Non-Western Ideas and Politics of Race Concepts

Flashcards covering key concepts related to Non-Western ideas, politics of race, and other sociopolitical topics.

Alternative modernities

The idea that there are multiple or plural paths of development, suggesting that the Western experience of modernization is not universal.

Campesino

A Spanish term often used in Latin America for country person, peasant farmer, or agricultural worker.

Eurocentric

A way of thinking that equates modernity, rationality, and progress with the experiences of Western countries.

Glocal

A combination of global and local ideas and practices.

Hybridity

A term denoting a composite or complex mixture of old and new, cross-cultural, or local, regional, and global.

Orientalism

A term describing stereotypes formulated by and for the West that construct the non-West or 'Orient' as irrational, violent, inferior, despotic, and passive.

Postcolonialism

An umbrella category focusing on ways European colonialism shaped the world economy and the role of race and racism in global capitalism.

Provincialized cosmopolitanism

a hybrid perspective that draws on both local and global thought and experiences to create new glocal solutions that does not assume Western superiority or non-Western inferiority

Subaltern

A term used in postcolonial studies to describe people and knowledge marginalized and suppressed by colonization and imperial power.

Aboriginal

A term and legal category used to refer to Canada’s Indigenous Peoples

Colonialism

A practice of appropriating and dominating other territories and peoples, associated with European imperialism.

Extractivism

An economic practice that removes natural resources from their origin on a large scale, typically for profit.

First Nations

A term used to describe diverse peoples who are descendants of the original inhabitants of Canada.

Indian Act

An Act of Canadian Parliament regulating registered Indians and reserve lands since 1876.

Indigenous

A term often used in national and transnational contexts to describe diverse nations and peoples who have long standing connections to territories and have been affected by colonialism

Inuit

Indigenous Peoples inhabiting the Arctic and subarctic regions, primarily of Greenland, Denmark, Canada and the United States

Land claims agreements

Also called modern treaties are mechanisms that bring unceded Indigenous territory under Canadian sovereignty, in exchange for limited powers of self-government and financial benefits for Indigenous signatories

Métis

Indigenous Peoples whose origins are traced primarily to unions between Indigenous women and European fur traders in Canada

Settler colonialism

A form of colonialism where original inhabitants are displaced by a new society of settlers.

Unceded lands

A term used in settler colonial countries to refer to traditional Indigenous territories that were never surrendered to the settler state through law, treaties, or other formal agreements

Cultural racism

A form of racism relying on cultural differences rather than biological ones as markers of superiority and inferiority.

Ethnicity

After the 1950s, it often replaced the term “race” in public discussions and political science. This term claims to be an objective/neutral category delineating a person’s origins, language, and cultural practices. However, critical race theorists and others have noted how it still retains embedded notions of White superiority and normativity and serves to create distinct categories of people in relation to political debates surrounding issues such as inequality and immigration.

Institutional racism

The interweaving of biological and cultural concepts of race in political, economic, and social institutions.

Race

A socially constructed category that divides people into distinct types and hierarchies in which White European is constructed as “pure” and every other racial category as an impure deviation from White normativity

Racialization

The social processes through which a person is classified and racial meaning is assigned to their identity.

Racism

Refers to the belief that human differences— including biological, genetic, and cultural—produce immutable races that are superior or inferior, and these beliefs shape prejudice, unequal treatment, and even violence. The beliefs can be institutionalized through policies and practices that effect disadvantage.

Systemic racism

The ways societal ideologies and norms interact at a macro-level to produce racial disadvantage.

Cisgender

The gender identity of a person matches their birth sex

Civil rights

Rights that protect individual freedoms such as freedom of speech, assembly, association, and religion.

Gender

A socially, politically, and economically constructed social code that refers to prescribed binary ideal-type male and female identities, notions of masculinity and femininity, gendered social roles and relations, and gender identities.

Gender binary

The division of people into two opposing sex categories, male and female, and the assignment of roles associated with them.

Heteropatriarchy

Unequal power distribution based on heterosexual relationships, with men deemed superior.

Intersectional feminist theory

An analytic approach that includes race, class, and sexuality in the study of gendered oppression.

Political rights

A term that includes citizen rights to vote, run for political office, and peacefully protest.

Public and private spheres

These concepts are integral to liberal political imaginaries that separates social organization into public spaces, where people debate and find solutions to collective problems, and private spaces of individual freedom and belief that are protected from interference by the collective or state. These terms, in contrast, are typically used to distinguish between governmental or collective activity versus privately owned and marketbased activity

Sexual citizenship

A concept focusing on the different rights and experiences based on diverse expressions of sexuality.

