Making Things Known: Epistemic Practices, the United Nations, and the Translation of Piracy

Abstract

How are international phenomena rendered knowable? By which means and practical devices is international knowledge generated? In this article, I draw on the case of contemporary maritime piracy to introduce a research framework that allows these questions to be addressed. Arguing that the practices of international knowledge generation are poorly understood, I show how concepts from science and technology studies provide the tools to study these practices empirically. Relying on the practice theory of Karin Knorr Cetina, I introduce the concepts of epistemic infrastructures, epistemic practice, and laboratories and demonstrate how they facilitate interesting insights on knowledge generation. I investigate three "archetypes" of epistemic practices in detail and show how these generate knowledge about piracy for the United Nations. The three archetypes are the quantification practices of the International Maritime Organization, the interpretation work of a monitoring group and the network of a special adviser. The article introduces an innovative agenda for studying knowledge generation in international relations by focusing on the practical epistemic infrastructures, which maintain knowledge about international phenomena.Constructivist international relations (IR) theorists have pointed to the importance of international organizations (IOs) in producing and disseminating knowledge, but they have rarely focused on how knowledge production unfolds in practice. Classically, scholars such as Haas (1975) or Galtung (1986) have scrutinized the epistemic dimension of IOs such as the United Nations. Whereas Haas (1975) understood IOs as combinations of science, technology, and politics intended to manage problems of interdependency, Galtung (1986:1) understood them as "enormous research conglomerate[s]," which are "trying to process inputs about the empirical world (data, theories, values) into such outputs as background papers, documents, etc." This classical argument, which understands IOs as a mixture of research and political organizations, has been further developed in several strands of contemporary literature. Works on epistemic authority demonstrate that IO secretariats and international administrations become autonomous actors by developing expertise in a distinct issue domain (Barnett and Finnemore 2004). Research has shown that IOs organize, or are influenced by, external knowledgeable communities, such as epistemic communities (Weiss, Carayannis, and Jolly 2009;Cross 2012). Studies drawing on organization theory have observed that IOs increasingly become learning organizations, significantly

Rebalancing the Encounter between Science Diplomacy and International Relations Theory

“…regional or international) without epistemic practices ‘on the ground’. This viewpoint sketches science diplomacy as a multitude of networked, yet determinable knowledge practices across borders, such as researching and providing evidence, reporting, advising, (Bueger, ). These practices originate and are maintained at the level of the everyday and that of routine (conventionally micro), including settings such as research sites and labs, boardrooms, universities, conferences and summits that Bueger refers to as ‘crucial nodal points’ and ‘major hosts of epistemic practices’ (Bueger, , p. 8).…”

Doing Europe: agency and the European Union in the field of counter-piracy practice

“…Any field of practice and governance activity draws on an episteme, that is, a certain set of knowledge, assumptions, and facts. Epistemic practices are concerned about making piracy known and creating the (epistemic) object, which is the object of activity (Bueger 2015). This implies not only to collect data about piracy behaviour and organisational structures, but also to hypothesise the origins and causes of piracy and what can be done against it.…”

“…This implies not only to collect data about piracy behaviour and organisational structures, but also to hypothesise the origins and causes of piracy and what can be done against it. Practices that produce or distribute knowledge about piracy were instrumental to the field from its onset (Bueger 2015). In particular, incident reports and statistics documented the drastic increase in piracy activity in 2008.…”

<strong></strong>Enabling Transparency Through Technology? Non-Governmental Satellite Imagery Analysis of North Korea<strong> </strong>

“…Only recently research has started to bring together both disciplines on a theoretical and empirical level to investigate the interrelation of technology, power and security [8][9][10][11][12][13]. Moreover, only few studies have concentrated how non-state satellite imagery analysis is conducted [14] and how it affects discourses of international politics [15,16].…”