Comparative Political Theory

The disparities in per-capita wealth and national productivity that divide the United States and Latin America today have often been understood as results of institutional variations introduced during each region's period of imperial rule. According to this interpretation, path-dependent processes preserved institutions installed by Britain, Spain, and Portugal across the centuries, propagating their positive or negative economic effects, and eventually producing a marked "development gap" in the hemisphere. This article aims to improve this account by highlighting the direct and indirect economic effects of the success or failure of the political unions established after independence in both the United States and Latin America. It demonstrates that influential political theorists throughout the hemisphere understood the developmental advantages to be gained from unifying former colonies and employing the political authority newly at their disposal to abolish the stifling institutional legacies of European rule, suggesting that if Spanish America's unions had endured, or conversely, if the United States had collapsed, the two regions' economies might not have diverged as dramatically as they subsequently did. This illustrates an important contribution that the emerging subfield of "comparative political theory" can make to comparative political science in general, and to the new institutionalism in particular, by providing uniquely direct insight into the choices available to political actors in consequential moments of institutional genesis and change, and revealing the contingency of institutional variations that might otherwise appear inevitable. , and the anonymous reviewers. He gives special thanks to Dawn Teele and Jeffrey Isaac, whose criticism and suggestions through several revisions greatly improved the article's ideas and argument.

As critics have recently demonstrated, developmentalist thinking sustains modern Euro-pean imperialism by portraying non-Europeans as further back on a fixed scale of civilizations. The problem persists in the developmental logics underlying contemporary Marxist and liberal political theory, suggesting that developmentalism is implicitly bound to domination and imperialism. This article complicates this connection by drawing out anti-imperial developmentalist arguments articulated from the other side of the colonial divide. I elaborate three distinctive developmental logics in anti-imperialisms advanced by Surendranath Banerjea, Aurobindo Ghose, and Shyamji Krishnavarma, leading figures in India's independence movement, to show the particularity of the form of developmentalism so intimately bound to domination. This exposition aims to provincialize it by uncovering alternative developmentalist schemas offering distinctive conceptual resources for understanding progress in relation to anti-imperialism. By reaching beyond the Western lens framing the problem of developmentalism, I show its instabilities and consider its utility in resisting imperialism .

This paper examines the political anthropological work of Pierre Clastres in light of the emergence of the subfield of comparative political theory. In particular, it argues that Clastres’ reconstruction of the political philosophy of various Amazonian societies offers an alternative model for the engagement with texts and traditions external to the history of so-called Western societies.  Rejecting all impulses towards totalization – as represented, for example, in the assertion of a dialogical potential for establishing modes of intercultural exchange aimed at achieving mutual understanding – Clastres calls attention to the radical social-historical alterity of forms of society. Appreciation of this alterity not only enlarges the scope of comparative political thought to engage inherited traditions that resist assimilation into Western conversations, but also reveals an indeterminate democratic potential grounded in political creativity.

The rising prominence of “comparative political theory” has inspired extensive and fruitful methodological reflection, raising important questions about the procedures that political theorists apply when they select texts for study, interpret their passages, and assess their arguments. But, notably, comparative political theorists have mainly rejected the comparative methods employed in the subfield of comparative politics, because, they argue, applying the comparative method would compromise both the interpretive and the critical projects that comparative political theory should pursue. In this article, I describe a comparative approach for the study of political ideas that, I argue, offers unique insight into how the intellectual and institutional contexts that all political thinkers always occupy influence their ideas. By systematically describing how political thinking varies across time and over space in relation to the contexts within which political thinkers live and work, the comparative method can serve as the foundation for both deconstructive critiques, which reveal the partial interests that political ideas presented as universally advantageous actually serve, and reconstructive critiques, which identify particular thinkers or traditions of political thought that, because of the contexts in which they developed, are apt to offer compelling critical perspectives on existing political institutions.

