Part front matter for 5 Discipline and Dissent

This section treats examples of disagreement about the rules of knowledge. Entries explore debates about what counts as a certain form of knowledge, along with the political aspects of that debate, and often broach questions concerning the aims and practices of comparative political theory itself. Sanjay Seth uses the insights and rubrics of postcolonial theory to argue that despite noble intentions, comparative political theory ends up reifying Western presumptions and categories by trying to incorporate or compare intellectual productions from outside the West as “political theory.” Treating works by Godrej, Euben, and Jenco in particular, he argues that what they valuably accomplish, they do despite their framing as comparative political theory, rather than through it. Robert Nichols discusses a legal battle around sovereignty, between First Nations and the Canadian state, to explore more generally themes of epistemic difference, epistemic justice, and refusal as a political response to the dangers of representation for indigenous knowledges. The chapter reflects on what a different “tradition” of knowing might be, as well as how that is lived in the present day and therefore how it intersects with political struggles of sovereign peoples and settler colonial states. Jimmy Casas Klausen argues that although both anticolonial thinkers and practitioners of comparative political theory are curators of “culture” and “civilization,” their political projects point in distinct if not opposed directions. Through four contrapuntal pairings—Ghose with Dallmayr, Gandhi with Godrej, Fanon with Jenco, and Cabral with Euben—he interrogates each group’s strategies, political orientations, and effects to call for a politics attuned to incommensurability and historically sedimented forms of domination. Delia Popescu explores how the geopolitical category of Eastern Europe relegates Eastern European thinkers to a particular and subaltern niche in European studies and in political theory and offers examples of how such subalternity—which she calls the condition of the “epigone”—might be worked through for a more productive engagement with thinkers such as Vaclav Havel. Leigh K. Jenco uses the debate about whether Chinese thought is “philosophy” to highlight the power inequalities that underlie attempts to include culturally marginalized bodies of thought within established disciplines. She excavates the enduring political questions that inflect these debates, especially the range of alternatives silenced or forgotten by this “inclusion” and the capacity of indigenous Chinese academic terms to compete successfully with Euro-American ones, to illuminate the position of comparative political theory today.