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Politics, NOT as usual

Decolonizing Politics is both a reimagination of the discipline of political science as well as a how-to manual for decolonial politics, with a focus on the Western academy. From the onset, Robbie Shilliam challenges a common attack of critics of decolonising. Decolonizing Politics is explicit in its aim to decolonize the mainstream knowledge about the discipline of political science (as much as the practice of politics); it baulks at the idea of deletions to the mainstream canon. Rather, Shilliam shows us what is possible – emancipatory and inclusive – when the knowledges of the colonized are considered important enough for theory building. This is what drives Decolonizing Politics. This relatively short book packs a major punch that reminds us that politics as a discipline is not a given but historically constructed (see p.66), and one whose evolution is unknowable without attention to the racial hierarchies engendered by colonial logics. In Decolonizing Politics, however, Shilliam reminds us that history is present over six core chapters. For those who may have absorbed the caricatured portrayals of demands to decolonize knowledge in Universities, and especially within political science, it is perhaps surprising that Shilliam starts Decolonizing Politics with a thorough biography of Aristotle, the father of politics. Shilliam himself tells us that starting with Aristotle is both familiar – the discipline accepts Aristotle as indeed the father of political science – and unfamiliar. In this unfamiliar narration of the ‘political scientist’ Aristotle, we meet the Aristotle that is a child of empire, an immigrant, and contingent citizen of Greece. In a way, this feels familiar to me: a child of empire, immigrant, contingent citizen of the United Kingdom. This is a new father of politics with depth and a context that forces us to consider the co-constitutive nature of lived experience and knowledge production. In this narration of Aristotle’s early life, and before he declared Europeans to be Barbarians, and in need of being ruled/disciplined. This departure point is significant for two reasons. First, it counters critics of decolonisation’s claim that decolonial knowledge is about the erasure of ‘dead white men’ or some sort of canon. Rather, what Shilliam does, and as a counter to this false narrative, is to show us how we can rethink said white men and the said canonfully and in context. Second, and this filters through the rest of the text: the core assumptions held by those who we canonize – in this case Aristotle as