“Reviewer 2 must be stopped”; Indigenous Contributions and Epistemic Domination in Political Science

Abstract

In 2016, Kennan Ferguson published “Why Does Political Science Hate American Indians?” Ferguson described structural features of contemporary political science to explain the exclusion of Indigenous peoples and knowledges from the discipline. Today, there is a different context. In universities, Indigenous knowledges are no longer ignored or disqualified, rather there are aims to diversify and deparochialize the curriculum, while opening space for Indigenous scholarship. Despite good intentions, however, there are still structural obstacles to taking up Indigenous knowledges in the university generally and political science specifically. We evoke a stylized Reviewer 2 to describe dynamics within the peer review process that tend to limit or exclude interventions that engage with Indigenous knowledges: 1) the disciplining effects of disciplines; (2) the reproduction of eurocentrism; (3) the demand for essentialism or romanticization – or the challenge to both; and (4) the unfair politicization of the “good” argument. We identify a fifth (5) dynamic related to the continued underrepresentation of Indigenous scholars. We conclude by indicating ways that reviewers and editors committed to pluralism can rigorously carry out peer review while opening up political science to Indigenous knowledges.