Governing the production of knowledge in IR through academic judgement

This article puts forward a general argument that Foucault’s work on power-knowledge interdependence can help us better understand knowledge production in the discipline of International Relations (IR), and the more specific argument that the discipline’s generated knowledge suffers from acute geographic centralization. The article’s first section briefly revisits the literature on how we know the things that we know in IR and elaborates on the Foucauldian epistemological toolkit and its value-added. I then continue with an empirical discussion of academic judgement as a practice of governing the discipline, showing that journal editors, published authors and committees governing academic associations are mostly institutionally based in the Anglosphere. The implications of restricting knowledge production in IR, such as on the creative imagination in the discipline and on related academic subjectivities, are presented in the ensuing section. The conclusion provides normative suggestions to tackle the question and paves the way for future research.