Bruce Gilley


Bruce Gilley is a professor of political science at Portland State University. He is a specialist in the comparative politics of China and Asia, a theorist of political legitimacy, and an advocate of viewpoint diversity and academic freedom. His article "The Case for Colonialism", published in an advance online edition of Third World Quarterly in 2017, was highly controversial for its thesis and resulted in death threats against the editor causing Gilley to agree to its retraction. Fifteen members of the journal's board resigned as a result of the affair.

Education

Gilley received his bachelor of arts in economics and international relations from the University of Toronto in 1988. He was a Commonwealth Scholar at the University of Oxford from 1989 to 1991 from where he received his degree of master of philosophy in economics in 1991 and a Woodrow Wilson Scholar at Princeton University from 2004 to 2006 from where he received his PhD in politics in 2007.

Scholarship

Political legitimacy

Gilley's 2006 article "The meaning and measure of state legitimacy: results for 72 countries" introduced a novel multidimensional, quantitative measure of the qualitative concept of political legitimacy. His work has since been extended by other scholars, and customized to specific geographical regions such as Latin America and Europe. Gilley himself has since updated his work on quantification of legitimacy with additional empirical data.

Colonialism

Gilley's article "The case for colonialism" was published in an advance online version of the Third World Quarterly in 2017. According to Gilley, colonialism was both objectively beneficial and subjectively legitimate. Consequently, the author calls for a revival of some colonialist measures.
The article was controversial both for its argument and for its subsequent withdrawal, which resulted in a debate about academic censorship and peer review. The publisher said the journal's editor "received serious and credible threats of personal violence." Fifteen members of the journal's board resigned. The article was re-published in the Conservative-leaning National Association of Scholars journal Academic Questions in April 2018.

Memberships and awards

Gilley is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Democracy and the Journal of Contemporary China.
He is the recipient of the following awards and nominations for scholarly achievement and articles:
In 2017, Gilley withdrew from the American Political Science Association, stating that he considered it to lack intellectual diversity. A member of the Heterodox Academy, he has been critical of tenure evaluations which require a pledge to uphold collegiate diversity.

Selected publications

Authored