Comparative Area Studies and the Study of the Global South

Abstract

Comparative Area Studies (CAS) offers a template to bring the Global South back into the foreground of social science inquiry. CAS urges researchers to grapple directly with empirical variations derived from across the seemingly different global regions. CAS offers three comparative modes: intra-regional, cross-regional, and trans-regional. A number of scholars have used CAS’s comparative rubrics, even without knowing about the wider CAS agenda and program. CAS unsettles assumptions about discrete, fixed “regional” or civilizational blocks as well as about nomothetic theory-building aimed at universal or general laws. At the same time, CAS engages in the idea of medium-range theory-building, focusing empirical rigor and induction in order to create concepts and analyses that are portable yet contextualized. These macro-historical theories must be attentive to spatial and temporal variation in the social world. Claims of universalism are suspect. For the study of the Global South, in particular, CAS provides a path for aggregating and leveraging the wide range of observations and interpretations area specialists have to offer on regions as diverse as South Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa. CAS thus changes the division of labor within social science to allow greater input for scholarship derived from and originating in the developing world.

Overcoming Area Studies’ Policy-Relevant Research Problem: The Case of the Sahel

“…Such comparisons have the potential to address the aforementioned policy theoretical and methodological needs. They allow engagement in mid-level theory building, offering empirical rigour and induction, to create concepts and causal analyses that are portable but sensitive to context (Sil & Ahram, 2020). An intra-regional comparative analysis presents the opportunity to generate what Ahram (2011) calls "bounded generalisations", whose focus on variation among clusters of similar cases is used to validate theory whilst being attentive to local dynamics and difference.…”

“…We therefore explore how Area Studies scholarship can overcome this obstacle and position itself to make an effective contribution to informing the decisions of policy makers. In particular, it argues for the importance of regionally based approaches to Area Studies scholarship-supporting, in this case, Sil and Ahram's (2020) call for intra-regional and cross-regional Comparative Area Studies (CAS). Finally, in order to open a debate about how such an approach might be applied, this paper offers some tentative suggestions of how this could be done in practice, both in the wider Sahel and beyond.…”