1What does it mean to be a stranger, an outsider to academia? We take up this question by exploring the reception of the social and political thought of First Nations, Métis, and American Indians in political science. We seek to shed light on the relationships and dynamics between the academic discipline of political science and the knowledges of Indigenous peoples, especially those situated in English-speaking settler colonial nations, like Canada, where we write from, as well as the United States of America, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Australia. These settler colonial states are among the world’s most powerful nations, and universities in these countries still attract many of the world’s people to pursue their education. They therefore exercise a disproportionate influence on what counts as knowledge in academic settings (Collyer 2018), including within political science.
2Our focus is on dynamics present in the peer review process in political science, especially in political theory, in English-speaking settler colonial contexts. To explore these dynamics, we invoke a stylized “Reviewer 2” imagined as evaluating what we refer to as an Indigenous contribution, that is a typical political science journal article but one that foregrounds Indigenous social and political thought. We then explain how Reviewer 2 routinely reproduces the marginalization of Indigenous contributions through the peer review process. While our claims pertain more specifically to political theory, we believe they have implications for other more empirical areas of political science, but this is not something we can fully explore here.
3A critical context to our argument is that long before the first universities were established, the lands of what are now settler colonial nations were already settled by diverse Indigenous peoples. They had their own histories, politics, cultures and languages as Nuu-chah-nulth, Cree, Saulteaux and Inuit peoples, among many hundred others. These self-determining original peoples had their ways of life brutally interrupted by the European invasion, beginning in the 16th century. The dispossession of Indigenous peoples by colonial states and the forcible imposition of European languages and lifeways are now increasingly recognized as genocidal (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015, MacDonald 2019, Starblanket 2018, Wolfe 2006). The fraught relationship between political science and Indigenous social and political thought is thus embedded within settler colonial contexts that have violently sought the dispossession and elimination of Indigenous peoples, their lifeways, and knowledges.
4For those less familiar with settler colonialism and its relationships to Indigenous peoples and knowledges, we begin by briefly reviewing the relationship between settler colonialism and epistemic domination. Next, we describe and analyze the exclusion of Indigenous knowledges from the discipline of political science as one manifestation of colonial epistemic domination. Specifically, we explore five ways that routine peer review operates, with a special focus on political theory, to exclude Indigenous ways of knowing, especially on their own distinctive terms. In arguing that “Reviewer 2 must be stopped,” we take up the widely used social media meme about harsh peer reviewers with unreasonable expectations, to investigate how Indigenous contributions are excluded in political theory, but with lessons for political science and other social sciences and humanities more generally. Despite a growing interest and real efforts to bring Indigenous knowledges into the academy, we thus contend that peer review dynamics mitigate against meaningful critical engagement. This is a loss for Indigenous scholars and for canonical disciplines that have much to gain from a critical uptake of Indigenous ways of knowing.
- 1 Enslaved peoples, those brought in indentured servitude, and those, like migrant farm workers, who (...)
5In settler colonial societies, “settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event,” as Patrick Wolfe famously put it (2006: 388). The invasion and colonization of what became the Americas began more than 500 years ago, but settler colonial studies invite us to appreciate the persistence of colonial social, political, and epistemic features of domination. If the lands now known as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States were supposedly “discovered” by Europeans, in fact, they were already inhabited and settled by diverse Indigenous peoples. The population of settler colonial societies is thus differentiated between the descendants of the first occupants who claim an original right to the land –Indigenous peoples– and the collective constituted by the descendants of the settlers, usually of European origins, but not exclusively.1 The qualifiers ‘Indigenous’ and ‘settlers’ are thus markers of this social structure and associated dynamics between the original peoples and those who invaded and claim right to the land, purportedly, as the first improvers (Sharma 2020, Veracini 2010).
6Settler colonialism is fundamentally characterized by the drive to eliminate Indigenous peoples, to dispossess them, and legitimate settler occupation. This objective is pursued through diverse processes, including genocide and forcible assimilation, and legitimated by a range of ideological constructions, like the myth that Indigenous peoples are doomed, due to their primitive race, civilization or culture, so leaving the future open for settler occupation alone (Veracini 2015, Allard-Tremblay and Coburn 2021). These ideological constructions disqualify Indigenous ways of being, doing, and knowing, denying their contemporary and future salience to their own lands. Indigenous peoples are framed as belonging to the past, as inevitably superseded by more “advanced” lifeways and so as necessarily making way for progress and civilization, identified with European settler traditions. Framed as such, Indigenous lifeways are suppressed, or ignored and their significance –and especially their contemporary, ongoing, and future significance– disavowed. Other theorists of the world inaugurated by colonialism refer to this disqualification and destitution of Indigenous lifeways as coloniality, the direct correlative of the enunciation of European lifeways as universal standards (Quijano 2007, Mignolo 2011, Mignolo and Walsh 2018).
7The status of Indigenous knowledges in contemporary universities, and academic disciplines, including political science, must thus be read against the erasure, disqualification, and destitution of Indigenous lifeways in settler colonial contexts. In other words, it must be considered in light of dynamics of epistemic oppression and domination that suppress Indigenous ways of knowing and knowledges in the name of European ones seen as universal and universally desirable. Indigenous peoples and scholars, and other critical academics have challenged and sought to remedy these dynamics by recentering Indigenous lifeways. This is the project of decolonizing disciplines and knowledges, which directly challenges the destitution of Indigenous knowledges at the heart of the settler colonial project. Yet, despite contemporary efforts to bring Indigenous knowledges back into the academy, obstacles persist.
- 2 We will use Indigenous to refer specifically to First Nations and American Indians in what are now (...)
