This Workshop takes stock of the ‘ideational turn’ in the study of politics in Africa and the Global South. It consolidates this pivot-point, away from reductive analyses of the triumvirate of ethnicity, violence and patronage, and towards greater attention to political ideas and normative politics. This research agenda has three methodological strands. First, it relies primarily on high-quality feedback on empirically grounded, in-depth qualitative work. It welcomes sensitive mixed-method work that integrates these inductively generated categories into quantitative analysis. Finally, it embraces work drawing on Global South political thought and practice as the basis for innovation in international political theory.
This Workshop contributes to the ongoing re-location of knowledge production in and about the Global South within the discipline of Politics. The ideational turn paves the way to a deeper engagement between what have traditionally been seen as areas studies fields (Africa, Latin America and Asia) and broader disciplinary communities in political theory, ideology studies and political anthropology. Thematically, beyond the limitations of previous paradigms which studied Global South cases as examples in deficiency from Western norms, the ideational turn reveals political life in post-colonial societies as instructive for timely global conversations, including: the rise of populism, the role of racism and borders in state making; and the authority of law and the state where such authority is always ‘in progress’. Amidst these concerns, the Workshop pays particular attention to the fruitfulness of diverse experiences of and imaginations of democracy, accountability and political possibility across the Global South.
Moreover, this agenda speaks to current methodological concerns: i) the use of ethnography and field-based methods for political theory; ii) questions about how to anchor new innovations in AI and quantitative methods in meaningful and inductively-generated theoretical categories; and iii) responding to the historical biases in knowledge production which have and continue to skew our ability as scholars to know how power operates. As such the rejuvenated study of political ideas is an entry point to the aspiration to de-colonise politics: through an engagement with ideas Western-located scholars and institutions can re-engage Non-Western subjects as interlocutors not solely as objects of analysis.
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1: How is democracy being constructed today? What ideologies are instantiated in these constructions?
2: How do vernacular political ideas speak to ongoing debates in international political theory?
3: What emancipatory futures, if any, are envisaged in them? How is liberal democracy critiqued?
4: How might empirical attention to political ideas in the Global South make us rethink dominant conceptual categories?
5: How is politics animated by rival conceptions of concepts like accountability, ‘the people’, corruption etc?
1: Ideology within contemporary democracy movements – contesting entrenched power, envisioning democracy
2: The construction and contestation of political ideas in parties, state agencies and/or formal institutions
3: Empirically grounded, in-depth qualitative/ethnographic work on political ideas in the global south
4: Populism, illiberalism and everything else: taking alternatives to liberal democracy seriously
5: Accessibility as accountability: theorising the democratic value of face-to-face encounters with power
6: Politics from the street: studying vernacular political ideas in popular politics
7: Republicanism in action? Anti-corruption, purity politics and conceptions of political domination
8: Integrating inductively derived political categories from the global south into quantitative analysis
