Particulars and Universals: What I Learned from Teaching in Egypt

From 1996 through 2000, Anthony F. Lang, Jr taught at the American University in Cairo as an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science. He taught courses in American Foreign Policy, Introduction to Political Science, Strategic Studies, and Ethics and International Relations. Through his teaching in Egypt, he came to see that his assumptions about what is universally true in both normative and pedagogic terms needed expanding. Teaching Egyptian students taught him a new form of universalism, one that takes seriously normative claims but locates them in a different context. In this chapter, Anthony F. Lang draws on those experiences of teaching in Egypt, along with some reflections on the work of Edward Said, to expand his idea of what counts as universal in a contested and complex international order.