Hi Junaid,

First, I want to make sure you understand that my intention in responding to your post isn’t to be polemical or disagreeable. I criticize your argument because I take it seriously.

I understand that you intended to make a broader point about pedagogy and curricula. However, your original post made assertions about both “introductory international relations courses and advanced political science seminars.” A conjunction is true if and only if both conjuncts are true. If you claim that some pedagogical pattern pervades a “every level” of political science courses, you need to answer my objections that at at least one level, it doesn’t. Or, if you think the counterexamples I’ve presented aren’t actually part of the pattern you’ve identified, you should explain why.

It’s clearer to me now that you’re using “democratic peace theory” in a broader sense than is used in international relations. “Democratic peace theory” is a specific hypothesis about why (it’s argued) democracies don’t go to war with each other. It is not the idea that democratic regimes uniquely protect human rights, the rule of law, and other qualities of good government. Intelligent criticism of teaching within a discipline requires knowledge of the specific terms of art used in the discipline — both to avoid confusion and to demonstrate that you understand the position you’ve criticized.

Here’s an example of a sentence that reflects the ambiguity in “democratic peace theory”:

On the specifics of democratic peace theory, my goal was not to argue that it compares democracies to non-democracies; rather, it is that by teaching Western democracies as exceptional we de-legitimize other forms of governance outside the West, casting them as warlike.

If you mean “democratic peace theory” in the specific IR sense here, this sentence is deeply confusing. If you mean it in the broader sense I distinguished above, this is understandable and we can argue its merits.

As a more general point, it would be helpful if you could give specific examples from syllabi or assigned readings to illustrate this general pattern you’ve identified. It would also be helpful if you could explain why, for example, realism as taught in IR isn’t useful or relevant to the study of colonialism. While there are specific features of realist theories that might be contestable (for example that the international system is a state of anarchy comprised of formally equal sovereign states), realism emphasizes the importance of power and the inevitability of conflict between weak and strong actors. Isn’t Thucydides useful for understanding empire, for example?

I also want to agree with part of your judgment about the readings for the last week of the Intro to IR course. It’s not strictly true that the only minority (non-white, non-male) authors we read were in the last week of class — compare for example Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, among others — but you’re right that the syllabus is overwhelmingly white and male. I think the practice of tacking on last week of “critical perspectives” is patronizing if the readings aren’t thoughtfully chosen. That navel-gazey David Lake essay “White Man’s IR” is deeply insulting to student’s intelligence, for example. A much better argument (in a different political science context) would have been this.

Let me also add something on a more personal note. I don’t know your particular circumstances and the full background to your original post. But I do know something about academic alienation — I certainly struggled with feeling like I had a place in my undergrad university and finding courses that energized me. I think the history of Western thought has some deeply troubling elements, but I don’t think those are its only elements or that they mean the whole corpus is rotten through and through. I would suggest that it has something to offer you too, and it would be a mistake to throw it away. C.L.R. James, the great Trinidadian historian of the Haitian Revolution and postcolonial writer, has a short essay called “Discovering Literature in Trinidad” where he writes:

The atmosphere in which I came to maturity, and which has developed me along the lines that I have gone, is the atmosphere of the literature of Western Europe. In my youth we lived according to the tenets of Matthew Arnold; we spread sweetness and light, and we studied the best that there was in literature in order to transmit it to the people — as we thought, the poor, backward West Indian people… I didn’t learn literature from the mango-tree, or bathing on the shore and getting the sun of the colonial countries; I set out to master the literature, philosophy, and ideas of Western civilization. That is where I have come from, and I would not to pretend to be anything else.

James was no apologist for colonialism or the West, of course. But I think he was right that “Western civilization” was also the source of his own literary style and his socialist and anti-imperialist politics, and that it contained threads of excellence that were worthy of study and mastery.