In this paper, I draw on Carl Schmitt's political and constitutional thought in order to reflect on the political struggle over the foundational norms and values of a constitutional settlement in modern Turkey. This analysis, which focuses on the relationship between democracy and sovereign decision in Schmitt's thought, extends the implications of his writings beyond the Weimar Republic. I argue that the political movement of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) successfully identified itself with two distinct (yet partly overlapping) narratives in order to establish a truer democracy than the old regime, which was guarded by the military and the bureaucracy. The first narrative concerns the subordination of the will of the people to the guardianship model of the old regime. The second narrative involves negating the political decision of the Kemalist elites on the grounds of identity, in particular, the dissonance between the Kemalist ruling class and the Muslim majority of the society.

W hat is the relationship between interpretive methods and decolonizing projects? Decolonial thinkers often invoke pre-colonial traditions in their efforts to fashion "national cultures"-modes of being, understanding, and self-expression specific to a de-colonizing collectivity's experience. While the substantive contributions of precolonial traditions to decolonial thought have received well-deserved attention in postcolonial and comparative political theory, this paper focuses on the role that interpretive methods play in generating the emancipatory sensibilities envisioned by decolonial thinkers. It draws on the contemporary Moroccan philosopher Mohammed 'Abed Al-Jabri's interpretive method to show that its decolonial potential lies in its "reader-centric" approach. This approach is concerned with transforming its postcolonial reader's relationship to precolonial traditions, and not only with establishing the truth of historical texts or making use of their insights in the present as is more common in political-theoretical modes of interpretation. It does so through a tripartite process of disconnection, reconnection, and praxis.

Mostafa Malekian is one of the popular public intellectuals in the post-revolutionary Iran. Although an original thinker, his work is almost unknown outside Iran, and there are very few pieces written about his thought in western languages. The first part of this article includes an overview of Malekian's spirituality thesis, because I believe his political theory cannot be properly understood unless we have an idea of the rationality and spirituality thesis which has made Malekian famous in the last fifteen years. In the second part I will discuss Malekian's specific theory of toleration and his idea of political secularism. As we will see, he argues that we have a fundamental moral duty to seek the truth and another fundamental duty to follow justice; the second duty obliges us to behave tolerantly towards others when the first duty does not apply. In other words, in those cases where

The relationship between representative democracy and conflict in John Stuart Mill’s political philosophy has been interpreted in very different ways. While some scholars claim that Millian democracy is incompatible with political conflict, others identify in Mill a radical political agonism that would offer a non-consensual model of deliberative democracy. This paper argues that neither of these views is exactly accurate: although he highlights the centrality of conflict in political life, Mill believes that democratic deliberation presupposes a minimal level of consensus regarding the formal value of democracy’s basic principles, viz. the principles of individual freedom and equality. Initially, I reconstruct the relationship between conflict and consensus in Mill’s conception of representative democracy. Next, I investigate Mill's association of representation and advocacy and show that his encomium on political conflict was influenced by Guizot’s work. Finally, I explain how a democratic debate riven with conflict is conducive to individual freedom.

Once an oppositional ideology in the 1990s that united Muslim intellectuals around a radical critique of the state based on the ideals of democracy, civil society and pluralism, how has Turkish Islamism transformed into a state-centric and conservative world-view? This paper aims to document this transformation by scrutinizing the writings of a group of intellectuals in the context of (I) the 28 February 1997, military memorandum and the subsequent events which culminated in the AKP’s first electoral victory in 2002; and (II) the series of trials that started in 2008 known as the Ergenekon trials through which the AKP gained the upper hand in Turkish politics. In so doing, the paper problematizes the prevalent narratives on the relationship between Islam, on the one hand, and democracy and civil society, on the other, that miss how formulations and articulations of Islamism evolve in changing political contexts.

This article addresses the centrality of normativity to IR (International Relations) by engaging in an investigation of the meaning of a 'classical' approach (Bull 1969). It demonstrates how a classical approach, properly understood, might provide common ground for IR theorists. The substantive argument is that IR can benefit from reflection on the classical understanding of the relationship between theory and practice, and in particular on the understanding of this relationship provided by philosophical hermeneutics. Philosophical hermeneutics is an approach to the human sciences informed by Aristotle's conception of a practical philosophy. A practical philosophy in the classical sense sees theory as a moral and political inquiry involving a body of knowledge and a philosophy of practice engaging in reflection upon the nature of the good life and the means to achieve it.