8We are not the first to explore epistemic domination in political science. In 2016, a prominent American peer-reviewed journal in political science, Perspectives in Politics, published a symposium on Kennan Ferguson’s article “Why Does Political Science Hate American Indians?” (2016). While Indigenous scholars have long theorized their disqualification and erasure by dominant academic disciplines (L. T. Smith 2012), Ferguson analysed how political science, specifically, limits the uptake of Indigenous scholarship.2
- 3 This underrepresentation persists. In Canada, from where we write, “Aboriginal academics remain sig (...)
9After establishing that there are few Indigenous political scientists in the university,3 Ferguson (2016) explains that several features aggravate the discipline’s lack of engagement with Indigenous politics and knowledges.
10Political science is present and future oriented, he observes, such that it fails to appreciate the historical processes and injustices that inform contemporary Indigenous peoples’ claims against the settler state (1032). Moreover, the present is often conflated with what is desirable, especially insofar as politics is institutionalized in law and law is conflated with legitimate rule. What “is” politically and legally becomes synonymous with what “ought” to be in politics and jurisprudence (1032). The focus on the state, as the political form, squeezes out analytical space to critically engage with the alternative political forms and normative traditions that Indigenous lifeways offer, such as for instance, the Haudenosaunee’s Great Law of Peace (Alfred 2009, K. P. Williams 2018).
11Relatedly, Ferguson (2016: 1032) observes that political science is marked by Eurocentrism and so theorizes in ways that matter to European political traditions. Texts are privileged over other kinds of material records, like wampum belts, that matter to Indigenous political histories and relationships. Further, Eurocentric conceptual categories like “sovereignty” translate badly into distinctive Indigenous political and social thought. This is because sovereignty is often read as commensurate with the bounded nation-state, while for Indigenous peoples, sovereignty is often interpreted as self-determination oriented to fulfilling responsibilities to lands and life, both human and other-than-human (Ferguson 2016: 1032, Alfred 2005, Stark 2013). Indigenous politics on their own terms, like this distinctive view of sovereignty, do not register within dominant understandings of the field.
12Another consequence of the discipline’s focus on the colonial state, is that political scientists tend to subsume Indigenous peoples as an “interest group” under the authority of the federal government (Ferguson 2016: 1032).
13Finally, Eurocentric political science focuses on the liberal individual, rather than political communities, so invisibilizing Indigenous collective claims and their emphasis on relationships, both with other peoples and with the natural world (Ferguson 2016: 1033). Since individualism also structures the academy, participating in universities mitigates against relationships, including to the land, that inform Indigenous scholarship and the positionality of Indigenous academics as members of Indigenous nations (1033). These are all obstacles to the meaningful uptake of Indigenous knowledges in political science.
- 4 The residential schools existed for over 100 years in Canada. The last one closed in 1996.
- 5 See two examples: (York University 2017, McGill University 2017).
14In the eight years since Ferguson’s publication and the accompanying symposium, dynamics have shifted, at least on the surface. Across universities in settler colonial contexts, Indigenous knowledges are increasingly understood as essential to scientific inquiry, even if, of course, there are variations in the degree and extent to which these knowledges are taken up in different national contexts. In Canada, for instance, The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015) investigated the residential school system, in which thousands of Indigenous children died, many were subject to physical and sexual abuse and all were purposefully separated from their communities, families, language, and culture (MacDonald 2019, Starblanket 2018).4 Since the TRC, many Canadian universities have heeded the Final Report and its calls to actions, which demand a greater space for Indigenous knowledges and languages across educational institutions. University administrators joined scholars in recognizing the urgent need for new relationships with Indigenous peoples and knowledges. Accordingly, universities have put in place frameworks and initiatives,5 including commitments to Indigenous faculty hires, teaching Indigenous knowledges in university classrooms, and supporting research by and for Indigenous peoples. These efforts seek to support Indigenous ways of knowing in the university. This connects with broader efforts to decolonize and Indigenize the academy, ranging from more tokenistic to more thoroughgoing transformations (Gaudry and Lorenz 2018).
- 6 Many universities in the USA and Canada subject their PhD candidates to a comprehensive exam that r (...)
- 7 While our examples focus primarily on Canada and while the US experiences a different political and (...)
15As part of political science’s decolonial impulse we note the multiplication of efforts to bring Indigenous voices into the discipline. The Canadian Political Science Association, for instance, has developed readings lists of Indigenous scholarship to help political scientists bring this work into their research and course syllabi (CPSA Reconciliation Committee 2022). Some political science departments are revising their comprehensive exams to include marginalized voices and thus remake the canon6 (Wallace 2022). In the Canadian context, Indigenous scholars, like Glen Coulthard (2014), Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017), and John Borrows (2017) have become unavoidable in some areas of political science. Familiarity with their work is expected and not considered a “specialized” interest. In sum and in contrast to the nearly totalizing exclusions described only recently by Ferguson in the US context and clearly recognizable to us, there is now a strong, if uneven desire to remedy the marginalization of Indigenous people and knowledges in the university generally and in political science, specifically.7
- 8 From this point on, we will use “Indigenous contributions” to refer to any putative contributions t (...)
16Despite these efforts, important obstacles continue to limit the uptake of Indigenous contributions.8 We consider the publishing and reviewing process as a significant juncture in the conduct of academic disciplines, at a moment when Indigenous contributions are simultaneously recognized and marginalized in political science. We identify five problematic dynamics, sometimes overlapping and mutually reinforcing, that impede Indigenous political theory contributions, wherein a stylized Reviewer 2:
(1) exercises the disciplining effects of disciplines;
(2) reproduces Eurocentrism;
(3) either demands essentialism or romanticization – or challenges both; and
(4) unfairly politicizes the “good” argument.
