This is republished in strict obedience to the DIRECTIVE to make this more easily readable and more understandable by all. It was thought to be understandable by nearly all. Some senior readers do not think so. Intervention obliges, happy that they consider the review to be important. The expanded review goes as follows:
The Nigerian Political Science Association, (NPSA) sends a very timely and promising message in publishing A Handbook on Aspects of Research Methodology even as that still remains a very partial and/or incomplete response to the two grave threats to the study of and/or the possibility of Political Science in Nigeria. One of the two threats is the dated nature of the Methodology dished out in Nigerian universities. In other words, most academics saddled with teaching Methodology in Political Science (and in the social sciences generally) across Nigeria have yet to come to grips with Aradau and Huysmans’ contention in their wave-making 2014 essay that “methods are instruments not for creating common grounds but for power struggles, competing enactments of worlds and/or creating disruptive positions in the worlds of international politics”. At the time Prof Claudia Aradau and Jeff Huysmans published their essay, “Critical methods in International Relations: The politics of techniques, devices and acts”, they were in Kings College London and The Open University in the UK, respectively but Huysman has since moved to Queen Mary, University of London.
Forget their reference to international politics as that sentence would still stand if we replace international politics with Economics, Psychology or History. It is that contention that explains the tragedy in the orientation of many academics to methodology as innocent techniques for amassing so-called empirical evidence that would count their researches as rigorous, systematic, objective and scientific. On the contrary, Methodology is that which we can say is the power to be seized in the same way Michel Foucault talks about discourse. Foucault once wrote that discourse is the power to be seized. Where the struggle for this power called Methodology is in limbo, then it can be said that the people have lost and lost everything.
It is difficult to know which of the two is a more grave threat but each is as soul destroying as the other, the only good news being that, on many campuses, students are up fighting academics they have discovered to have no thematic grasp of majority of the course units that define the discipline in the country today, using several techniques. One of the techniques students use is reporting directly to higher authorities teachers that they think are teaching them nonsense. For, incapable of situating courses in the wider knowledge tree, such academics end up producing Political Science graduates that are basically lost in the forest of knowledge. There are hardly Vice-Chancellors who cannot testify to this students’ dimension to the struggle against crisis of knowledge transfer across Nigeria today. But the two threats provide very crucial indicators of the risky decay Nigeria is experiencing.
The message in the NPSA booklet is in that body’s obvious awareness of the threats and to which it obviously seeks a response in assembling some of the leading lights today in the discipline to restate some of the tenets of the research enterprise. There lies the significance of the effort which stretches to securing support from a symbolic stakeholder such as MacArthur Foundation. The title – A Handbook on Aspects of Research Methodology – shows conclusively that the professional body knows what it is doing in that text: consolidating the more dominant research process in Nigerian academia rather but not yet confronting the aspects of Methodology that are still strange across much of Nigeria. It is not very clear why the NPSA would be concentrating all that effort in that direction in the year 2022. It is a question Intervention would not pursue in this review as the NPSA must have its reasons. For all we know, a sequel might be in the offing.
What is considered important is how the NPSA can create and lead the coalition that can clear the ground for a more serious engagement with Methodology in Nigeria beyond the current obsession with neopositivism. National survival requires such a coalition as a matter of utmost priority.
There might be no debate about it that, as a meta-theoretical homestead, neopositivism is very much alive across the world. Some departments in even some global front rank universities are still dominated by scholars who have so naturalized both the homestead and its techniques that they are stuck with it, partly for reason of specialisation and partly for ideological reasons. Neopositivism is about power. because power is what determines what counts as knowledge. That is if one doesn’t understand power as something possessed exclusively by people at the top but as something relational. As a relational variable, power is everywhere. Everyone is powerful in some way or the other.
But, in this case, it is, as someone else said, the password for class power and is, therefore, not just another metatheory along with its quantitative techniques. Rather, it doesn’t know how to or it is not interested in any equalitarian gospels. It has had an interesting conceptual career, taking a detour from its radical anchor at some point to arrive and stabilize at the precision and technicism it dishes out today. It remains very useful to certain forces and interests in world politics but it would be difficult to find any reasons for its dominance in Nigerian universities at this point. Apart from its ability to hide truth, however truth is understood, it proves nothing, scientifically speaking. Verifiability, falsifiability, correlation, co-variation and that entire bunch have failed to speak to the idea of science, individually or collectively. So, for what reasons should young minds be held hostage by the most conservative research philosophy and the associated techniques?
If, for any reasons, the Nigerian university system cannot afford equal attention to the three other meta-theoretical homesteads – Analyticism, Critical Realism and Interpretivism, the system should, at the least, ensure that students are conversant with everything Interpretivism. Not only is Interpretivism or Reflexivism (as some people call it) inclusive as an epistemological lens, it works to uncover power, domination and inequality in a partisan but critical manner. It exposes unheard screams. This is irrespective of any of its research techniques we take – ethnography, qualitative content analysis, discourse analysis (of any variant), genealogy, textual analysis, deconstruction, key informant interview, in-depth interview, thematic analysis, snowballing and FGD.
