Aiman Mohammad Caezar Best Dissertation Prize Winner MSc Political Theory 2019/20
[email protected] Towards a Postcolonial Contract: Revisiting Malaysia’s Grand Bargain TOWARDS A POSTCOLONIAL CONTRACT Revisiting Malaysia’s Grand Bargain Abstract The Malaysian Social Contract (“MSC”) represents a consensus struck between the three major ethnic groups present in Malaya at the point of Independence from British colonial rule. In it, immigrant Chinese and Indian residents of Malaya were granted full citizenship rights, in return for recognizing the “special position” of the indigenous Malays. This dissertation provides a normative assessment of this Grand Bargain, drawing on the critical insights of Carole Pateman (“The Sexual Contract”), Charles W. Mills (“The Racial Contract”) and Christine Keating (“Decolonizing Democracy”) to reveal the inter- ethnic and intra-ethnic domination that the MSC creates, hides, and perpetuates. However, echoing Dipesh Chakrabarty’s insight that European thought is indispensable, but inadequate, in thinking through postcolonial experience, I argue that contractarian theory requires a recognition of colonial difference in order to fully explain domination occurring in postcolonial social contracts. Therefore, I argue there is space for another critical approach to contract theory, alongside the Sexual and Racial: The Postcolonial Contract, whose theoretical distinctiveness would begin with a recognition of the possibility of colonized states of nature. It is my hope that a fully-fledged account of the Postcolonial Contract, beginning with this, would be able to provide a more complete account of the domination that occurs in the MSC, and, more generally, present a novel and productive approach to thinking through postcolonial states and society.