“… but some are more equal than others“, no more! Decolonizing German Political Sciences
A Review by Sebastian Garbe (sebastian.m.garbe@gcsc.uni-giessen.de)
International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (Giessen)
Ziai, Aram (ed.): Postkoloniale Politikwissenschaft. Theoretische und empirische Zugänge. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2016. 401 p., Softcover, 29.99 Euro. ISBN: 978-3-8376-3231-6.
Abstract
The
volume “Postcolonial Political Science”, edited by Aram Ziai, Professor
for Development and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Kassel, is
the first collection to assemble a huge variety of innovative postcolonial
interventions in the discipline of German political sciences. Besides its
programmatic perspective, theoretical and empirical research is
well-balanced in this collection of essays by German-speaking postcolonial
scholars. Following postcolonial interventions in German sociology,
history, and cultural sciences, this edition now introduces the task of
decolonizing German political sciences.
Review
In
2016, basic assumptions about our Western liberal democracies were deeply
challenged: from media echoes on the sexual assaults in Cologne, where
many aggressors where less equal than others, until the election of Donald
Trump, who promised to make America greater for some than for others. The
social classification mechanisms and intersubjective order enabling these
arguments have one root in the colonial past and persist in the
postcolonial present of our political system. Revealing such “double
standards” as “a result of unreflected colonial patterns of thinking” (p.
17) is a central aim of the present volume.
Its departure point is a critique of “the core of colonial thinking” in
political science, where equal rights for everyone are denied because “the
Others” are not as rational as the European Self, but rather “backward,
underdeveloped and uncivilized” (p. 13). This disciplinary focus was taken
because, according to the editor, postcolonial perspectives “allow a
hitherto unknown look at topics, which is enriched by the focus on
colonial continuities and the already mentioned double standards” (p.
17/18). Cross-thinking political sciences and postcolonial studies allows
one to see “complementary deficits” (p. 26) leading to the fact that “the
innovative theoretical approaches of postcolonial studies would benefit
from a closer combination with systematic, empirical research in political
science as much as the mentioned subareas of political sciences” (p. 42).
To answer the question of colonial continuities in political sciences,
Aram Ziai offers an interesting and compact research program through
postcolonial concepts like orientalism, othering, or the provincialization
of Europe (p. 37-42).
The collection is divided into political theory, gender and women studies,
internal political affairs of the Federal Republic of Germany,
international politics, and political systems. The first section makes a
highly valuable contribution of thinking political theory while focusing
on the contribution of the Haitian revolution to modernity and to a more
universal human rights discourse (Siba N’Zatioula Grovogui), the
contributions of Frantz Fanon’s work to political inquiry, like gender,
racism and postcolonial transformation (Ina Kerner), and finally the
proposal of a “postcolonially expanded notion of violence within political
science” (p. 96) by Claudia Brunner.
Gender and women’s studies have been a key focus of postcolonial research
and hence produced a large postcolonial feminist canon. Following these
voices, Christine M. Kalpeer, Rirhandu Mageza-Barthel and Christine Löw
give insights to their research on human and women’s rights, the genocide
and transitional justice in Ruanda, and women’s land rights in India.
Concertedly, they argue to “include (feminist-) postcolonial approaches
more prominently in researching and teaching political sciences” (p. 125).
The next section exemplifies and does justice to the imperative of
postcolonial analysis on contemporary Germany. In this way, politically
timely topics are addressed through a potent postcolonial critique of the
history and present of immigration policy, discourse, and jurisdiction
(Kien Nghi Ha), and by an ambitious discussion of the difficult
conjunction of racism, coloniality, and antisemitism (Floris Biskamp).
Bilgin Ayata provides a solid and empathic postcolonial re-reading of the
racist murders conducted by the “National Socialist Underground” in
Germany between 2000 and 2006. By rearticulating Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s
work on the silencing of the Haitian revolution in historiography, Bilgin
Ayata manages to disentangle the murderous coloniality and racism implied
in political, legal, and public spheres in Germany.
In return, international politics have been defied more constantly by
postcolonial critiques. While Franziska Müller recapitulates some of these
debates and proposes fruitful decolonial research strategies and
desiderata, Bettina Engels, Chandra-Milena Danielzik and Daniel Bendix
provide empirically based and informative postcolonial studies in
international politics. Finally, the last and biggest section of the
volume presents a series of postcolonial analysis of political systems by
looking at state formations, resistance, and democracy from the Andes over
Ghana to Afghanistan and India. While Shalini Randeria diagnoses the
postcolonial state with the concept of a “cunning state […], that tries to
overcome the Eurocentrism of the binary distinction between weak and
strong states” (p. 297/298), Maria do Mar Castro Varela and Carolina
Tamayo Rojas argue similarly for the possibility of weathering simplistic
views on indigenous resistance to state formations through a postcolonial
lens. Complementing this debate, Tanja Ernst, Joshua Kwesi Aikins, and
Mechthild Exo not only convincingly outline the Eurocentric pitfalls in
the analysis of postcolonial (and post-war) democracies, but also unearth
paths towards decolonial alternatives in organizing the polis and
the common.
Conclusively, all the present essays manage to fulfill the collection’s
aim of exposing the Eurocentric double standard in the political sciences
and claim convincingly, that postcolonial theory is a definitive surplus
within this disciplinary field. However, if the reader is already familiar
with the fact that post- and decolonial perspectives are irreversibly
relevant, the echo of this argument throughout the book is slightly
dogged. Although the method question is mentioned here and there, a
special treatment of post- and decolonial reflections on the discipline’s
methodological toolkit would have been helpful. Finally, an open question
remains, if the volume’s aim is to “apply” postcolonial perspective within
political sciences or rather if it joins other post- and decolonial
critiques in arguing for un-disciplinizing the social sciences in general.
Aside from this difficulty, the catch phrase of “a much-needed volume”
applies. Not only because of the obvious fact that it is the first
German-speaking volume to think through political sciences from a post-
and decolonial perspective, but also because current political trends
force the critical social scientist to understand postcolonial
inequalities and racist continuities in times of crisis. Besides the
better-known postcolonial works in political theory and international
politics, particularly the section on the German political landscape is an
inspiration for these sorts of local interventions. The volume also
attracts due attention thanks to its well mixed composition of both senior
and younger, female and male scholars. It continues ongoing international
post- and decolonial debates in German language as well as it provides
innovative and creative empirical and theoretical insights. With this
collection, there can hardly be any doubt that postcolonial political
science is an urgent and pressing field of research and that its
decolonization is on the way.
German Abstract
Nie
wieder “... aber manche sind gleicher als andere”! Die Deutsche
Politikwissenschaften dekolonisieren
„Postkoloniale
Politikwissenschaft“, herausgegeben von Aram Ziai, Professor für
Entwicklungspolitik und Postkoloniale Studien der Universität Kassel, ist
das erste Werk, welches eine große Bandbreite von innovativen
postkolonialen Interventionen in der Disziplin der Deutschen
Politikwissenschaft systematisch vorstellt. Neben der programmatischen
Perspektive stellt der Sammelband verschiedene theoretische und empirische
Forschungszugänge deutschsprachiger postkolonialer Wissenschaftler_innen
vor. Nach postkolonialen Interventionen in der deutschsprachigen
Soziologie, Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaft, führt dieser Band in die
dringliche Aufgabe ein, auch die deutsche Politikwissenschaft zu
dekolonisieren.
Copyright 2020, SEBASTIAN GARBE. Licensed to the public under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).