Transparency is an important concept in International Relations. The possibility of realizing transparency in practice operates as a central analytical axis defining distinct positions on core theoretical problems within the field, from the security dilemma to the function of international institutions and beyond. As a political practice, the pursuit of transparent governance is a dominant feature of global politics, promoted by a wide range of actors across a vast range of issue areas, from nuclear proliferation, to internet governance, to the politics of foreign aid. Yet, despite its importance, precisely what transparency means or how the concept is understood is frequently ill-defined by academics and policymakers alike. As a result, the epistemological and ontological underpinnings of approaches to transparency in International Relations often sit in tension with their wider theoretical commitments. This article will examine the three primary understandings of transparency used in International Relations in order to unpack these commitments. It finds that while transparency is often explicitly conceptualized as a property of information, particularly within rationalist scholarship, this understanding rests upon an unarticulated set of sociological assumptions. This analysis suggests that conceptualizing 'transparency as information' without a wider sociology of knowledge production is highly problematic, potentially obscuring our ability to recognize transparent practices in global governance. Understanding transparency as dialogue, as a social practice rooted in shared cognitive capacities and epistemic

Jürgen Habermas's theory of communicative action has provided the inspiration for a school of Critical International Relations Theory which looks to communication as a source of praxis, and therefore a means of emancipation. This article argues that Critical International Relations Theorists have been too ready to accept Habermas's claims about the emancipatory power of communication. In particular, it is not clear that a Habermasian Critical International Relations Theory can address the concerns of more sophisticated materialists -not least those of Habermas's predecessors in the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. One of the most original of these predecessors, Theodor Adorno, argued that the pursuit of communication between subjects would result in the betrayal of Critical Theory to the requirements of instrumental reason. The article suggests that similar concerns are apparent in International Relations: in Marxian criticisms of the turn to communication; in accusations of 'anthropocentrism' aimed at post-positivists by Critical Realists; and in Andrew Linklater's emphasis on the common human capacity to experience and recognize bodily suffering. Adorno's Critical Theory points to the need for a reorientation of Critical International Relations Theory towards an account of praxis which draws upon the experiences and needs of corporeal, vulnerable human beings who are part of a material world. In this way, critical International Relations theorists can carry forward the critique of global socio-political forces which the majority of the world's inhabitants experience as an arbitrary constraint.

This article describes the central role played by conceptions of truth in critical IR scholarship. Two broad positions are identified. Firstly, despite their differences, Critical Theorists and post-structuralists understand truth in intersubjective terms, and its political significance as arising from its relationship to the norms and practices constitutive of political reality. In contrast, Critical Realists understand truth in terms of the cognitive relationship of subjects with an independent objective reality, and its significance as arising from the importance of accurate knowledge of that reality. The article suggests that each of these positions blocks the legitimate insights of the other. It argues that a way out of the resultant impasse can be found in Theodor Adorno’s theory of truth, in which a concern with the primacy of the objective is coupled with an insistence on the connection between truth and human needs.

This journal article has been accepted for publication and will appear in a revised form, subsequent to peer review and/or editorial input by Cambridge University Press in the Review of International Studies.

International actors, state and non-state, have embraced transparency as a solution to all manner of political problems. Theoretical analyses of these processes present transparency in a fetishtic manner, in which the social relations that generate transparency are misrecognized as the product of information itself. This paper will outline the theoretical problems that arise when transparency promotion is fetishized in International Relations theory. Examining the fetishism of transparency, we will note problematic conception of politics, the public sphere, and rationality they articulate. Confusing the relationship between data, information and knowledge, fetishized treatments of transparency muddy the historical dynamics responsible for the emergence of transparency as a political practice. This alters our understanding of the relationship between global governance institutions, their constituents, and the nature of knowledge production itself. Realizing the normative promise of transparency requires a reorientation of theoretical practice towards sociologically and historically sensitive approaches to the politics of knowledge.