Leading twentieth-century Iranian public intellectual Ali Shariati has been described by some as a proponent of a project of nativism and cultural authenticity. This article offers an alternative reading of Shariati, one that highlights the germination of his thought in a process of constant oscillation between particular historical-sociopolitical attachments and a decidedly cosmopolitan intellectual horizon. This oscillation, it is argued, while born out of the core-periphery dynamics of commodity and knowledge production within a colonially constructed world order, nevertheless allows Shariati to transcend postcolonial anxieties and nativist traps even as he calls on his fellow Iranian and Muslim intellectuals to attend to resources within the local culture and to delink from Eurocentric and colonially globalized knowledge regimes. In order to place his thought within the broader framework of the emergence and evolution of anti- and decolonial thought, Saffari reads Shariati in dialogue with some of the leading twentieth- and twenty-first-century critics of colonial modernity: Muhammad Iqbal, Frantz Fanon, Enrique Dussel, and Walter D. Mignolo. Saffari argues that the oscillation between local attachments and cosmopolitan vistas in Shariati's work is best understood as a function of his cosmopolitan localism.

Debates about preserving, modifying and applying sharia (Islamic normative guidelines) through principles of taqlid (to follow) or ijtihad (to carry out independent interpretation) are immensely useful in thinking through a sharper definition of tradition for political theorists and historians of political thought more generally. Political theorists and historians of political thought have tended to use tradition in a range of ways without specifying key elements of the concept. Building on debates in Islamic thought related to taqlid and its relationship to ijtihad, and through a focus on the ideas of a contemporary thinker, Javed Ahmed Ghamidi, this paper proposes that tradition in political thought can be defined as a framework for knowledge production and consumption constituted of two key elements: method and sensibility. Further, the paper suggests that this definition allows us a better understanding of vibrancy in a tradition:
vehement debate, contradictions and internal contestation are not signs of decay but of vitality within a tradition. It is the severe delinking of the two elements of a tradition, method and sensibility, which has greater potential to reduce its vibrancy.

Comparison is fundamental to the practice and subject-matter of philosophy, but has received scant attention by philosophers. This is even so in “comparative philosophy,” which literally distinguishes itself from other philosophy by being “comparative.” In this article, the need for a philosophy of comparison is suggested. What we compare with what, and in what respect it is done, poses a series of intriguing and intricate questions. In Part One, I offer a problematization of the tertium comparationis (the third of comparison) by examining conceptualizations of similarity, family resemblance, and analogy, which it is sometimes argued can do without a tertium comparationis. In Part Two, I argue that a third of comparison is already required to determine what is to be compared, and insofar as that determination precedes the comparison that tertium may be called “pre-comparative.” This leads me to argue against incomparability and to show how anything can indeed be compared to anything. In Part Three, I relate my arguments to what is today commonly labelled “comparative philosophy.” Finally, I raise some questions of ontology and politics in order to demonstrate the relevance of a philosophy of comparison.

Democratic theorists agree that in a democracy the people should be sovereign. However they cannot give democratically acceptable criteria for telling who precisely the people are. According to some theorists this "paradox of popular sovereignty" can lead to disastrous consequences such as territorial disputes and ethnic cleansing. By contrast, others hold that this paradox is productive. Using the tools of Comparative Political Theory, this paper wages in the controversy by providing new evidence of how this theoretical paradox has influenced political practice. The article shows that the problem was already apparent in early 19 th Century Spanish America, where two different conceptions of the people had contrasting consequences. The article argues that the main effect of the paradox was to bring to the fore the ineradicable discrepancies between political praxis and juridical form. This effect should be seen as an opportunity to be seized rather than a problem to be solved.

