Increased flows of people, capital, and ideas across geographic borders raise urgent challenges to the existing terms and practices of politics. Comparative political theory seeks to devise new intellectual frames for addressing these challenges by questioning the canonical (that is, Euro-American) categories that have historically shaped inquiry in political theory and other disciplines. It does this byanalyzing normative claims, discursive structures, and formations of power in and from all parts of the world. By looking to alternative bodies of thought and experience, as well as the terms we might use to critically examine them, comparative political theory encourages self-reflexivity about the premises of normative ideas and articulates new possibilities for political theory and practice.

The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory provides an entry point into this burgeoning field by both synthesizing and challenging the terms which motivate it. Over the course of five thematic sections and thirty-three chapters, this volume surveys the field and archives of comparative political theory, bringing the many approaches to the field into conversation for the first time. Sections address geographic location as a subject of political theorizing; how the past becomes a key site for staking political claims; the politics of translation and appropriation; the justification of political authority; and questions of disciplinary commitment and rules of knowledge. Ultimately, the handbook demonstrates how mainstream political theory can and must be enriched through attention to genuinely global, rather than parochially Euro-American, contributions to political thinking.

Acknowledgments

List of Contributors

1. Comparison, Connectivity, and Disconnection
Jenco, Leigh K.; Idris, Murad; Thomas, Megan C.

Section One: Geographies of Thought

2. The Plantation's Colonial Modernity in Comparative Perspective
Getachew, Adom

3. Situated Political Theory in Latin America
Gordy, Katherine A.

4. An Interpretive Approach to "Chinese" Identity
Kim, Youngmin

5. "Inter-Asia as Method" and Radical Politics
Goh, Beng-Lan

6. Toward a Tradition of Ghanaian Political Philosophy
Ajei, Martin Odei

7. Mapping Afro-Caribbean Political Thought
Gordon, Jane Anna

Section Two: The Presence of the Past

8. Santo Domingo and the Politics of Classical Reception in the Caribbean
Padilla Peralta, Dan-el

9. The Politics of Time in China and Japan
Murthy, Viren

10. The Idea of an Arab-Islamic Heritage
Daifallah, Yasmeen

11. History, the Hindu Right, and Subversion of Brahmanical-Hindu Political Thought
Gray, Stuart

12. Motho ke motho ka batho, an African Perspective on Popular Sovereignty and Democracy
Ramose, M. B.

13. Gender and Slavery in Islamic Political Thought
Urban, Elizabeth

Section Three: Translatability across Time and Space

14. The Labor Question and Political Thought in Colonial Bengal
Sartori, Andrew

15. Humiliation through the Prism of Islamic Thought
Euben, Roxanne L.

16. War without End, or, Ambedkar, Time, and Stasis
Kumar, Aishwary

17. The Aggañña Sutta and the Therav?da Buddhist Tradition
Walton, Matthew J.

18. The Concept of Rights in Modern Japan
?kubo Takeharu

19. Hemispheric Comparison in Latin American Anti-Imperial Thought
Hooker, Juliet

20. Latin American Women and Democracy, Identity, and Transformation
Femenías, María Luisa

21. The Twin Enlightenments of Marxism and Liberalism in the Philippines
Claudio, Lisandro E.

Section Four: Political Authority and Its Legitimation

22. Liberalisms in India
Bajpai, Rochana

23. Populism, Universalism, and Democracy in Latin America
Ciccariello-Maher, George

24. Searching for "Tolerance" in Islamic Thought
Iqtidar, Humeira

25. Modern Islamic Conceptions of Sovereignty in Comparative Perspective
March, Andrew F.

26. Palaver and Consensus as Metaphors for the Public Sphere
Okeja, Uchenna

27. Meritocracy, Aristocracy, and "Literati Democracy" in Chinese Imperial History
Blitstein, Pablo Ariel

28. Organicism in Indonesian Political Thought
Bourchier, David

Section Five: Discipline and Dissent

29. A Postcolonial Critique of Comparative Political Theory
Seth, Sanjay

30. Indigenous Struggles for Epistemic Justice
Nichols, Robert

31. Civilization and Culture in Anticolonial and Comparative Political Theory
Klausen, Jimmy Casas

32. Eastern European Political Thought as a Conceptual Tool
Popescu, Delia

33. The "Legitimacy of Chinese Philosophy" Debate and the Global Extension of Disciplinary Knowledge
Jenco, Leigh K.