“That which accommodates provides the structure of the accommodation. The fittings and decor change; the core infrastructure and superstructure of the house improve and remain. And the owners of the house take great care constantly to reinvent the house identifiably as itself, with heritage and conservation orders over all key drawing rooms. This house may have oriental chambers (encouraged into a chinoiserie), but occidentalises itself ” (Chan, 2010).

One can ask for Comparative Political Thought to decolonize the mind, but (at most) one is asking for it to do no more than “to add rooms to an Occidental house”. This bastardization of “non-Western” political thought does nothing more than “attune” the European Centric Political Paradigm, in essence, to befit for pluralist thought, rather than the study of a completely different paradigm (for Political Thought). The focus of this essay will be (in brief) to detail on a rather superficial level, why CPT (by itself) has no impact on the decolonization of the mind, but rather, can be also used to colonize the “others” mind.
True CPT is a suicidal field. It is a field in a sense, focused on the extermination of the ‘comparative’. As professor Bajpai puts it,
“One day the modifier ‘comparative’ will become associated with this time in the historical development of our discipline because in fact what we learn from how we do comparative inquiry improves how we do political theory (Bajpai et al, 2017)
CPT should be done in order for the study of the “comparative” to be of the “political”.In short, CPT never has, and never will be able to decolonize the mind. For a decolonization to take place, one has to in effect, break down the walls of the Occidental, and rebuild the knowledge of ‘the political thought’ using true universal bricks. The irony of this question can be best exemplified of the use of Sun Tzu, by the American Army.

Sun Tzu (along with Clausewitz) are but a handful of authors in regards to American Military Thought. As such, even though Sun Tzu is prescribed by the US Army as a cornerstone of military technique (and in the hands of many a American) nevertheless anti-Chinese sentiment has never been at a more fervent pitch than it is now. One then, has to question, has Sun Tzu done more for decolonization or rather, much more likely, has facilitated the colonization of the other.

This question of décolonisation is in similar fashion to the notion of “last men” by Fukuyama and Hegel. The question of who fits into the prophesied groupings, in effect, ensures that there will be groupings. The issue isn’t of groupings, but rather to eliminate the need for such grouping. As stated by a myriad of authors, the need for CPT isn’t for itself to “branch out” but rather to reimagine itself entirely. As Prof. Getachew declares,
Even as it calls attention to the contributions of the enslaved and the colonized, the effort to center black actors does not in this case lead into a more thoroughgoing rethinking of modern universals and risks inadvertently reifying a European normative core that merely has to be extended outwards. (Getachew, 2016)
In effect, the study of CPT (inherently) does nothing more than to add to the technique and ability of human intelligence; and as such, how one uses CPT can be for effects of decolonization or even more likely, colonization.

The “political project” question is a bit open ended as one cannot truly curtail what a non-political project will be. As the author of this response believes, one can effectively put the personal into the political, or as the sayin goes, “the personal is political”; so in effect, yes one can put “decolonization of the mind” as a political project. But withstanding the fact that anything can in essence, become in “the realm of the political”, such is the case with palm oil, water, terrain, bananas, and even thoughts.
To conclude this rather unjustifiably short prompt, no, I do not believe that CPT decolonizes the mind. One can use CPT for the act of colonization as much as ‘decolonization’. To ask for CPT to decolonize the mind is to ask for minds whom are capable to be decolonized. That stipulation is tantamount to the process of decolonization. CPT is useful tool for us to bridge understandings and to examine new methods of thought, but to ask for it to decolonize the world is to understand how (or more importantly why) the world was colonized in the first place.

Bibliography

Ackerly, Brooke, and Rochana Bajpai, ‘Comparative Political Thought’ in Adrian Blau ed.
Methods in Analytical Political Theory, (Cambridge, 2017), 270-96.
Chan, Stephen, ‘The End of Certainty, Towards a New Internationalism, Zed Books Ltd. (10 Jun.
2010)
Getachew, Adom. ‘Universalism after the post-colonial turn: Interpreting the Haitian revolution.’ Political Theory 44.6 (2016): 821-845.
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