Description
Think tanks have become increasingly central actors in foreign policy, offering expertise that potentially impacts decision-making processes and broader foreign policy discourses. But how exactly does knowledge move between think tanks and politics? The article makes a conceptual and empirical contribution to broader discussions on expert authority and the politics of knowledge in international relations. Conceptually, it advances circulation as a valuable means to grasp knowledge as always already moving (Östling 2018). This opens up a multidirectional perspective that considers not only the ways in which think tanks produce output to be consumed by policymakers, and what enables and hinders this unidirectional movement of knowledge. Circulation also grasps how knowledge moves in multidirectional ways, including from policymakers to think tanks. It also allows to interrogate the (im)material preconditions for knowledge to circulate or, conversely, to be kept from moving. Empirically, the article draws on an ethnographic study of two major German foreign policy think tanks, conducted between 2023-25. It demonstrates that think tanks engage in a mutual learning discourse, situating themselves as both producers and learners of policy knowledge. However, this discourse clashes with (im)material constrains such as funding and office spaces that result in hierarchies of knowledge production, limiting which knowledge can circulate and how. This restricts think tanks impact on foreign policymaking.
