequent Enlightenment. We consider how, in these eras, imperial expansion brought Europeans into contact with a diverse array of peoples, cultures, and practices. This diversity was tamed, if you like, by way of a fundamental philosophical distinction being made between properly human and not-properly human beings.

We engage specifically with the philosophical and anthropological writings of Immanuel Kant, and tease out the colonial logics of difference that accompanied his conception of the human. I’ll be suggesting to you that the universal rights of which Kant boasts are only universal to those racially defined as properly human. We then grapple with the work of Sylvia Wynter, a Jamaican scholar of the humanities. Wynter is concerned with many of the same themes as Kant. But she arrives at a very different conclusion. Wynter seeks a conception of the human being that no longer rests upon the colonial and racist logic that distinguishes the properly human from the non-properly human.

In chapter 3 we turn to the subfield of political behavior. This subfield seeks to uncover how citizens engage with the political process and how that process responds to citizens. We begin our analysis in the late-nineteenth-century context of expanding empire and industrial urbanization in both Britain and the USA. In this era, scholars worried that the increasing movement and mixing of different peoples would negatively impact the quality of democracy. In response, they developed a race science that attributed the inheritance of degenerative abnormal behaviors to some races and the inheritance of progressive “normal” political behavior, conducive to an orderly democratic process, to the white Anglo-Saxon race. This science was informed by eugenics.

As part of this examination we look at the work of a set of scholars: Walter Bagehot, the British editor-in-chief of the Economist magazine, Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States, and John Watson, an American psychologist famous for coining the term “behaviorism.” I’m going to make the argument that even if they refuted eugenics, all of these figures accepted the race logics of the science of heredity. We then explore a very different resolution to the division of citizenship into those who display normal versus abnormal political behavior. Frantz Fanon, a black clinical psychiatrist from Martinique, sought in his Algerian medical practice to repair the egos and psyches of those who had been made abnormal by structures of colonial rule. He envisaged a French citizenry that brooked no racial division on grounds of heredity.

In chapter 4 we address the subfield of comparative politics. We focus especially on the way in which comparativists have examined the distinctions between non-democratic and democratic societies and the varied paths of “political development” from one system to the other. Specifically, we track the colonial logic that inheres in what I will call the “paradox of comparison.” This phrase references how difference might be accepted analytically, that is, as part of the way in which you understand human behavior, but disavowed “normatively,” that is, as certain values and practices are set as the norm (the standard) by which all human groups should be evaluated and prepared for assimilation. We follow how scholars created and then re-shaped this paradox over a set of imperial eras from fifteenth-century Spanish colonization to twentieth-century decolonization.

Along the way, we look at the concept of “improvement” proffered by Adam Ferguson, a famous Scottish philosopher of the late eighteenth century; then we turn to the critique of “colonial development” made by famous anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in the early twentieth century; subsequently we examine the engagement by the US-based Committee on Comparative Politics with decolonization in the Cold War era. We then contrast the work of this Committee with that undertaken by a group of radical scholars who congregated at Dar es Salaam college, in Tanzania, in the late 1960s. I’m going to show you how Walter Rodney, Giovani Arrighi, and John Saul chose not to analyze developmental differences through a colonially induced paradox of comparison. Rather, they shifted their scope of analysis to the globally unequal relations of exploitation carved out by capitalist imperialism which delivered under-development to some and development to others.

In chapter 5 we scrutinize the subfield of International Relations (IR). Unlike most other subfields, IR displays a pronounced pessimism concerning the ability of humanity to enjoy the good life. In the absence of a world state, so the story goes, the logic of “anarchy” tends to lead to war and violence. Some scholars, however, call attention to globalization and the way in which its institutions of global governance mitigate conflict and provide some hope for the prospect of peace. We rethink this argument by retrieving the history of “good imperial governance” and its formative importance for the academic study of international politics. I’m going to make the argument that the pessimism evident in the study of IR is less a result of the logic of anarchy and more a colonial logic concerning the loss of empire.

In the course of this inquiry, we focus on Martin Wight, a very influential theorist of international politics. Wight is famous for introducing the concept of “international society” – a collective of diplomats and statesmen who might mitigate the worst of anarchy and its violent and warlike tendencies. I’m going to show you that Wight based his idea of international society on the British Commonwealth model of good imperial governance, while he increasingly associated the worst elements of anarchy – war and violence – with anti-colonial self-determination. Then we turn our attention to the Nuclear-Free and Independent Pacific movement of the late twentieth century. Led by Pacific women, this peace movement confronted nuclear war, military imperialism, and settler-colonialism as intersecting axes of oppression. I’m going to suggest that peace movements in the service of anti-colonial self-determination provide us with a very different insight into the causes and prospects for peace on a global level.

In the conclusion to the book, we return to Aristotle. Having identified the key colonial logics implicated in the subfields of political science we consider the extent to which Aristotle’s critique of politics can be utilized as a resource for confronting these logics and decolonizing the study of politics. I’m going to argue that while Aristotle was anti-imperial, he nonetheless wished to preserve the patriarchal hierarchies that placed the citizen at the center of the political world and which moved others to the margins. We then put Aristotle in conversation with Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa (1942–2004), a Chicanx queer theorist, who presents the craft of “border thinking.” With Anzaldúa we evaluate the possibilities of studying politics from the margins with an intention to erase the power hierarchies that consistently recreate centers-with-citizens and marginal-peoples-on-borders.