We identify a fifth (5) systemic dynamic associated with the still-limited representation of experts in Indigenous scholarship.
17Grounding ourselves in more than 15 years of joint experience, we explore how these five dynamics work independently and together to create obstacles to the critical engagement with Indigenous knowledges in political science. Our objective is to open space for a greater diversity of standards and to call for reviewers and editors to exercise prudence to allow for a fuller engagement with Indigenous knowledges.
18Finally, we seek to differentiate genuine critical engagements with Indigenous scholarship from problematic assessments. Ironically, they do not appear “problematic,” but rather as routine peer reviewing practices, in keeping with widespread professional understandings and norms. To explore institutionalized epistemic domination, we turn our experiences into stylized examples, represented by a metaphorical “Reviewer 2,” whom we imagine as responding to an Indigenous contribution in political theory. We relate Reviewer 2’s responses to broader disciplinary dynamics that marginalize and exclude Indigenous contributions. Our experiences guide the analysis and interpretation.
19All disciplines have a substantive focus and dominant approaches to central questions, and all disciplines foreground some intellectual figures as “canonical.” Indeed, disciplines cohere because there is broad agreement about what matters substantively, theoretically, and methodologically, even if the field remains pluralistic. Such broad agreement constitutes a given discipline as a distinctive field of inquiry. Professional competence, developed through undergraduate and graduate training and sustained through ongoing involvement in the discipline, demands familiarity with major concerns, theories, and concepts. In short, political science may be pluralistic, but, like other disciplines, it has a shared core that defines the discipline. Accordingly, the well-trained political scientist, Reviewer 2, knows that states matter in political science, as do concepts like power, citizenship, justice, equality, and freedom. They are aware that historical figures like John Locke and Thomas Hobbes provide a theoretical basis to the discipline. Even if Reviewer 2’s own approach is not centrally concerned with states, citizenship or freedom, or these historical authors, they understand that it is their professional duty to be familiar with them.
20Reviewer 2 thus acts in professionally expected ways in drawing on necessarily bounded disciplinary knowledge to review Indigenous scholarship. We explore three ways routine peer evaluation of Indigenous contributions may be professionally warranted but problematic for Indigenous political thought.
- 9 We refer to mainstream or top journals in the field at different moments in this article. We declin (...)
21First, as noted by Ferguson, political science has historically centered on the state. Reviewer 2 presumes this familiar ground in their critical assessment of Indigenous contributions. Asked to review an article about the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, for instance, Reviewer 2 may argue that the article falls outside of the scope of a mainstream political science journal, because it is not engaged with the state. Skeptical of its relevance, Reviewer 2 may suggest, instead, submission to a “specialized” political science journal or to an Indigenous Studies publication. From a disciplinary perspective, an engagement with Indigenous political formations requires special justification. Insofar as Reviewer 2 remains unconvinced about the need to expand the focus of mainstream political science beyond the state, and the journal editor agrees, the Indigenous contribution will be rejected. In this way, discussions concerned with sui generis Indigenous political forms, like the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, are redirected away from and so excluded from mainstream political science journals.9
- 10 Hence the proliferation of approaches seeking to situate Indigenous peoples with respect to the Can (...)
22Alternatively, when asked to evaluate a paper about the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, Reviewer 2 may ask for clarifications and revisions that presume that the state is the default, normal and normative political authority. Reviewer 2 may ask the author to locate the Haudenosaunee Confederacy –which sees itself as an independent, sovereign polity that pre-exists the Canadian state– within the domain and under the de facto sovereignty of the Canadian Crown.10 In so doing, Reviewer 2 theoretically moves to incorporate Indigenous political formations under the state and, in reasserting the disciplinary focus on the state, distorts the distinctiveness of Indigenous political forms. Worse, such an approach comforts colonial ideologies that construe Indigenous political forms as existing under colonial state authority.
- 11 See, for example, Wilson (1996: 307, 310).
23Second, Reviewer 2 may request a re-centering of existing disciplinary conversations and thus shift the original argument away from a detailed, nuanced exploration of Indigenous political practices on their own terms. In reviewing a contribution about the negotiation of political and cultural differences within Indigenous political traditions, for instance, through the ethic of non-interference,11 Reviewer 2 may request engagement with established contributions about multiculturalism, as the mainstream entry point for taking up questions of political and cultural difference within the state. In doing so, Reviewer 2 seeks to resituate the Indigenous contribution as part of a disciplinary conversation –here established political science debates about multiculturalism– but this recentering forecloses a deeper engagement with the distinct alternatives offered by Indigenous political principles. This conscientious disciplinary approach by Reviewer 2 marginalizes Indigenous political theory and concepts like the ethic of non-interference by re-constituting existing conversations in political science, and associated concepts and theoretical frameworks, like multiculturalism, as the default approach. This limits or even eliminates the possibility of discussing Indigenous political thought and practices on their own terms.
- 12 On recoding, see: Aguirre Turner 2018: pt. two, Tuck and Yang 2014.
24Third, political science, as a discipline, is constituted by key conceptualizations and theoretical frameworks, associated with relatively enduring intellectual figures. The well-schooled Reviewer 2 is thus likely to read ideas through key intellectuals and concepts, so misreading the distinctive contributions of Indigenous political and social thought. If Reviewer 2 is asked to take up Louis Karoniaktajeh Hall’s Warrior’s Handbook, from 1979, they may note that Hall emphasizes his commitment to rights, including “the right to live and be free” (A. Simpson 2014: 27, Hall 2023). Reviewer 2 may learn that for Hall, these concerns are bound up with his plea for righteous leadership as part of his critique of hereditary governance practices, within a broader discussion of the Great Law of Peace. Well-trained in the discipline, Reviewer 2 may then naturally resort to their acquired interpretative scheme and recode12 Hall’s politics into familiar disciplinary terms. Thus, Reviewer 2 may interpret Hall’s arguments informed by Locke’s well-known discussion of natural rights and accordingly demand revisions, perhaps offering the apparently constructive suggestion that Hall’s rights be understood as a sub-genre of Lockean natural rights.
