Description
In recent years, the study of knowledge and expertise in international politics has firmly established itself as a burgeoning field of research within (critical) International Relations. Basing itself on concepts such as power/knowledge, epistemic injustice, and epistemic violence, existing IR research has often criticized epistemic actors, forms, institutions, and practices based in or originating from the West/the Global North, as well as their underlying assumptions about who can be considered an epistemically, ethically, and politically capable subject of knowledge. Conversely, IR research dedicated to alternative ways of knowing international politics has been far less extensive. This is where we seek to intervene by theoretically and empirically exploring what conceptual work epistemic disobedience can do for International Relations. Theoretically, we are interested in the tensions that arise when we conceive of international politics not in terms of the oppressor, through which we can expose the Eurocentric biases in global standards of being and knowing, but through alternative logics underpinning disobedient ways of knowing and being. Taking disobedience to be both disruptive and constructive, we pay particular attention to experiential, presentational/artistic, and practical ways of knowing - which oppose the propositional knowledge that is currently dominant in international politics - and the creative/generative elements they entail. How and under what conditions do such ways of knowing amount to epistemic disobedience? With an empirical focus on the fields of conflict, security and the environment, we explore which actors practise epistemic disobedience and how they do so. We also aim to investigate how disobedient ways of knowing can become (politically) effective and (methodologically) seen in international politics. Finally, we are interested in the question of whether, and if so, how epistemic disobedience can constitute a response to the challenges of a political present characterized by "truthiness", revisionism, and fundamental doubt about scientific knowledge.
