Knowledge

This entry discusses knowledge in international politics, understood as the socially and historically determined world-images or understandings about the world which we experience as reality. Studies of knowledge in International Relations (IR) mostly concern, first, the socio-historically embedded processes which construct and spread politically relevant knowledge, and second, how these processes and their products, in turn, shape power relations and political imaginaries and action. The entry traces approaches that study the (international) politics of knowledge across five perspectives which take as their starting point actors, practices, contexts, structures and relations, but are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive and are interlaced with a diversity of theoretical commitments. Some of the most pressing debates, highlighted in the final part of the entry, revolve around questions of the politics and ethics of knowledge production, especially who can produce relevant, authoritative or useful knowledge in/about/for IR and world politics, and how epistemic injustices can be remedied.