The Politics of Political Science and Toxic Democracies: A Hemispheric Perspective

We are interested in problematizing the globally dominant analytical perspectives on democratization, which have mostly originated in English North America and Northern Europe, by way of looking at power relations from within and without political science as a discipline. We argue that such perspectives increasingly show serious shortcomings in explaining past and current realities in Latin America and beyond. They not only analyze “power” but in fact incarnate unequal international power structures. Our analytical exercise is twofold. On the one hand, we engage in the analysis of the politics of political science, looking at the discipline as an object of (political) inquiry. On the other, and as a product of the latter, we propose a new category, namely toxic democracies, as a conceptual tool that might allow for a critical understanding of the international and transnational dimensions of political regimes and their transformations in the so called “Global South.” In other words, the politics of political science assists us in understanding and unpacking the existing biases in the literature on democratization, while toxic democracies performs an analytical intervention that disrupts the power dynamics of our discipline. Once again, epistemology and social research need each other to become effective and critical in their knowledge-production pursuits.