Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Pepinsky, Thomas

Titel

Everyday Political Engagement in Comparative Politics

Ist Teil von

• PS, political science & politics, 2018-07, Vol.51 (3), p.566-570

Ort / Verlag

New York, USA: Cambridge University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2018

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Worldwide Political Science Abstracts

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• It is common for critics of social science to consider scholarship and academic research to be too divorced from reality to be useful. This research, critics allege, is too motivated by disciplinary or methodological concerns, or funding agencies’ priorities, to be relevant for the pressing political issues of the day in countries around the world (see Isaac 2013; Lynch 2016; and Stoker, Peters, and Pierre 2015). Such criticism paints modern political science as irrelevant at best and exploitative at worst. This article presents an alternative view. In much area-focused comparative politics, academic political science research does focus on issues that have contemporary practical and political importance. The debates and findings of political scientists are input for national political conversations—and sometimes even for the policy process itself. There is, in fact, a more interesting—perhaps politically fraught—question of under which conditions it is appropriate for foreign academics to be as engaged as they are. I build this argument with reference to the comparative politics of Southeast Asia, a region that has occupied a particularly important place in US politics—a result of both colonial ties between the United States and the Philippines and US involvement in Vietnam. It is well known how politics in the Philippines and Vietnam shaped US politics; however, the reverse relationship—in which US political science research has affected politics and policy in Southeast Asia during and after the war in Vietnam—is today mostly forgotten. Yet, it projects a different perspective on engaged comparative politics research, which I define as research that aims to create actionable knowledge about the political issues confronting societies outside of the United States. This article also highlights ethical issues raised by such engaged scholarship, specifically for scholars who are neither citizens nor residents of the countries that they study. Meanwhile, their senior colleagues, George Kahin and John W. Lewis, were central figures in the anti–Vietnam War movement in the United States. The United States in Vietnam (Kahin and Lewis 1967) made the strong case that “Vietnam is a single nation, not two”—an argument that undermined the legitimacy of any war in support of the independence of the Republic of Vietnam or in defense of its regime.