Description
In the past years, history of knowledge has established itself as an academic field in its own right (Daston 2017, Sarasin 2011). Yet what can a knowledge-historical approach contribute to the study of international politics? On the one hand, knowledge-historical analyses of international politics would broaden the range of questions asked about knowledge’s history within Historical International Relations (HIR): they would shift the focus from the (meta-) theoretical and disciplinary developments of interest to HIR approaches such as intellectual history and history of science towards the concrete institutions, practices, relations and exclusions of knowledge in international politics. On the other hand, a genealogically understood history of knowledge would enable a critique of our IR ways of knowing that, rather than contenting itself with the deconstruction of these ways, would produce historical materials for their experimental reconstruction. The paper develops these arguments through an analysis of the work of the so-called “Balkan Commission” (ca. 1912-14). Initiated and financed by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), the commission inquired into atrocities committed by the parties to the two Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913. Based on primary sources collected from the CEIP’s archive, the paper discusses the institutional form of the commission, the practices of looking and of writing developed by the commissioners, and the hierarchical social relations between the commissioners and their interlocutors in the Balkan states as well as in Western Europe and the United States.
