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² El Amine, Loubna, “Beyond East and West: Reorienting Political Theory through the Prism of Modernity,” Perspectives on Politics 14, no. 1 (2016): 102–20Google Scholar; Freeden, Michael and Vincent, Andrew, eds., Comparative Political Thought: Theorizing Practices (London: Routledge, 2013)Google Scholar; Vacano, Diego von, “The Scope of Comparative Political Theory,” Annual Review of Political Science, no. 18 (2015): 465–80Google Scholar.

³ Dallmayr, introduction to Comparative Political Theory, 3.

⁴ Dallmayr, “Beyond Monologue,” 15.

⁵ Williams, Melissa and Warren, Mark, “A Democratic Case for Comparative Political Theory,” Political Theory 41, no. 1 (2014): 33 Google Scholar.

⁶ Black, Antony, “The Way Forward in Comparative Political Thought,” Journal of International Political Theory 7, no. 2 (2011): 221–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ Euben, “Comparative Political Theory,” 32.

⁸ Iqtidar, Humeira, “Redefining ‘Tradition’ in Political Thought,” European Journal of Political Theory 15, no. 4 (2016): 424–44Google Scholar; Idris, Murad, “Political Theory and the Politics of Comparison,” Political Theory (2016): 5 Google Scholar, published online July 26, 2016, doi:10.1177/0090591716659812; El Amine, “Beyond East and West,” 103.

⁹ Freeden, Michael, “Editorial: The Comparative Study of Political Thinking,” Journal of Political Ideologies 12, no. 1 (2007): 1–9 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; von Vacano, “Scope of Comparative Political Theory”; El Amine, “Beyond East and West,” 103.

¹⁰ Freeden, “Comparative Study of Political Thinking”; Godrej, Farah, Cosmopolitan Political Thought: Method, Practice, Discipline (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; von Vacano, “Scope of Comparative Political Theory.”

¹¹ Freeden, “Comparative Study of Political Thinking,” 5.

¹² Ibid., 4.

¹³ Little, Adrian, “Political Action, Error and Failure: The Epistemological Limits of Complexity,” Political Studies 60, no. 1 (2012): 3–19 Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Freeden, “Comparative Study of Political Thinking,” 7.

¹⁵ March, “What Is Comparative Political Theory?,” 532.

¹⁶ Jenco, “What Does Heaven Ever Say?”; March, “What Is Comparative Political Theory?”; Idris, “Political Theory and the Politics of Comparison.”

¹⁷ Freeden and Vincent, Comparative Political Thought, 12.

¹⁸ Williams and Warren, “Democratic Case,” 26.

¹⁹ Von Vacano, “Scope of Comparative Political Theory,” 467; El Amine, “Beyond East and West.”

²⁰ Browers, Michaelle, “The Reconciliation of Political Theory and Comparative Politics,” in New Approaches to Comparative Politics: Insights from Political Theory, ed. Holmes, J. S. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books 2003), 2–22 Google Scholar; Iqtidar, “Redefining ‘Tradition’ in Political Thought.”

²¹ Browers, “Reconciliation of Political Theory.”

²² I am grateful to Hamza Bin Jehangir for initially raising this point about relationality with me. El Amine (“Beyond East and West,” 109) raises a similar argument concerning the fact that the colonial experience was pivotal to the development of many non-Western ideas. This highlights that political ideas and concepts are always cultivated in relation to one another rather than emerging pristine and fully formed. For similar points on the development of the thought of those who influenced the work of Javed Ahmed Ghamidi, see Iqtidar, “Redefining ‘Tradition’ in Political Thought,” 433.

²³ This does not mean that Freeden and Vincent, Comparative Political Thought, 2, are working with a universalist understanding of human political conduct whereby there has to be “an evident nature of politics that is consistent everywhere” (von Vacano, “Scope of Comparative Political Theory,” 472). On the contrary, it simply points to the fact that political theorists need to be able to address the theoretical dimension of a discourse or practice in political terms. This merely suggests that analysis of political concepts and ideas is the staple territory of political theorists rather than, say, the study of cultural practices or different legal systems.

²⁴ March, “What Is Comparative Political Theory?,” 547.

²⁵ Ibid., 537.

²⁶ Like almost all commentators with an interest in comparative political theory, I would argue that there is great value in conducting comparisons between non-Western and Western societies. Methodologically however, comparative political theory need not require that the comparisons are between Western and non-Western societies. Indeed, what actually constitutes a Western and non-Western society should rightly be a matter of dispute.

²⁷ Freeden, “Comparative Study of Political Thinking.”

²⁸ In their work linking comparative political theory and conceptualizations of democracy, this point is made inadvertently by Williams and Warren when they contend that “comparative political theory… is nothing other than the representation and reconstruction of systems of ideas that have arisen in cultures or civilizations different from our own” (Williams and Warren, “Democratic Case,” 36). By this definition, comparative analysis need not be between Western and non-Western societies at all and could equally be more focused on the internal comparison of the use of concepts between groups that may now share the same geographical space containing multiple cultural differences.

²⁹ For example, comparative political theory has tended to focus on different regions, cultures, or traditions (see, e.g., von Vacano, “Scope of Comparative Political Theory,” 474–76), but has had relatively little to say about other relevant comparisons. One of the most interesting examples that could be employed in comparative political theory is the different understanding of concepts in settler colonial societies such as Canada and Australia between Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups that have coexisted in the same space over decades or centuries. This implies that completely self-contained conceptions of political ideas in specific cultures or traditions are unusual and that particular meanings are usually formed in interaction with alternative views.

