I have a new open-access article out in Global Studies Quarterly, “What’s at Stake in the Indigenous Empire Debate,” in which I argue against historian Pekka Hämäläinen’s claims that the Comanche and the Lakota constituted empires.

Many others have provided reasons why we ought not to think of the Comanche or the Lakota polities as empires, but as I argue, this debate has been inconclusive because it has been lacking any clear definition of “empire” according to which we might assess Comanche or Lakota practices.

I find a good basis for defining “empire” in Meghan McConaughey, Paul Musgrave, and Dan Nexon’s 2018 article, “Beyond Anarchy: Logics of Political Organization, Hierarchy, and International Structure”. (This piece refines Nexon’s earlier discussion of empire in an article coauthored with Tom Wright, “What’s at Stake in the American Empire Debate”.)

There empire—as opposed to other modes of governance such as federalism or confederalism—is defined by heterogeneous contracting, high central authority autonomy, and investiture of authority from that core central authority to peripheral segments (with these features of governance providing three axes along which polities will vary). (This perhaps sounds abstract, but there is more detail in the paper.)

I survey Hämäläinen’s work on the Comanche and the Lakota—as well contrasting and sometimes complementary descriptions of their practices by other scholars—and they simply don’t align with the McConaughey, Musgrave, and Nexon (2018) criteria, nor do they align with other reasonable definitions of empire (such as that developed in the “new imperial history” focused primarily on the British Empire).

The Comanche and the Lakota were relatively powerful, to be sure, but that is not good reason to label them empires. Rather, their modes of governance seem to have been quite decentralized—more confederal than imperial.

As the title suggests, however, I think there is more at stake here than simply how to conceptualize Comanche and Lakota governance. Rather, this debate also raises questions about how to study Indigenous polities.

Some in this debate suggest a fundamental incommensurability in the governance of Indigenous and non-Indigenous polities. Others suggest that it is inappropriate to use concepts and theories developed in a Western context to describe and explain Indigenous political structures and behavior.

Much of this debate, moreover, seems concerned with the normative stakes. Hämäläinen frames his use of the term “empire” as a sort of empowerment that gives the Comanche and the Lakota their rightfully significant places in North American history. Others worry that labeling Indigenous polities empires might have pernicious, unintended consequences if this promotes a moral equivalence between Indigenous and Western polities that excuses or downplays the harms wrought by colonialism.

Against such concerns, I argue for the comparability of Indigenous and non-Indigenous polities (a case Neta Crawford made well in 1994), for the value of such comparison despite the limits of language, and for the need to clearly separate descriptive and analytic claims from normative ones to the extent that we can.

Empire might be the wrong term for the Comanche and the Lakota, I argue, but that is not because of the context in which the term “empire” emerged or because of the potential political effects of labeling them empires. Rather, empire is the wrong term for them because of the lack of fit between Comanche and Lakota practices and any reasonable definition of empire, and we need not stretch our concepts to right perceived historical (or historiographical) wrongs.

On the other hand, other Indigenous polities—e.g., the Aztecs and Incas—might be fairly labeled empires insofar as their modes of governance approximated an ideal typical empire. Such a label, I argue, need not be taken to imply a normative judgment about the character of those polities or about the validity of political aims sought by their descendants.

I conclude the article by quoting Neumann and Wigen (2018, 252): “A science of politics that does not consider how politics and polities may take a variety of forms…or a science of International Relations that does not factor in all known types of relations between polities is simply not taking their raison d’etre seriously.”

International Relations (IR), in short, might benefit from considering the variety of forms that Indigenous polities have taken and from further engagement with the historical relations between such polities, and IR scholars might help refine debates across fields in doing so.