25In reading an Indigenous contribution through the discipline’s canonical intellectuals –here Locke and his conceptualization of natural rights– Reviewer 2 asserts and reaffirms the disciplinary canon. Effectively, they assert that Hall’s discussion is and should really be about natural rights as they have been conceptualized by and following Locke. In so doing, Reviewer 2 displaces or erases Hall’s discussion about rights and leadership in relation to the Great Law of Peace. Whatever Reviewer 2’s intention, their intervention refuses disciplinary space for Hall’s distinctive critique and contribution to specifically Mohawk political thought and practice. Similar “recoding” includes, for instance, linking Indigenous sui generis conceptions of sovereignty, recognition, democracy and justice to Hobbes, Friedrich Hegel, Robert Dahl, or Rawls.
26The dynamic identified here limits the capacity of Indigenous contributions to reshape the terms of the academic conversation because they are either read as fundamentally incoherent with dominant approaches or as being improved by their rearticulation within dominant paradigms. This form of epistemic domination has been discussed by decolonial scholars, notably by Brian Burkhart who explains that “In the context of settler philosophy,” but with relevance for the context of settler political science and theory:
articulations of Indigenous philosophy often trigger the operations of philosophical guardianship that force Indigenous philosophical articulations into appropriate guardianship forms, or forms that are assimilated to the dominant paradigm or at least translatable to or consistent with views of knowledge, morality, and the like that are generally acceptable within the dominant paradigm. This is often done, as with guardianship in general, with good intentions. The purpose of guardianship in the context of philosophy is to bring Indigenous philosophy into the realm of proper civilized philosophy in contrast to what is seen as mere religious thought or mythopoetics (Burkhart 2020: 42).
27In this way, Reviewer 2 participates in the marginalization of Indigenous thought in political science by misreading and recoding Indigenous social and political thought to assert the primacy of canonical political science figures and associated concepts (relatedly, see our discussion of Eurocentrism, below).
- 13 Following Mignolo, to constitute is to also destitute other options. To define political science is (...)
- 14 As we have noted, this idea is extensively developed in Ferguson’s (2016) discussion of the discipl (...)
28Importantly, in enacting the disciplining dynamics of the discipline, Reviewer 2 is not purposefully and willfully refusing to hear Indigenous social and political thought. Rather, Reviewer 2 is reflecting deeply rooted institutional divisions of labour that separate political science from other disciplines, including Indigenous Studies. Yet, in constituting and reproducing the discipline following the dominant concerns, conversations, and conceptualizations and intellectual figures, Reviewer 2 acts to simultaneously destitute and marginalize Indigenous intellectual traditions (Mignolo 2021).13 If Reviewer 2 proposes that Indigenous political thought is out of place in “mainstream” political science journals, then that knowledge is thereby excluded from mainstream political science debate. If Reviewer 2 suggests that Indigenous political practice can only be understood in reference to the state or dominant concepts, then the sui generis nature of Indigenous political forms, on their own terms, is marginalized or eliminated from discussions in the discipline. If Reviewer 2 seeks to reposition Indigenous thinkers within conversations and frameworks developed by canonical Western political theorists, then Indigenous ideas are distorted into a response or reaction to those theorists –rather than being taken up as distinctive, rich political imaginaries and practices in the field of political science. The overall consequence of Reviewer 2’s conscientious reproduction of disciplinary norms is to exclude or marginalize Indigenous contributions in mainstream disciplines, so failing to enrich political science debates.14
29Political science is Eurocentric. This is neither unique to the discipline nor particularly surprising given that political science was developed within European universities and by settler-colonial states who built their universities in imitation of European metropolitan models. Eurocentrism can be broadly defined as the enunciation of European ways of doing, knowing, and being as standards according to which all other lifeways should be measured and assessed (Mignolo and Walsh 2018). Europeans’ lifeways are constituted as norms; and the lifeways of other peoples are represented as lacking and as having to be improved, or superseded and replaced, by European lifeways. Eurocentrism is therefore often associated with progress and diffusionism (Battiste and Henderson 2000: 21), the idea from James Blaut (1993: 1) that the “natural, normal, logical and ethical flow” of culture and knowledge is from the superior, innovative European “Inside” to the inferior, primitive and backwards “Outside.” The fundamental assumption is that all lifeways should progress towards or be superseded by European lifeways. Difference is not apprehended as a distinct, unique, and valuable perspective, but as a bygone, outdated, superstitious and even primitive lifeway.
30Reviewer 2 may explicitly reject Eurocentric assumptions, as expressed in this direct and dehumanizing way, but they may nonetheless reproduce them as they manifest, less directly, in disciplinary institutional practices. We identify three routine ways this occurs.
31First, Reviewer 2 is trained within an academy and discipline that unevenly grants symbolic capital to different forms of knowledges. In keeping with the discipline’s Eurocentric origins, political science generally accords greater prestige to Eurocentric knowledges and relatively less prestige to Indigenous knowledges. Consequently, as a professionally competent political scientist, Reviewer 2 must know European intellectuals and traditions but familiarity with Indigenous political thought is professionally optional, rather than necessary. A political theorist Reviewer 2 will be embarrassed to admit that they have not read Plato, John Stuart Mill or Rawls, or that they are unfamiliar with concepts like justice, the separation of powers, and democracy. In contrast, Reviewer 2 will feel no special shame at their unfamiliarity with Indigenous intellectuals, like Vine Deloria Jr. or Viola Cordova, and with political traditions and practices like the Two Row Wampum or the Dish With One Spoon.
