Regimes of power/non-knowledge in global politics

Abstract

Critical work in international relations (IR) has analysed the production of multiple forms of knowledge and its entanglements with power, silences, circulations and networks of expertise. The ‘other side of knowledge’ has received less attention, except as a resource for political contestation when envisaged as contingency, indeterminacy or uncertainty. This chapter argues that we need to attend to differentiated regimes of governing through nonknowledge. To outline this argument, in a first step we situate non-knowledge in recent debates in IR, agnotology and the emerging field of ignorance. Rather than emphasising the social construction of ignorance by elites, regimes of power/(non)knowledge encompass varied practices where different forms of knowing and not-knowing produce political effects. In a second step, we conceptually engage with the production of non-knowledge in the context of border and migration governance, highlighting how states weave together and balance different forms of knowledge and non-knowledge in their attempts to ‘govern’ migrants. We then draw on reports and fieldwork we conducted in France, Greece, Italy and the UK to trace how various forms of ‘situated non-knowledge’ are produced and play out within asylum regimes across Europe. By analysing the production and proliferation of situated non-knowledge practices, we show how non-knowledge can be a site of (epistemic) violence and injustice in enacting, sustaining and intensifying hierarchies and asymmetries of power.