Sexual contract

A concept that asserts that a woman’s citizenship rights vary according to her marital status with a man

Social contract

A term first used by political philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and John Locke to refer to the idea that people enter into a mutual agreement to observe each other’s rights and responsibilities, agree to select an impartial magistrate to adjudicate disputes, and give up their right to punish to the magistrate. In subsequent centuries, it was expanded in many advanced democracies to include state obligations to provide citizens with minimum levels of social security

Social reproduction

A concept that focuses on the ways in which individuals, families and societies are sustained biologically and socially. It typically foregrounds the unpaid reproductive and care work provided by women in the home and broader community which enable adult men to be full-time workers and political agents.

Social rights

Entitlements typically claimed by citizens in advanced democracies which, although not entrenched in constitutions, guarantee citizens a modicum of economic welfare and social security, often in the form of social insurance and welfare programs.

Disability

A term connoting an inability to function at the same level as an abstract conception of normality.

Pharmakon

A philosophical term that conveys the ideas of remedy, poison or scapegoat and is often used to justify the status quo

Citizenship

An official designation of full membership in a national state

Civil rights

Rights that protect individual freedoms such as freedom of speech, assembly, association, and religion

Political rights

A term that includes citizen rights to vote, run for political office, and peacefully protest

Shifting border

Diverse practices in which wealthier countries typically deploy legal measures to prevent or restrict entry to potential visitors, refugees, or immigrants before they reach the former border, while, at the same time, allowing others accelerated mobility across borders.

Social rights

Entitlements typically claimed by citizens in advanced democracies which, although not entrenched in constitutions, guarantee citizens a modicum of economic welfare and social security, often in the form of social insurance and welfare programs

Cyber-optimism

The belief that new digital technologies offer revolutionary possibilities for democratic politics.

Cyber-pessimism

Refers to the idea that cyber politics does not support democracy and is a threat to democratic society

Digital campaigning

The use of digital technologies, primarily by political parties, to inform, persuade, and mobilize voters

Digital government

A term used to describe various governmental uses of digital technologies to better communicate with citizens or provide easy access to government information and services.

Digital politics

Refers to digital technologies such as social media, facial recognition and surveillance platforms, and others that are used by political actors, institutions, and citizens.

Digital surveillance

A practice of extracting or creating data by accessing personal data generated by individuals in unrelated contexts such as internet activity, consumer purchases and social media

Digitally based politics

Political actions or processes that exist only because of the invention of digital technologies

Digitally enabled politics

Political actions or processes that are changed and facilitated through digital technologies

Hashtag activism

Refers to the growing practice of raising awareness of an issue or an event through the use of hashtags.

Internet voting

Also called i-voting, this refers to the use of the internet to facilitate remote voting in elections or plebiscites

Misinformation

Refers to false, inaccurate, and misleading information designed, presented, and promoted to intentionally cause public harm or for profit.

Meta-Data

information left by session access on websites

Astroturfing

the deceptive practice of creating a false impression of widespread, grassroots support for a policy, product, or candidate, when in reality, the campaign is orchestrated and funded by a concealed, centralized organization

Cyber skeptic perspective

Refers to the idea that rather than being good or bad in and of themselves, digital politics is shaped by the political actors and political contexts that use these technologies

Globalization

The intensification of economic, technological, and cultural processes that transcend state boundaries.

Political ecology

An approach centering ecological relationships in the study of politics, addressing environmental injustices.

Post-positivist

A philosophical approach that rejects claims of value-neutral or objective scientific knowledge, insisting instead that all knowledge claims are socially constructed.

Anarchy

The absence of government at any level. At the international level, the term signals that sovereign states operate in a system in which there is no overarching authority that makes and enforces laws to regulate the behaviour of these states or the behaviour of other actors in world politics.

Discourse

An internally coherent story or world view that has the power to shape both individual identities and political practices

Globalism

A world view advocating a single system of governance for the planet. Neoliberalism is often described as neoliberal globalism because it advocates the worldwide embrace of market-based principles of governance.

Realism

The dominant international relations theory in Anglo-American academies. It purports to explain the world by holding that the international sphere is dominated by sovereign states, which act in their own interests. International politics is a struggle for power between states.

Sovereignty

A legal (de jure) and actual (de facto) condition whereby national states recognize no higher authority either domestically or externally. A national state’s right to manage its affairs internally, without external interference, is based on the legal concept of the equality of states.

Totality

Draws on Hegelian philosophy and was used by Marx to suggest that in order to understand social phenomenon, one must consider the “whole.” For example, in order to understand global politics, one must examine capitalism as a totality (social relations, economic relations, technological components, political relations, etc.).

Carbon budget

The concept that there is a finite amount of carbon that the planet can withstand and that this “budget” is largely used by Europe and the United States, the largest producers of greenhouse gases.

Ecocentric

An ethic and worldview that prioritizes the value of all life forms, diverse ecosystems, and the environment in contrast to anthropocentric worldviews that prioritize human values and interests.

Glocality

A combination of global and local ideas and practices.

Metabolic rift

A term initially coined by Karl Marx to describe the ways capitalism has separated the dynamics of human life from the rest of the natural world, in the process often creating ecological disasters.