Increasing interest in applying the theory and practice of deliberative democracy to new and varied political contexts leads us to ask whether deliberation is a universal political practice. While deliberation manifests a universal competence, its character varies substantially across historical contexts, a variation partially explicable in cultural terms. We deploy an intersubjective conception of culture to explore these differences. Culture meets deliberation where publicly accessible meanings, symbols, and norms shape the way political actors engage one another in discourse. Fuller understanding of political deliberation requires comparative and historical studies of particular contexts. We look at one case from Egypt in some depth and provide shorter illustrations from Botswana, Europe, India, Japan, Madagascar, the United States, Yemen, and elsewhere. Cross-cultural learning can enrich the theory of deliberative democracy, and give democratic theory a more universal reach.

This essay extends themes in Adom Getachew's Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (2019) by introducing Iran as a mediating element in Cold War worldmaking. It recovers the story of Pahlavi Iran's diplomatic efforts during the Sixth Special of the United Nation General Assembly, which resulted in the declaration of the New International Economic Order. Getachew's book provides a framework to interpret these diplomatic efforts with greater precision. The same framework explains the Islamic Republic's internationalist policies in the 1980s. Worldmaking after Empire is less equipped, however, to explain the popular revolution separating different modes of Iranian statecraft between the 1970s and 1980s. This observation reveals the limits of the book's methodological approach—namely, its overemphasis on elites and its overinvestment in exactitude. These limits invite a revised approach to writing histories of anticolonial worldmaking. An alternate approach focuses on statecraft (exactitude) and popular politics (inexactitude) at once, echoing the simultaneous affirmation of nation building and worldmaking in Getachew's theory of decolonization.

http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yccp20?open=7&repitition=0#vol_7

This translation of Tosaka Jun's " The Philosophy of the Kyoto School " is as unembellished as possible. As far as is known, this is the original statement of the philosophical nature and scope of the Kyoto School. Making it available in English serves the purpose of documenting how the Kyoto School was conceived, not only in terms of philosophical themes and approaches, but also in terms of who was included. Returning to the first written source reveals that Tosaka's views on both what characterized the philosophy of the Kyoto School and who its leading thinkers were differ somewhat from the dominant postwar conceptions filtered through Tanabe and Nishitani, and disseminated by, among others, Takeuchi, Heisig, Ōhashi, and Davis. Thus this source can stimulate a rethinking of what the term " Kyoto School " meant historically and whether this has any implications for how Kyoto School studies are constituted today.

In responding to the five excellent articles on Freedom Is Power collected here, I argue that my account of representation in politics runs all the way down, as does my associated views on needs and institutional critique aimed at diminishing domination. I take on board some of the other criticisms levelled at me, but resist the notion that my account of freedom as power constrains resistance. Liberty through representation requires and depends upon resistance; it also institutionalises it.

Asian Values discourse was widely criticized for its cultural inauthenticity and instrumentalism. However, its similarity to an early twentieth-century conversation about the values of "€œEastern civilization"€ places it within a particular history of cultural assertion, which emerges when Asian experience defies expectations about the direction of future progress. Both discourses reformulate historically-central Chinese ideas in more general terms to carve out space between regional ethnocentrism and mimeticism of the West. Although sometimes co-opted by authoritarian elites, they nevertheless articulate "€œAsian"€ characteristics as challenges that transform, rather than traditional values which supplement, "€œWestern" processes of modernization.

Through an analysis of the international legal thought of Alejandro Alvarez, Ruy Barbosa, Isidro Fabela and Carlos Saavedra Lamas, this paper shows that Latin America played a vital and complex role in the reconfiguration of a new global legal order in the early twentieth century and the consolidation of the modern discipline of international law, as well as a specific legal field in Latin America. It argues that the region was a pioneer in the promotion of distinctive continental and regional approaches to international law and world peace before and after the creation of the League of Nations.