Without systematic processing in these research techniques and, above all, in the postpositivist meta-theory informing them, most if not all our Political Science graduates would still be unable to speak Political Science. This is not to suggest that their counterparts in the other social sciences – Economics, Sociology, Psychology, Mass Communications, Geography – are better off. No. They all suffer the same tragedy.
And they are denied this training only because educational planners have simply not paid attention to the rumblings over Methodology in the post Cold War. Academia’s share of the decay that followed the period in Nigeria has made it impossible for academics to have raised this issue more forcefully. The Academic Staff Union of Universities, (ASUU) has made the case but not as specific as it ought to have been made. In the end, students are forced to use quantitative techniques, even for research questions that are completely interpretive or should be interpretive. When they use the few qualitative techniques that are known such as FGD or in-depth interview, it is not because they have been schooled in the epistemological argument but mostly as a result of the patchy approach which glorifies triangulation, for instance, as if triangulation is what any and every one can handle. This is why it is common to find researches combining all manner of research techniques in Nigeria in the name of triangulation, including research techniques from different ontological standpoints but without the level of justification upon which such a research can be allowed to stand.
So, some universities or academics would protest a statement that there are few or even none where there is systematic engagement with Interpretivism beyond departments of Literature (which has always been interpretivist in orientation). Intervention stands to be corrected and to clap hands for such a Nigerian university but it is doubtful if that can be the case from the ‘Call for Papers’ that anyone might have randomly observed. Except one that came from the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ibadan, many others have been very rural kind of academia, not just in Political Science but generally. Someone else might find a nicer or more diplomatic way of putting this but the point is that Nigeria is going down too fast in these matters. Many senior academics have been frustrated out by what they see as Methodology training before their own eyes today compared to their own better days years back.
The knowledge – power nexus doesn’t just strike the average academic in this shore at all when it comes to discussing national rebirth or radical democratic politics in Nigeria. People appear too happy regurgitating quotations from works that they should be contesting or re-inscribing in relation to the big question on the table in the late 20th and early 21st century and which is the question of subjectivity: what does it mean to be a human being?
Should the totalitarian regimes produced by both capitalism and socialism have happened? Should the world wars have happened? Should there ever have been colonialism, taking the length of time it took? What did each of these and similar nightmares and horrifying experiences of the 20th century do the idea of the subject?
The leading candidate here in terms of the ‘answer’ is the Enlightenment package of truth through reason, facts and science in favour of progress. This is the Rationalist strand of thinking about the subject. The contending position comes from those who say that truth as a universal category is nothing but a disciplinary move because we do not all experience the world in the same way and truth must, therefore, be relative. Otherwise, they argue, the universalism of truth canvassed by rationalism cannot but be an agenda for mastering anxiety through strategies of power that are beyond the control of those under domination, be it domination within the domestic space of a country or in world politics. This is the epistemological standpoint of Reflexivists or interpretivists or postpositivists.
When critical constructivists, feminists, post-Marxists and post colonial theorists who form the postpositivist research family arrived with their own research techniques, (as already listed above), the intellectual commanders of Rationalism denied them a research agenda on the terms of neopositivism. The intellectual commanders were like asking, how can you talk about a research agenda without it being about formulating testable hypotheses and joining “the search for systematic cross-case correlation arranged so as to approximate covering laws”?
The battle over this took nearly two full decades before the postpostivists prevailed to the advantage they enjoy today across the world, from Europe to North America but except in much of Africa and certainly almost completely in Nigeria. At the height of this fight, this reviewer can recall only one Nigerian scholar – Prof Oka Obono, the University of Ibadan Sociologist – who announced to everyone that he was shifting from whatever he was doing to the realm of met-theory. What this illustrates is that, possible as there might now be many more who are grounded in meta-theory, Nigeria has not paid attention to the ‘Philosophy of (Social) Sciences’ and which is an absolute tragedy. Nigeria is the one that ought to provide continental leadership on the ground of its demographic profile. How can that happen from the position of methodologically unconscious establishment where denialism by those who should have been in the forefront for that is prevalent, from the radicals to the capitalists who need quality graduates and the power elite who can never hope to make anything out of Nigeria without a critical mass that can sustain change of any serious type.
Might we be seeing the NPSA in action soon again, retaining but equally diversifying from MacArthur Foundation to all these TY Danjuma Foundation, Atiku Abubakar Foundation, Elumelu Foundation, Dangote, ASUU and so on? Of course, these actors must be made to fund knowledge production in cash and/or in kinds or the future will be too imperiled. There is no debate about that!