WE start with an example from Harvard International Review by staff writer William Mao. His piece on Guyana’s oil industry was published in the September 27, 2023 issue. Mr. Mao referred to Guyana as a small Latin American country.

Basic research would reveal to anyone that Guyana is part of the British West Indies and though geographically in South America is known in the world of scholarship as historically, culturally and sociologically part of the Caribbean.
How did Mao come to refer to Guyana as Latin? Which source did he use to arrive at that typology? Here is what Mao did.

He knew Guyana was in South America; that is all he knew about the country’s geographic location. By extension, then it was a Latin country. He did not do any research on Guyana’s history. If he did, he could not have referred to Guyana as a Latin nation.

Mao’s mistake typifies the kind of poor Western scholarship that has poured into Guyana and the Third World (TW) from colonial times to this day. Take the HARDtalk documentary of Guyana’s oil industry. The host Stephen Sackur did not research Vanda Radzik-Veira. Once she was selected for an interview, Sackur had to research her; this is a basic requirement in academic research.

So Sackur asked for her opinion on the oil industry. She had one that she made public since 2022. She didn’t give Sackur that opinion and Sackur didn’t know she had one. If he did, when she failed to answer his question as to what is the alternative to oil for the purpose of income-generation, he would have cited her opinion that she made public since 2022.

There are many research organisations that sit in the US and Europe and come to conclusions about Guyana and TW countries without any proper research, and politicians, journalists and academics in the TW quote these flawed reports. Leading the way in this journey of mediocrity is Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem) in Sweden.

No trained scholar in the social sciences would accept the criteria V-Dem uses to assess the existence of democracy in the countries around the world. The criteria V-Dem uses are shamelessly Eurocentric. Just one example in this respect should suffice. Israel always comes out on top of most TW countries. But what are the criteria used to rate Israel so high up above many fine democracies in the TW?

How can an occupying power that scorns international laws and has the citizens of the land it illegally occupies living in an apartheid system be classified as democratic? But V-Dem lists Israel as democratic because of the Eurocentric models they have used since the era of European empires.

What V-Dem has done is to use standards of democracy to describe Israel based on classifications that are no longer in use. A country cannot be democratic if it is in violation of international laws. This is an antithetical situation that is inherently absurd. Democratic countries are only democratic if they accept the laws governing civilized behaviour among states.

The United States has an electoral system that contradicts basic democratic principles. In the US, the Electoral College decides the results of an election not the collection and separation of votes cast. Mrs. Hilary Clinton won more votes than Donald Trump but lost the presidency because the Electoral College decided the results.

Federal Supreme Court judges in the US have been traditionally selected based on ideology by Republican and Democratic presidents rather than legal brilliance. Despite these graphic facts, V-Dem always put the US far above many TW countries whose standards of democracy could be classified as higher than the US.

In several European countries, freedom of speech is curtailed yet these very countries are placed far above TW democracies by V-Dem. In many European countries, one cannot write or say anything whatsoever that questions any dimension of the Holocaust. It is a criminal offence.

Yet in those very countries, scholars can write about the positives of colonial conquest and be flippant about the cruelties of slavery. In several Western countries, including Canada, it is illegal to form an association that advocates boycott of Israeli goods. In many of these countries, including the US, to shout or to print the words: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” can get you arrested.

Despite these set-backs to free speech, many of these Western countries are rated way, way above TW democracies by V-Dem where there is no such burden placed on free speech. One of the reasons for the skewed conclusions about democracy in the TW is because organisations like V-Dem do not do competent research on the developing countries.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.