While numerous methodological and interpretive challenges confront the study of cross-cultural political theory, this essay examines a particular premodern Indian tradition as an example of such difficulties and one way in which they can be overcome. Exploring the problematic ways in which people have interpreted and made use of India's ancient past, it critically examines arguments for the existence of secularism, free elections, and democratic assemblies in the Vedas. Defending what I call a " critical revivalist " position, it is argued that predominant approaches to premodern traditions in contemporary Indian political theory place significant constraints on cross-cultural intelligibility and theory building within the Indian context. To elaborate this point, I shift from a " political " to rājan-oriented categorical register in an effort to reposition current understandings of self-rule (swaraj) in India within a broader rajanical tradition. Finally, this essay explains how contemporary Indian political theory can draw insights from this native tradition without necessarily reverting to familiar Western idioms.

International law has played a crucial role in the construction of imperial projects. Yet within the growing field of studies about the history of international law and empire, scholars have seldom considered this complicit relationship in the Americas. The Hidden History of International Law in the Americas offers the first exploration of the deployment of international law for the legitimization of U.S. ascendancy as an informal empire in Latin America. This book explores the intellectual history of a distinctive idea of American international law in the Americas, focusing principally on the evolution of the American Institute of International Law (AIIL). This organization was created by U.S. and Chilean jurists James Brown Scott and Alejandro Alvarez in Washington D.C. for the construction, development, and codification of international law across the Americas. Juan Pablo Scarfi examines the debates sparked by the AIIL over American international law, intervention and non-intervention, Pan-Americanism, the codification of public and private international law and the nature and scope of the Monroe Doctrine, as well as the international legal thought of Scott, Alvarez, and a number of jurists, diplomats, politicians, and intellectuals from the Americas. Professor Scarfi argues that American international law, as advanced primarily by the AIIL, was driven by a U.S.-led imperial aspiration of civilizing Latin America through the promotion of the international rule of law. By providing a convincing critical account of the legal and historical foundations of the Inter-American System, this book will stimulate debate among international lawyers, IR scholars, political scientists, and intellectual historians.

Introduction and first chapter of a new book: Even though ‘the crisis of secularism’ was declared decades ago, it remains unresolved. This book argues that its roots are internal to the liberal model of secularism, which emerged from the religious dynamics of the Protestant Reformation. In Europe and India, this model has gone hand in hand with an intolerant anticlerical theology that rejects certain traditions as evil ‘political religion’. Consequently, liberal secularism often harms local forms of coexistence rather than nourishing them.

The principles of liberal political theory are often said to be “freestanding.” Are they indeed sufficiently detached from the cultural setting where they emerged to be intelligible to people with other backgrounds? To answer this question, this essay examines the Indian secularism debate and develops a hypothesis on the process whereby liberal principles crystallized in the West and spread elsewhere. It argues that the secularization of western political thought has not produced independent rational principles, but transformed theological ideas into the “topoi” of a culture. Like all topoi, the principles of liberalism depend on other clusters of ideas present in western societies. When they migrate to new settings, the absence of these surrounding ideas presents fundamental obstacles to the interpretation and elaboration of liberal principles. The case of Indian secularism illustrates the cultural limitations of liberal political theory rather than showing its universal significance.

This essay considers the overlap between ʿAli Shari’ati’s ethical reflections and his discussion of insurrectionary violence. Davari argues that the earlier lectures discussing bāzgasht be khishtan (a return to self) formed the conceptual foundation for his advocacy of shahādat (martyrdom) as a model of self-formation. These intellectual tendencies were rooted in a tradition of anticolonial and insurgent political thought, exemplified in Shari’ati’s case by an engagement with the writings of Frantz Fanon. Shari’ati’s borrowing of Fanon’s notions of return and decolonial violence involved alterations within a shared framework. Most notably, Shari’ati emphasized the prospect of a return to a religious self, redefined as political ethics. Whereas Fanon privileged an embodied experience of racialization as the most fundamental constraining and enabling factor in the realization of a new humanism, Shari’ati’s presentation of the “new man” as shahid involved a hermeneutic relationship with a collective self imagined across historical time. In Shari’ati’s hands, Fanon’s eschewal of history became an engagement with historical memory in the present tense. In the process, the body was reimagined as that which dies, its physical death marking the future where Fanon’s new man was said to be found. The shahid’s choosing to die—as opposed to the colonized’s need to kill the colonizer—led to the revision of two central conclusions pertaining to the process of decolonization: the discussion of means as ends, and the critique of a hierarchical relationship between revolutionary leaders and the led.

