Anarchist Discourse in Asian Studies

With time, academics of all disciplines bore even themselves. Recent works on anarchism by Benedict Anderson and James C. Scott, however, have renewed an appreciation for an anarchist approach in the study of political history, while rejuvenating exciting new research about people on the margins of society in Asia. Unlike most scholars of area studies or comparative politics today who care more of being unimportantly right by borrowing a natural science methodology with careful hypotheses about minute social or political problems, Anderson and Scott embrace the possibility of being monumentally wrong while engaging in a regional or global scale based on a wide and comparative reading. At the very least, their non-state-centric or marginal peoples approach has pushed international relations/area studies scholars to reinterpret a political community beyond its national boundaries. Based on the author's personal relationship with Anderson, the review essay also explores some reasoning behind these two thinkers, who are highly cited across various disciplines yet not well accepted within their own field of political science

Linguistics · Political science · Sociology · Anarchism and Radical Politics · Gender Studies · History · Philosophy