32Secure in their ignorance of Indigenous knowledges and histories, Reviewer 2 may ask the author of an Indigenous contribution to explain basic facts, like the meaning of “Indian Status” under colonial law in Canada; or Reviewer 2 may feel entitled to ask for an extensive review of contemporary Indigenous feminisms in a paper foregrounding a particular Indigenous feminist author, given their unfamiliarity with the field. Reviewer 2 makes these demands comfortable in the knowledge that there is no professional requirement to demonstrate familiarity with Indigenous political knowledges. Correspondingly, they can demand that Indigenous contributions palliate the expected ignorance of their political science audience. The consequence of such requests is an extra burden for Indigenous scholars who are now expected to make a convincing case for their contributions and to surmount the allowable ignorance of their disciplinary audience. Eurocentrism manifests here in the attention and prestige granted to Euro-Western political traditions over Indigenous traditions in political science, and attendant, additional explanatory burdens that Reviewer 2 places on Indigenous-centered political scholarship that is outside of these traditions.
- 15 This is importantly distinct from racist denials of this genocide masquerading as careful requests (...)
33Relatedly, since Reviewer 2 is both relatively unschooled in Indigenous political thought and relatively comfortable admitting their ignorance in this area, they may demand extensive justifications for broadly accepted arguments within Indigenous scholarship. Confronted with the claim that the residential schools in Canada constitute genocide, for instance, Reviewer 2 may ask for documentation and arguments to support this position. Yet residential schools have been denounced as “a national crime” in reports and newspapers since at least 1922, notably by Peter Bryce (Blackstock 2021: xiii). Moreover, the vast majority of Indigenous and settler colonial studies’ scholars recognize the schools, explicitly created to “kill the Indian in the child,” as genocidal (Starblanket 2018, MacDonald 2019, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015). Reviewer 2’s Eurocentric training, however, means that they can be ignorant of such broadly agreed upon facts and interpretations.15 If some knowledge asymmetries are inevitable between established disciplines and newer areas of scholarship, Reviewer 2’s requests that well-known facts be established or debated, at length, make it difficult to advance more complex arguments. Reviewer 2 thus contributes to the reproduction of Eurocentric dynamics and to the truncation of Indigenous contributions, which must perpetually re-establish foundational knowledges with little space to engage in more nuanced argument. This work may be truly unavoidable insofar as it is required to enable many political scientists to meaningfully take up Indigenous contributions, but this does not make this additional, explanatory labour any less of a burden.
- 16 Imagine declaring Western feminisms superfluous, as distinctive intellectual traditions, because In (...)
34Third, Reviewer 2 may judge Indigenous political thought superfluous when a contribution is not entirely distinct from European traditions. Asked to evaluate, an Indigenous critique of the contemporary exploitation of nature and of other-than-human kin, for instance, Reviewer 2 may respond by turning to their own Eurocentric training. They will observe that environmental and ecological political scientists operating from heterodox schools have already critiqued the historical and contemporary exploitation of nature by human beings. Reviewer 2 thus reproduces the Eurocentric valuing of European over Indigenous theorizing, because they assume that if an element of critique is present within European traditions, then Indigenous approaches are superfluous. The consequence is that critical Indigenous perspectives are set aside as redundant and therefore made irrelevant to political thought, or at least unworthy of publication, because insufficiently original –once again marginalizing Indigenous approaches on their own terms.16
35In short, Eurocentrism is reproduced in Reviewer 2’s allowable ignorance about Indigenous knowledges and experiences, which carry relatively less prestige within political science and the academy. Reviewer 2’s allowable or expectable ignorance then places additional explanatory burdens on Indigenous-focussed contributions to political science. In other instances, Reviewer 2 may deem Indigenous thought superfluous, because there are some shared elements with heterodox traditions within European political science, so that Eurocentric traditions are reconstituted as the universe of political possibility.
36Demands that Indigenous peoples be different, in essentializing and romanticizing ways, are not unique to scholarship but manifest in specific ways within it. Indigenous differences are essentialized when Indigenous lifeways are understood as unchanging, such that deviations from their expected descriptions are considered disqualifying. Indigenous lifeways are romanticized when they are understood according to idealizing stereotypes, often referring to some pristine pre-contact historical and cultural fiction (P. C. Smith 2009).
37The essentializing and romanticizing engagement with Indigenous lifeways has a long history, going back to Voltaire and Montaigne, where the noble savage is a “device” (De Lutri 1975: 206) to condemn or parochialize and facilitate critique of European traditions, rather than accurately describe what is distinctive about Indigenous lifeways. As LaRocque explains: “The European idea of the noble savage was abstract; it was meant as a tool for social criticism” (LaRocque 2010: 128). At worst, in popular culture, this manifests as a demand for a crude caricature that LaRocque summarizes as a series of contrasts: ‘Whites are materialistic, Reds spiritual; Whites are linear, Reds circular; Whites are individualistic, Reds tribal. Whites are patriarchal, Reds blur with “Mother Earth”’ (2010: 139). In contemporary scholarship, essentialism is manifest in the demand that Indigenous political thought sharply contrasts with and be ‘uncontaminated’ by mainstream (but also heterodox) Western traditions. The romantic tendency is manifest in the need for Indigenous knowledges to stand as idealized normative standards –where only the good remains and from which the bad and the ugly are expunged– by which contemporary Western political configurations can be condemned.
- 17 As with the Reviewer 2 who sees Indigenous theorizing as superfluous if a critique from an Indigeno (...)
