Description
This paper is motivated by an observation that contemporary reflection on the discipline of International Relations (IR), its theoretical debates and knowledge practices does not accommodate questions about the socio-political context of knowledge production. However, it is only through an in-depth engagement with the process and context of knowledge production, that we can understand specific knowledge claims and take into consideration the fact that some may be silenced or suppressed. The most obvious challenge for the exploration of the context of knowledge-making is how to define the components of a given setting and which aspects to prioritise. In this paper, I present a framework for analysing the socio-political context of the knowledge production endeavour. The framework relies on a critical engagement with Ole Wæver’s first (and, to date, only) ‘explanatory model’ for studying IR from a sociology of knowledge perspective (Wæver 1998, 694-695). I propose developing Wæver’s model with the help of new insights from the sociology of sciences (Mulkay 1979; Bloor 1991) and social sciences (Sokolov 2018). The framework is composed of three sections: (1) state–society relations, (2) historic (dis)continuity and (3) epistemic practices and the communication of research that are further broken down into more specific components. Rather than an explanatory model, I propose an exploratory framework, which aims to guide the study of socio-political context and its influence on knowledge produced in academia. The purpose is not to avoid ambiguity, or to suggest that the processes the model helps to map are static, but rather to stimulate thinking about aspects that have not occupied the horizon of reflection about knowledge-making.
