It is about time someone in Nigeria takes on the concept of power in the international system and, by implication, in Political Science. And who might do this better than Prof Irene Pogoson?
As the incumbent Head of the Department of Political Science at the University of Ibadan, she is the equivalent of the Number 1 citizen of that discipline, Ibadan being the first university in the country.
The gender warriors would be happy it is her because feminism largely subscribes to women being at the centre (powerful) even as they also subscribe to decentring the system. We will continue to pretend that there is no such anomaly. After all, men have a thousand anomalies out there.
Scholars of Political Science who specialise in International Relations would be comfortable with her doing it because they have a controlling stake in the indispensable but problematic concept of power.
Coming from Edo State, Intervention is sure she will not be selling any narratives of reconfiguration of the Nigerian State and which makes her a good and timely candidate for the conceptual unpacking of power in the international system.
Finally, there might be no better time than now when the international order is in most fluid state since 1945 for the concept of power to be taken to the surgery to be superintended by a Nigerian academic who may produce a new way of coming to it, what with the mighty shift in IRs from the ‘international’ to the inter-cosmological. Power is the concept which has undergone so much conceptual framing in the post-Cold War. It remains an inconclusive exercise because the African cosmological dimension has yet to feature.
Against the foregoing, Intervention is already in the mood to offer anticipatory congratulations to Prof Irene Pogoson. This cannot but be her moment to make that academic statement once again!