38Insofar as Reviewer 2 is socialized into essentialized and/or romantic stereotypes –very likely given their prevalence in popular culture and the established tradition of social critique drawing on the figure of the noble savage– then they reproduce these schemas. When Reviewer 2 is drawn by essentialism, then where Western political theory centres the individual, Reviewer 2 will expect Indigenous theory to centre the community, and if Western political thought is secular, then Indigenous political thought will necessarily be spiritual. When Reviewer 2 is drawn by romantism, if Western ways of governing are problematically hierarchal then Reviewer 2 will expect Indigenous politics to emphasize desirable forms of horizontal decision-making, and so on. For Reviewer 2, an Indigenous contribution that does not reflect such normatively loaded binaries may be critiqued as failing to genuinely reflect what matters in Indigenous lifeways. In short, Reviewer 2 demands what Andersen calls “Indigeneity-as-different” ((Andersen 2009: 88) emphasis in the original), the expectation that Indigenous contributions focus on “elements which supposedly render Indigenous communities and cultures different from” –and for romantics, necessarily better than– “settler society and its communities” (Andersen 2009: 89).17
- 18 On ‘freezing’ Indigenous peoples, see also Craft (2023). At a seminar with leading Indigenous intel (...)
39When Reviewer 2 is attracted to essentialist ideas, they assess Indigenous political thought and practices in terms of “authenticity.” Reviewer 2 may demand stereotypical and romantic differences insisting, for instance, on Indigenous spirituality even in cases where that may not be relevant, either to the author or to the question at hand. At worst, Reviewer 2’s essentialist demand for authenticity can lead to a reification of aspects of Indigenous cultures, real or imagined, that then serve to disqualify contributions as inauthentic and even Indigenous scholars themselves as insufficiently authentic (Aikau 2023). LaRocque (2011) and Andersen and Hokowhitu (2007) warn that such essentialist temptations risk freezing Indigenous knowledge at an imagined pre-colonial point of purity.18 The essentialist Reviewer 2 thus excludes the right to diverse changing, and transformative intellectual understandings of Indigenous political traditions, instead demanding essentialist, unchanging, uniform or even romanticized expressions of “authentic” indigeneity.
40Conversely, Reviewer 2 may forcefully reject essentialist and romantic ideas, precisely because they are aware of their problematic histories. This leads Reviewer 2 to critique any comparison of Western and Indigenous social and political thought as an essentializing binary, even when there may be relevant distinctions to be made (Sioui 1992: chap. 5, Wolfe 2013). Despite their diversity, for instance, many Indigenous political traditions centre relationships with land and with other-than-humans understood as kin, to whom human beings hold very strong responsibilities. This is different from the ways many Western traditions understand land: as space to be possessed, often as private property. In their fear of essential or romantic binaries, Reviewer 2 limits the possibilities for examining any commonalities across otherwise diverse Euro-Western traditions and similarly excludes analyses that point to commonalities among otherwise distinctive Indigenous ways of knowing. If all analyses depend on schematics, hence simplifications, the anti-essentialist Reviewer 2 refuses them as inevitably essentializing (Andersen 2009: 96). The issue is not Reviewer 2’s appropriate scrutiny of claims to difference or their engagement with the specificities of Indigenous traditions, but their pre-emptive denials of any synthetic and comparative engagement with distinctive features of Euro-Western and Indigenous traditions.
41In sum, the Reviewer 2 who reproduces essentialist and romantic ideas demands Indigenous difference, especially difference from mainstream political scientific traditions and practices. In contrast, the Reviewer 2 concerned with rejecting essentialist and romanticizing approaches refuses arguments that find common ground among otherwise diverse Indigenous political traditions or among diverse Western intellectual traditions. In these cases, Reviewer 2 forecloses a rich discussion of Indigenous contributions as a pluralistic intellectual field of debate that reflects complex and contradictory living and lived traditions, or what Andersen (2009) describes as the “density” of Indigenous lifeways.
- 19 See Smith (2012) and LaRocque (2015).
42Indigenous studies and contributions are often guided by an ethical impulse to defend and sustain self-determination against colonial dynamics of dispossession, erasure, and disqualification.19 Many Indigenous studies’ scholars, moreover, challenge epistemologies that strive for disinterested, objective knowledge, arguing that it is more realistic and rigorous to recognize the necessarily political nature of all knowledge produced by fallible human beings in unequal circumstances. Thus, many Indigenous scholars reject, as false pretense, the suggestion that scholarship is or can aspire to be apolitical (LaRocque 2015). Accordingly, Indigenous contributions generally embrace and make explicit their political commitments, not least their efforts to challenge ongoing colonial injustices. Unlike other engaged political theorists who take up theory to normative ends, however, the engaged Indigenous scholars’ distinctive contribution is to explore right relationships through a commitment to the revitalization and resurgence of specific Indigenous lifeways. Indigenous contributions performatively and “contrapuntally” recentre Indigenous ways of being, doing, and knowing (LaRocque 2010: 11-12), in contrast to an ethical impulse towards disalienation or critical enlightenment, seen as universal goods.
43Despite such established academic practices, Reviewer 2 may unfairly disqualify explicitly politicized arguments in Indigenous contributions on three related but distinct bases.
44First, when committed to neutrality and objectivity as central to political science, Reviewer 2 may reject any Indigenous contribution that makes explicit its normative and political aims. Reviewer 2 will argue that such a contribution is too “editorial,” an “opinion piece” rather than a scholarly article. The consequence is to exclude much of the field of Indigenous scholarship and normative contributions by Indigenous scholars from mainstream journals, given these contributions’ frequent explicit political commitments. For Reviewer 2, a political commitment is the enemy of the “good” –neutral, objective, and thus apolitical– argument.
- 20 In developing this argument, we are indebted to John McGuire, University College Dublin. He calls t (...)