Ali Shariati (1933–77) has been called by many the 'ideologue of the Iranian Revolution'. An inspiration to many of the revolutionary generation, Shariati's combination of Islamic political thought and Left-leaning ideology continues to influence both in Iran and across the wider Muslim world. In this book, Siavash Saffari examines Shariati's long-standing legacy, and how new readings of his works by contemporary 'neo-Shariatis' have contributed to a deconstruction of the false binaries of Islam/modernity, Islam/West, and East/West. Saffari argues that through their critique of Eurocentric metanarratives on the one hand, and the essentialist conceptions of Islam on the other, Shariati and neo-Shariatis have carved out a new space in Islamic thought beyond the traps of Orientalism and Occidentalism. This unique perspective will hold great appeal to researchers of the politics and intellectual thought of post-revolutionary Iran and the greater Middle East.

Women simultaneously occupy a space of both strength and
vulnerability in Mexico. While existing institutions, traditions, and
gender norms create the conditions whereby feminicide and
forced disappearances proliferate, responses to these events prominently feature maternal calls for justice. How do the victims’
mothers counter extreme gender violence in Ciudad Juárez?
Existing accounts of maternal politics typically fall into three
wide categories: celebratory accounts, critical approaches, and
the theatrical dimension of maternal politics. While these accounts
provide important insights into the political power of maternal
politics, they do not adequately explain its pedagogical function.
Bringing to bear the insights of Judith Butler’s performative theory
of public assembly and Rita Laura Segato’s anthropology of violence, this article suggests that maternal politics transforms private
experiences of extreme gender violence into political expressions
of strength and agency to politically beget what Segato defines as
counter pedagogies of cruelty

Social movements are increasingly turning to mind-body practices like
meditation to support their work. This is a new, but still marginal trend.
The spread of mindfulness practices among social justice organizations will grow if a compelling case can be made that mind-body practices are central, not peripheral, to collective liberation. The philosophers Georges Bataille and Chögyam Trungpa provide that case. Both Bataille and Trungpa, in their respective works, articulate how easy it is for humans to feel small in the face of a contingent and finite existence, and how this felt smallness often fuels compensatory desires for aggrandizement and domination, desires with profound material effects. If there are existential drivers behind systemic dominations like colonialism, capitalist exploitation, white supremacy, and hetero-patriarchy, then existential change strategies become central to addressing the causes of injustice. The accounts provided by both Bataille and Trungpa clarify how efforts to integrate mind-body practices into social movements are central to the pursuit of social and ecological justice.

This paper is a reflection on the distinctiveness and scope of the ideas of Ziya Gökalp (1876Gökalp ( -1924, who played a key role in the formation of the ideology of the Turkish Republic created in 1923. Gökalp is generally cast by interpreters as a 'Westernist' or 'modernist' nationalist thinker, like many other thinkers in late developing societies, whose chief concern was the establishment of a modern Turkish nation-state and who, therefore, tried to combine Western knowledge with the culture of his own society. Contrary to received wisdom, I argue that Gökalp developed not just a model of modernity befitting Muslim Turks but also a distinctive general theory of social life, according to which the cultures of all societies are hybrid, i.e. blends of other (past and present) cultures. If this is correct, then Gökalp's social thought is more than a mere specimen of late nationalist ideologies; it is applicable to all forms of social life just as much as the ideas of the European social theorists he cited.

