Commissioned Book Review: Robbie Shilliam, Decolonizing Politics: An Introduction
| Author | Fikir G Haile |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14789299221091883 |
| Published date | 01 February 2023 |
| Date | 01 February 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Commissioned Book Review |
Political Studies Review
2023, Vol. 21(1) NP9 –NP10
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
1091883PSW0010.1177/14789299221091883Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
book-review2022
Commissioned Book Review
Decolonizing Politics: An Introduction
by Robbie Shilliam. Cambridge, UK: Polity
Press, 2021, 181 pp., £15.99 (paperback), ISBN
9781509539390.
In the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter pro-
tests, there has been renewed interest in the
enduring influence of racism, colonialism, and
imperialism in the discipline of political science.
While there is increasing recognitio n of the
thorny and exclusionary foundational assump-
tions and figures in the discipline, there has
been relatively limited discussion about how to
transcend these foundations. In “Decolonizing
Politics,” Shilliam advances this conversation
by outlining a novel approach to a decolonial
study of politics. Employing a three-pronged
approach of recontextualization, reconceptual-
ization, and reimagination, Shilliam demon-
strates that the central concepts, debates, and
approaches in the discipline are rooted in a
colonial logic a nd proposes more inclusive
alternatives.
In the introduction, undertaking a project to
make the familiar unfamiliar and the unfamiliar
familiar, Shilliam recontextualizes Aristotle as a
resident of a settler-colony, a migrant, and non-
citizen of Athens to demonstrate how the con-
cepts he developed, including the good life, are
inextricably tied to colonial logics and reimagi-
nes a more inclusive conception by drawing on
the oath of the Mande Hunters of West Africa.
The second chapter recontextualizes the emer-
gence of the subfield of political theory to dem-
onstrate the role of imperialism and colonialism
in the construction of the fully human vs not-
properly human binary. To reimagine an alter-
native to this racially coded notion of humanity,
Shilliam turns to Jamaican theorist Sylvia
Wynter’s universal conception. Chapter three
contends that anxieties about the degenerative
consequences of imperial expansion drove the
development of the political behavior subfield,
which conceptualized political order and disor-
der through racially coded dichotomies and
turns to anti-colonial scholar Frantz Fanon to
locate political disorder not in biological or cul-
tural inheritance but in imperial violence.
Chapter four covers how the colonial para-
dox of comparison, which depicts difference
as natural while simultaneously upholding a
racially coded hierarchy, undergirds the
assumptions in the subfield of comparative
politics and utilizes the work of the Dar es
Salaam scholars to offer a reconceptualization
of the sources of under-development. The fifth
chapter recontextualizes the era of imperial
decline in which the subfield of International
Relations (IR) emerged to demonstrate how IR’s
central concepts mirror the logic of imperial
hierarchy and turns to the intersectional Nuclear-
Free and Independent Pacific Movement for a
radical alternative. In the concluding chapter,
using Gloria Anzaldua’s insights about physical
and metaphysical borderlands, Shilliam under-
scores the normative and analytical costs of the
continued use of concepts and approaches
rooted in the colonial violence of fixing.
From ancient Athens to present-day Jamaica,
from the halls of power in the Global North to
resistance movements in the Global South,
Shilliam unearths the complex web of imperial
entanglements that undergird the discipline,
transgressing both geographic and discipli-
nary boundaries. The project of recontextual-
ization, reconceptualization, and reimagination
is enriched by his careful engagement with
fields considered marginal to political science,
including geography, Black studies, and devel-
opment studies. Despite the wide geographic
and thematic scope of the book, Shilliam’s
argument unfolds coherently, tracing the colo-
nial logic of dichotomization that informs sub-
fields in the discipline to underscore the
normative and analytical imperative for a deco-
lonial study of politics. Looking to experts in
the margins to critically assess and reimagine
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