- 21 This dynamic is not unique to Indigenous contributions and can hardly be qualified of proper discip (...)
45Second, Reviewer 2 may dismiss an Indigenous contribution out of a desire to protect their discipline, and their own investments in it, from critique. If Reviewer 2 is faced with a contribution that points out systemic exclusions within political science – like Ferguson’s essay, or this one – then Reviewer 2 may raise multiple objections whose main function is to defend the discipline and Reviewer 2’s role in it. For instance, when confronted with a critique that Western political science naturalizes the oppressive colonial state, Reviewer 2 may seek to salvage parts of Western political science by observing that not all Western political scientists reproduce this naturalization and that, in fact, some among them have long pointed to the historically contingent and even oppressive nature of the state. Reviewer 2’s observation might be accurate but diverts critique away from the Indigenous scholar’s systemic concerns. In such cases, Reviewer 2’s call for more granularity has the unavowed aim to protect their own scholarly and professional investments in political science. In a sense, this is a settler move to innocence (Tuck and Yang 2012, Ravecca and Dauphinee 2022) whereby Reviewer 2 denies that the discipline they have invested in –often with the hope of making the world a better place– may be oppressive towards Indigenous peoples. In short, Reviewer 2 does not want to be one of the ‘bad guys.’20 Here, Reviewer 2 demands that the “good” argument not counter their own politicized but ostensibly merely professionally rigorous defense of disciplinary commitments.21
46Third, when Reviewer 2 is engaged in Indigenous scholarship, they may also review in problematic ways. Given underlying political disagreements, they may subject sound and valid contributions to excessive critique. Editors little versed in Indigenous scholarship may understand such critiques as fundamentally about soundness of argument, when they are actually a defense of a particular political solution. When Reviewer 2 is committed to a revolutionary emancipatory project, for instance, they may reject all reformist approaches as hopelessly argumentatively compromised. Conversely, the reformist Reviewer 2 may condemn more revolutionary contributions as unsound arguments. Even editors who suspect a political undercurrent to the evaluation may reject the contribution out of concern about controversially intervening in debates they are ill-equipped to navigate. Here Reviewer 2 unfairly maintains that a “good” argument, and the only sound reasoning, is the one that supports their own political line. Faced with such evaluations, editors may either fail to recognize the politics underlying the critique or reject the article to avoid becoming embroiled in unfamiliar and potentially contentious debates.
47In sum, we refer to ‘unfairly politicizing the “good” argument’ in three circumstances: first, when Reviewer 2, committed to an objectivist stance, argues that any explicit political commitment contaminates the good argument; second, when Reviewer 2 seeks to defend political science and their own professional commitments from critique by imposing exonerative distractions; and third, when Reviewer 2 attacks the soundness of an argument because it supports a competing political conclusion, effectively maintaining that the only “good” argument is one that aligns with their own political stance. All three arguments may lead to the rejection of an Indigenous contribution to mainstream political science. In other cases, they may lead to the narrowing of the pluralistic contributions of Indigenous social and political thought to political science, as Reviewer 2 gatekeepers accept as “good” arguments only those in line with their own views.
48For all academic articles, reviewers may have diverging views, but in our experience, contributions to political science from Indigenous scholarly perspectives are notable for the frequency and extent to which reviewers offer deeply opposing assessments.
49Reviewer 2 is especially likely to disagree with Reviewer 1 because there is a relatively small number of Indigenous scholars and indeed, any scholars professionally competent to review Indigenous contributions. This reflects Indigenous studies relative youth as a discipline. In the 1970s, Indigenous scholarship was just emerging and largely seen as “remedial” rather than a field with broader intellectual value beyond educating Indigenous students (LaRocque 2015). This has changed, but only very recently, so that Hokowhitu documents the development and consolidation of the field over the last fifteen years, notably thanks to the work of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA), incorporated in 2009 (Hokowhitu 2021). Despite the emergence of Indigenous Studies as a robust interdisciplinary field, specific disciplines like political science and sociology still have very few Indigenous scholars and even fewer established and tenured ones. Historical injustices are at play in this underrepresentation. For instance, status Indians in Canada could lose their status –be involuntarily “enfranchised”– for getting a university degree from 1876-1920 (Assembly of First Nations, n.d.). Further, non-Indigenous scholars working on Indigenous political traditions are not legion and they often approach Indigenous issues through a canonical disciplinary perspective rather than from an Indigenous-informed perspective.
50In this context, few specialists can be asked to review Indigenous contributions. It is easier to find scholars who can engage with scholarship on Locke, Hobbes, Rawls, representative democracy and luck egalitarianism, for instance, than to find political scientists expertly conversant about the concept of Mino-Mnaamodzawin (McGregor 2018) or the Dish With One Spoon (L. B. Simpson 2008). Moreover, since Indigenous scholarship is often trans- and interdisciplinary, political scientists without that interdisciplinary training are ill-equipped to critically review Indigenous contributions.
- 22 But see Stark’s challenge to this division in terms of refusal and dialogue (Stark 2023).
51Reviewer 2 may thus be part of a very small pool of scholars who can expertly review Indigenous contributions. These scholars are often deeply invested in their understanding of Indigenous scholarship, its ethical commitments, and how to approach Indigenous issues and tradition –and they may vigorously disagree with experts who do not share their views. Scholars like Glen Coulthard, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Audra Simpson are associated with the politics of refusal and turning away from the state (Coulthard 2014, L. B. Simpson 2017, A. Simpson 2014). Others, like John Borrows, James Tully, and Dale Turner (Borrows and Tully 2018, Tully 2020, Turner 2006) are focused on a transformative dialogical engagement with the state. While these named scholars may perfectly be capable of abstracting their diverging views when reviewing, these are opposed views about how to pursue decolonization22 –and Reviewer 2 may be less willing or able to strive for detachment.