³⁰ See Jenco, Leigh, “Thinking with the Past: Political Thought in and from the ‘Non-West,’” European Journal of Political Theory 15, no. 4 (2016): 377–81Google Scholar; Jenco, “New Pasts for New Futures”; and Jamal, Amal, “Conflict Theory, Temporality and Transformative Temporariness: Lessons from Israel and Palestine,” Constellations 23, no. 4 (2016): 365–77Google Scholar.

³¹ Koselleck, Reinhard, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 111 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Koselleck, Reinhard, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

³² Space precludes a more developed discussion of temporality in comparative political theory here, but see Hamza Bin Jehangir and Adrian Little, “Time, Change and Comparisons: Temporality in Comparative Political Theory,” paper delivered at the Australian Political Studies Association annual conference, Monash University, Melbourne, Sept. 2017 for a more extended discussion.

³³ Geuss, Raymond, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Little, Adrian, “Reconstituting Realism: Feasibility, Utopia and Epistemological Imperfection,” Contemporary Political Theory 14, no. 3 (2015): 276–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rossi, Enzo and Sleat, Matt, “Realism in Normative Political Theory,” Philosophy Compass 9, no. 10 (2014): 689–701 Google Scholar; Williams, Bernard, In the Beginning was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

³⁴ Shapcott, Richard, “Philosophical Hermeneutics in Practice: Fred Dallmayr, Comparative Political Theory and Cosmopolitanism,” Journal of International Political Theory 7, no. 2 (2011): 234 Google Scholar.

³⁵ Williams and Warren, “Democratic Case,” 37.

³⁶ Ibid., 46.

³⁷ Dallmayr, introduction to Comparative Political Theory, and Dallmayr, “Beyond Monologue.”

³⁸ March, “What Is Comparative Political Theory?,” 537.

³⁹ Maddison, Sarah, Conflict Transformation and Reconciliation: Multi-level Challenges in Deeply Divided Societies (London: Routledge, 2015)Google Scholar; and Little, Adrian, “Fear, Hope and Disappointment: The Politics of Reconciliation and the Dynamics of Conflict Transformation,” International Political Science Review 38, no. 2 (2017): 200–212 Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ This article is an output from an Australian Research Council Grant (DP130101399) conducted by the author with Erik Doxtader, Mark McMillan, Paul Muldoon, Juliet Rodgers, and Andrew Schaap.

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⁴³ Tutu, No Future without Forgiveness.

⁴⁴ Hinton, Alexander Laban, ed., Transitional Justice: Global Mechanisms and Local Realities after Genocide and Mass Violence (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Miller, Zinaida, “Effects of Invisibility: In Search of the ‘Economic’ in Transitional Justice,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 2, no. 3 (2008): 266–91Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ I am grateful to Erik Doxtader for providing some of the impetus for the development of the arguments in this passage.

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⁵⁵ At the time of writing, Northern Ireland has been unable to form a new executive for six months since the assembly elections in March 2017.

⁵⁶ Erik Doxtader, “Making Rhetorical History.”

⁵⁷ Terreblanche, Sampie, Lost in Transformation (Sandton, South Africa: KMM Review, 2012)Google Scholar; Gibson, Nigel, Fanonian Practices in South Africa (Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Marais, Hein, South Africa Pushed to the Limit: The Political Economy of Change (Claremont, South Africa: UCT Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

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⁶¹ Freeden, Michael, The Political Theory of Political Thinking: The Anatomy of a Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

⁶² While each context is inevitably different, it is worth noting some of the dissimilarities explicitly that make direct lesson learning difficult. In Australia, for example, resistance to the prevailing order has been largely nonviolent, unlike South Africa and Northern Ireland. However, like the other two cases, there is certainly a case to be made that the prevailing order is violent. Other contextual factors include the small numerical size of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples (roughly 3 percent of the population) and the absence of the kind of international attention that both South Africa and Northern Ireland received.

⁶³ See https://www.humanrights.gov.au/publications/indigenous-deaths-custody-report-summary for a summary of the report.

⁶⁴ A transcript of the speech can be found at https://antar.org.au/sites/default/files/paul_keating_speech_transcript.pdf.

⁶⁵ Larissa Behrendt, “The Abolition of ATSIC: Implications for Democracy,” in Democratic Audit of Australia (Canberra, 2005), available at http://library.bsl.org.au/jspui/bitstream/1/679/1/200511_behrendt_atsic.pdf, accessed Nov. 27, 2016.

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⁶⁸ Jenny Macklin, “Act of Recognition Passes,” media release, February 13, 2013, http://www.jennymacklin.net.au/media/act-of-recognition-passes/, accessed Aug. 31, 2015.

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⁷² See http://www.recognise.org.au/ and, for a sense of some of the opposition the Recognise campaign has engendered among some Aboriginal activists, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/18/i-dont-want-your-recognise-campaign-its-nothing-but-a-sham.

⁷³ See https://newmatilda.com/2016/02/08/recognise-rejected-historic-meeting-500-black-leaders-unanimously-opposes-constitutional-recognition/.

⁷⁴ The transcript can be found at https://www.referendumcouncil.org.au/sites/default/files/2017-05/Uluru_Statement_From_The_Heart_0.PDF.

⁷⁵ Both institutional political reforms and truth and reconciliation institutions are part of the debate in Australia. Since the abolition of the main representative body for Indigenous peoples in Australia, ATSIC, in 2005, the main organized body has been the National Congress of Australia's First Peoples. However, it has been denied promised government funding since 2013. Proposals for a truth commission have been less prominent, but see the speech by Aboriginal broadcaster Stan Grant at the University of New South Wales in 2016: https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/social-affairs/time-truth-and-reconciliation-commission-%E2%80%93-stan-grant, accessed Sept. 3, 2017.

⁷⁶ Freeden and Vincent, Comparative Political Thought, 15.