Hindu philosophy and its associated meditative traditions have historically been characterized as renunciatory and world-negating, producing an ethic of political passivity, quietism, and indifference. In contrast, I demonstrate here that both the orthodox systems of Hindu philosophy and the heterodox Tantric tradition have been enlisted in service of a variety of socio-political commitments and projects, within and outside India. The more important question is whether these traditions inspire the ossification of conventional hierarchies or the emergence of radical, emancipatory, or liberatory commitments. I argue here that Tantra, a dissident tradition of thought and practice, contains a progressive potential for critiquing and subverting the hierarchical, masculinist politics of gender, sexuality, and caste in contemporary India.

This article pursues a topological reading of Milestones, one of the most influential books in the history of Islamism. Written by Muslim thinker Sayyid Qutb, the  general interest in this crucial text has largely remained restricted to the fields of Islamic Studies and Security Studies. This article aims to make the case for assuming a philosophical  standpoint, relocating its significance beyond the above-mentioned fields. A topological reading of this text will allow the spatial complexity of Qutb’s eschatological vision to be fully exposed, while also unpacking the way in which antagonistic relations have variously been articulated by this thinker. This will offer new perspectives from which to examine and develop current debates on political universalism and antagonism in the tradition of continental philosophy.

The Mexican Revolution and the new Constitution of 1917 produced trans- formations in the field of international law both in Mexico and across the Americas. The impact of these transformations, and particularly their implications for continental and regional debates over armed and unilateral interventionism, have tended to be overlooked by scholarship on inter- national relations and the Mexican Revolution.This chapter examines the redefinition of Mexican and Latin American conceptions of the international legal order, and the germination of new international legal doctrines concerning intervention and US unilateralism in the face of US armed intervention in Veracruz, Mexico, in 1914.

In this course, we will explore a range of questions: What is the state and why does it matter?  Why are some countries democratic and others authoritarian? Why are some states able to successfully transition to democracy, while others are not? What are the causes and effects of economic development? Why do civil wars happen? The use of a comparative approach allows us to explore these questions in a range of different contexts. We will seek to explain both the similarities and differences between different countries and regions. We will also be introduced to the work of the various comparativists who teach in the department, and discuss the differences between their methods.

This chapter is an attempt based on the emerging field of comparative political theory (CPT) to trace civilization’s trajectory throughout the contemporary era, beginning with Rifa’a Rafi ’ al-Tahtawi (1801–1873) up to and including Hamid Dabashi. Although it analyses the rise and demise of this concept, among my chief concerns is to discuss this concept’s current descriptive and normative value. I argue that for the last two centuries, the term civilization has possessed a primarily rhetorical value, for it functioned as a defensive tool that subjugated Muslims could use against the Western colonial discourse that helped justify and perpetuate colonial domination. Thus, the term Islamic civilization itself emerged as a defensive discourse constructed
by Muslim apologists to counteract the project of the ‘West’,  which had first constructed ‘the Orient’ as a foil to represent its distinct and inferior ‘other’. Beyond this, I maintain, civilization has had little descriptive and normative value for Muslims’ self-understanding or self-projection. Moreover, I argue that its current deployment as both a descriptive term for various Muslim cultures’ self-understanding, as well as a normative goal for Muslims to pursue a socio-political project in the form of constructing or revitalizing an ‘Islamic civilization’, is obsolete and must be overcome. Toward this end, I will pay particular attention to the work of Dabashi (Dabashi 2001, 2008), who has consistently sought to deliver a coup de grâce to this wellworn concept. Accordingly, I view all attempts to formulate a unique ‘Islamic civilization’ vis-à-vis Western civilization as futile pursuits of an outmoded way of thinking about oneself and the other. By the same token, the concept of dialogue among thinkers who draw upon diff erent ontological sources should not be considered a dialogue among civilizations, a concept that is itself a power-effect. Any truthful and reasonable theoretical endeavour that aims to establish dialogue and peace among groups of people, therefore, must first debunk such essentialist concepts. My stance can better be characterized as ‘post-Western’, a post-Orientalist overcoming of the categories of ‘Western’, ‘Eastern’, or ‘Islamic’ civilizations.