52While there are deep disagreements across political science, reviewing processes conventionally accept that a given contribution should not need to convince an ideological opponent; an historical materialist contribution, for instance, will not normally be reviewed by a neoliberal scholar. The underrepresentation of scholars conversant in Indigenous concerns simply makes it more likely that Reviewer 2 will fall on the opposite sides of Reviewer 1, given significant political divides. This can explain why, in our experience, Reviewer 2 is very often sharply divided from Reviewer 1 in their assessments. Alternatively, an Indigenous contribution may not be sent to specialists in Indigenous issues, but to Reviewer 2 because they are an expert in the different literatures Indigenous contributions draw upon. A contribution that engages with political economy, Indigenous political thought, and settler colonial studies may be sent to a specialist in each of these disciplines, given the limited number of scholars who are conversant in all these disciplines at once. Reviewer 2’s evaluation joins with the other reviewers to hold an Indigenous contribution to multiple disciplinary standards, making it very difficult to meet wide-ranging reviewer expectations.
53Similarly, since Indigenous issues are generally understudied, this can lead to profound misunderstandings. Ferguson writes about an encyclopedia of political thought for which the editors compiled concepts of “great importance to political thought.” Revealing for our point, he observes:
all agreed on the importance of one entry: “metis.” Only after the finished entries began to arrive many months later did we recognize a telling incommensurability in our discussion. For some of us, metis referred to the ancient Greek concept of wisdom in counsel, the ability to give and take advice for strategic and clever thinking. But others among us presumed we had been discussing the critical Canadian racial and cultural classification of métis: the descendants of mixed European and Native ancestry, who are legally recognized as one of Canada’s three aboriginal groups. The real question this misunderstanding raises is not which of these definitions (or, more properly, concepts) is more important to political theory. It is, instead, how none of us considered the possibility of confusion. Greek mythology was so distant to one group, and Native North American racial identity so unfamiliar to another, as to allow the surprisingly long-lived nature of this miscommunication. (Ferguson 2016 1036)
54Similarly, Reviewer 2 may be an expert on the Aristotelian good life and may thus be asked to review an Indigenous contribution about the Anishinaabe conception of the good life (Mino-Mnaamodzawin), in an evaluative process especially ripe for such miscommunications.
55Given that top journals in the field receive significantly more submissions than they publish, two or even three reviewers may be required to recommend publication. Without questioning this practice, it should be clear, given the dynamics just surveyed, how Indigenous contributions may face additional challenges in a competitive publication process.
56To conclude, we turn to the most easily operationalized remedies to Reviewer 2, for those committed to ensuring a pluralist political science more amenable to Indigenous contributions.
57First, editors committed to pluralizing the discipline should communicate with reviewers to establish the importance of evaluating Indigenous social and political thought on its own terms.
58Second, reviewers will need to become conversant enough in Indigenous social and political thought to evaluate the intelligibility, clarity, and relevance of the argument, shifting the burden of explanation, narrowing the “allowable ignorance” of editors and reviewers, and over time contribute to a more pluralistic political science.
59Relatedly, editors should alert reviewers about unhelpful tendencies to overburden Indigenous scholarship with an educational mandate for well-known facts and concepts. Reviewers should be careful in requiring additional framing, justifications, and explanations regarding Indigenous issues.
60Third, both editors and reviewers should be careful in their engagement with Indigenous contributions that they do not reproduce essentialism and romanticism, demanding Indigenous “differences” or worse, the Noble Savage. Listening to “other” and “othered” Indigenous voices does not imply that they will say something radically different or opposite or necessarily “better” compared to prevailing insights. Indigenous perspectives may make a distinctive, but not necessarily entirely unique –and necessarily or inevitably emancipatory contribution. Furthermore, the mobilization of Indigenous worldviews purely as foils for critiquing all that is wrong with colonial civilization should be replaced by more nuanced, rich, and thickly descriptive accounts of Indigenous lifeways.
61Fourth, editors and reviewers should be aware of both the danger and the meaningful possibilities for comparative analyses of Indigenous and Euro-Western lifeways. How is a reviewer to know if a comparison is essentializing and romantic or meaningful? The answer cannot be given a priori but depends on the depth of engagement with existing Indigenous scholarship and knowledges and the care taken in the analysis.
62Fifth, the underrepresentation of Indigenous scholars, and ensuing tendencies to sharply divergent reviews, can only be remedied by a significant increase in Indigenous scholars –and even then, the fact that Indigenous contributions are often trans-disciplinary means that they will remain susceptible to divergent reviewer assessments. Rather than regard such assessments as disqualifying or leaving it entirely up to the author, editors need to offer clear, specific editorial guidance to reconcile or navigate these divergences.
63Our article identifies problematic dynamics that limit the engagement of political science with Indigenous contributions. Importantly, in calling for more careful engagement with Indigenous contributions, we do not ignore the need for such engagements to remain critical. Reviewer 2 can and should remain critical, but thoughtfully so, in service of a more intellectually diverse discipline. How to properly carry out this work is not something we can fully explore here. We recognize the need to think more extensively about best practices and we can point to the work already being done for thinking about and carrying out critical, respectful engagements across traditions, notably by scholars who seek to deparochialize and decolonize the discipline (Kirloskar-Steinbach 2023, M. S. Williams 2020). Our hope is that as editors, reviewers, and scholars more broadly, we can contribute to the undoing of the marginalization of Indigenous knowledges. The result will be a more pluralistic and rigorous political science that takes up a fuller range of human knowledge, stimulating new debate and ways of thinking about our social and political lives.
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