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MULTIVERSITY

Western Intellectual Imperialism in Malaysian Legal Education

Vol - XLVI No. 46, November 12, 2011 | Shad Saleem Faruqi

An over-reliance on Western knowledge paradigms and the exclusion of traditional knowledge and indigenous cultures characterises legal education in Malaysia. The same could be said of education in most Asian and African universities. This paper holds that such educational enslavement must end and that genuine globalisation demands that we be open to the best from East and West. It argues that our very survival could hinge on resisting today's Western intellectual imperialism and embarking on a voyage of discovery of our ancestors' intellectual wanderings.

World History and Its Polit

Vol - XLVI No. 46, November 12, 2011 | Vinay Lal

World history as we have it now is the pertinent form of knowledge for our times, taking its place besides other dubious labels such as multiculturalism, globalisation, multilateralism, and the new world order. This paper points out that it is in various ways one of the 21st century's pre-eminent forms of colonising knowledge - and all the more insidious in that it appears to be as benign and ecumenical an enterprise as one can imagine. An integrated history of one world sounds appealing, but we need to have a conception of many worlds, not just one world from the viewpoint of western exceptionalism.

Teaching Social Theory as Alternative Discourse

Vol - XLVI No. 46, November 12, 2011 | Syed Farid Alatas

The social sciences are taught in the developing world in a Eurocentric manner. This has contributed to the alienation of social scientists from local and regional scholarly traditions. Further, courses in sociology and the other social sciences generally do not attempt to correct the Orientalist bias by introducing non-western thinkers. This paper highlights the contributions of Filipino thinker and activist José Rizal and draws attention to a course that used the theme of Eurocentrism to provide a critical stance from which to understand the discipline of sociology.