Howard Burton - Exploring Southeast Asia: A Conversation with Jacques Bertrand

In many ways political science has always irritated me.

First off, there is the issue of its very name, which is clearly a hubristic sort of misnomerthere is nothing remotely scientific about political science, and any attempt to genuinely pretend otherwise will quickly land one into all sorts of trouble, invoking notions of laws and experiments where none, in reality, exist.

Then there is the fact that so many political scientists seem determined to slip into punditry positions, cheerfully sticking their faces into the camera to trivialize complex geopolitical situations as they not so subtly pump sales of their invariably sensationalist and inflammatory popular books.

The astute observer might point out that none of this is particularly unique to political science. In fact, a quick perusal at the popular science section of any bookstore will be enough to convince any critical thinker that the real sciences are also littered with people desperately trying to promote their own sensationalistic popular interpretations of things, often in a decidedly underwhelmingly non-scientific way. Indeed, its tempting to conclude that the only reason you generally dont find these people also sticking their faces into the cameras of popular news shows to talk about their pet theories of the universe is that nobody has bothered to do so.

Which brings up a central point: the reason why most average people have at some point encountered the smug assertions of those declaring The Clash of Civilizations or The End of History while generally remaining removed from the dogmatic sputterings of inflationary cosmologists, say, is precisely because political science, by its very nature and orientation, is vastly more relevant and impactful to people than many other disciplines.

As Cambridge University political theorist John Dunn once exasperatedly expressed it:

The fact is people do need political comprehension; and the way in which political science has been institutionalized over time is hugely unhelpfulmost of it doesnt provide much political comprehension.

Those words were ringing in my ears as I spoke with University of Toronto political scientist Jacques Bertrand, who strikes me as precisely the sort of thoughtful, responsible political scientist who can help us. His intriguingly synoptic book, Political Change in Southeast Asia, contains no pat thesis or sweeping call to action, but instead carefully and methodically describes the remarkable historical, cultural, religious, political and economic diversity throughout a region that many of usmyself most definitely includedknow alarmingly little about.

Indeed, if there is one clear generalization that one can make about this part of the world it is that its remarkably, distinctively, diversea fact that naturally presents its own inherent challenges to specialists.

Most specialists of Africa or Latin America will usually know at least three or four countries in their region pretty well. They might be embarrassed that they dont know the other thirty as well, but, when you study Africa there are certain trends or themes that will come up, such as the colonial history. Whether it was the English or the French, theres a commonality in the forms of colonialism that occurred in Africa that make scholars look at it and see certain trends in poverty, inequality, marginalization and so forth that they can trace back to a particular historical backdrop of colonialism and how it evolved.

But when you confront Southeast Asia, youll find some countries that come out of fairly consolidated attempts at building empires, other areas where there was practically no political consolidation before European colonizers came, and anything in between. There were many changes in borders, and some cultures where borders didnt even matter: it was the control of people that mattered not the borders, so youre often not exactly sure where to demarcate beginning and end in terms of expressions of territorial meaning. Typically, the meaning of states and territory really comes much later; and in some ways its the history of European colonialism that establishes the idea of states with borders in the region.

So when we study Southeast Asia, the idea of knowing the region really well is oftentimes limited: many people who study Southeast Asia will really only know one country, and maybe a second. And this means that once people start making claims about several countries we start to get a little nervous, because you almost never know three or four Southeast Asian languages, so the depth that you can capture by going from one country to the next is quickly lost when you cant communicate anymore in the local language.

And suddenly, the question gets turned on its head. Rather than looking at political science through the simplifying lens of grandstanding pundits, the question becomes, How, in light of such striking diversity, can we make sense ofanythingat all? If every example has its accompanying counterexample, if every trend has its exceptions, to what extent are we able to say anything more than merely, Its complicatedparticularly about a place that we dont have any shared personal experience with?

According to Jacques, the answer lies in a methodical, case-by-case application of a combination of what he calls factors of explanationcarefully invoking established concepts such as democracy, conflict, economic liberalization, and social progresstogether with a deep understanding of historical circumstances.

Were not going to have a theoretical proposition that holds under all circumstancesat some level the social world just doesnt work like that. But when were trying to study political phenomena and political change, we have to have a vocabulary, we have to have something that we can compare. Meanwhile, although Im sympathetic to history and sympathetic to cultural differences, what I resist is the idea that were simply telling a story, because thats what happens in the end if you emphasize too much diversity.

Such sober calls for caution and speculative restraint will likely not result in bestselling popular books, but they are, Im convinced, a necessary part of actually understanding whats going on around us.