Do international relations scholars not care about Central and Eastern Europe or do they just take the region for granted? A conclusion to the special issue

Abstract

I have very little knowledge of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). I have attended an academic conference in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 2019, been on a romantic gateway to Zagreb in 2013, shared an office with a specialist of Moldova and Crimea for a year, and my partner is Turkish. As a non-expert outsider, sharing my reading experience about whether the provincialising ambition of the special issue 'worked' for me -that is, whether it successfully decentred my perception or not -makes me somewhat of a reflexive test subject. Another reason why I may have been invited to conclude this special issue relates to my interest in questions of knowledge production and my experience studying the discipline of International Relations (IR). I have researched different questions the special issue addresses. I investigated how to make IR a less parochial/Eurocentric field of study -by probing the conditions of production and internationalisation of the discipline in Brazil and India (Alejandro 2018b). I worked to show that 'European IR' goes beyond what is produced in the United Kingdom and Scandinavian countries (Alejandro 2017) -by co-editing a book series that aims to deuniversalise and historicise European transnational traditions in IR Theory (Jørgensen et al. 2017). I explored the conditions for formulating critiques that produce something other than the problems they seek to denounce (Alejandro 2021b). And so, I have tried to write this conclusive essay from this outsider/connoisseur position. 2In this contribution, I review the special issue in light of the broader debates it contributes to. I structure this conclusive article around the two goals set up in the special issue's introduction: 1) investigating how CEE has been used 'in the scholarship of politics and international relations in order to account for the relative silence about CEE in the debates on "worlding IR"', and how knowledge about and from CEE has been used in the discipline more generally; 2) exploring 'what provincializing the discipline from CEE might look like' (Mälksoo 2021b). How can we explain CEE's relative absence in the 'worlding IR' conversation and how has CEE been used in IR instead?This question emerges out of four decades of questioning IR's unequal institutionalisation around the world, which hinders its capacity to produce knowledge capable of explaining the diversity of sociopolitical phenomena in different contexts and potentially contributes to the (re)production of an unfair socio-political order. To engage such issues, IR scholarship started showcasing IR production in different countries/regions in an exercise sometimes referred to as 'mapping the discipline' (Holden 2002; Kristensen 2015). This special issue takes as a starting point the general lack of interest for CEE in this debate.Apart from a few initiatives (see Drulák 2009;Drulák et al. 2009 as well as Thümmler (2014 for the influence of emigres scholars on the global thinking about the international), CEE seemed to have fallen between the cracks of a conversation structured ...

Knowledge, Information, and Data Readiness Levels (KaRLs) for Risk Assessment, Communication, and Governance of Nano‐, New, and Other Advanced Materials

“…KaRL 7 is assigned to a roadmap or framework outlining integration of the available scientific/technical data, information, and knowledge and the outcomes of cocreation (from KaRLs 1–6) into risk‐related social/reflexive multistakeholder discourse. [ 58 ] KaRL 8 is ascribed to the actual process of multistakeholder discursive engagement, as already indicated in KaRL 7, which addresses the actual problem, any similar examples and good practices, who is involved, what the problems and conflicts are, what functional knowledge is available, and what is missing. KaRL 9 , the highest readiness level, is assigned to the outcome of discursive engagement in the form of “a group or family of statements” and reflection from KaRL 8, i.e., discursive formation.…”