Conceptualizing epistemic violence: an interdisciplinary assemblage for IR

Conceptualizing epistemic violence: an interdisciplinary assemblage for IR

Abstract

While many forms of violence shape the global world order, the disciplines devoted to international politics are often content with reductionist concepts of violence; knowledge and knowledge production are more often than not seen as altogether antithetical to direct and physical harm. At the same time, global entanglements of knowledge with violence have increasingly come into view in the course of the ongoing (de-)colonial turn. After more than thirty years, Gayatri C. Spivak's feminist postcolonial understanding of epistemic violence is still the preeminent theoretical touchstone for addressing this issue. By providing an interdisciplinary understanding of lesser-known conceptions of epistemic violence, I open up additional routes for deploying the term in the analysis, theorization, and critique of international politics. Based on this assemblage, I frame epistemic violence along the decolonial concept of a coloniality of power, knowledge, and Being and finally consider how we can possibly undo epistemic violence while un/doing IR.

Introduction. Where do we see(k) (epistemic) violence?

According to the colonial/modern paradigm, international relations expertise is expected to provide solutions to the problem of violence in international politics. Be it in IR proper or in peace studies, development studies, security studies, conflict studies, or other fields related to questions of international politics, violence is seen as a predominantly direct and physical phenomenon. It is usually defined along three axiomatic lines: first, as something that occurs somewhere else (i.e., not in the Global North - and if so, it is understood to be the exception rather than the rule); second, as something that is perpetrated by somebody else (i.e., not by a rational political subject - and if so, it is done for the right reasons); and, third, violence is considered as genuinely something else (i.e., nonexistent in the academic realm - and if so, it is understood to be an unfortunate ideological aberration). It is, therefore, hardly surprising that epistemic violence seems to be an academic nonissue, and a theoretical oxymoron at that. Indeed, and while many critical voices have outlined the power of knowledge production in IR, epistemic violence is not a key concept when it comes to analyzing and theorizing international politics in the abovementioned (sub-)disciplines.

At the same time, post- and decolonial as well as many feminist scholars working in IR and related disciplines are well aware of the pernicious effects caused by epistemic violence. Consequently, and quite naturally, they have been making use of the term to analyze and theorize entanglements of knowledge and violence in international politics in a broader sense. Joining voices from global sociology and other disciplines, authors have pointed at the deeply colonial heritage not only of IR-related theory, but also of the Occidentalist academic system and the Eurocentric scholarly sphere itself. To all of them, epistemic violence is a matter of fact, which is why the term itself is never brought to the front and investigated in and of itself. Having shown how deeply embedded epistemic violence is both in real-world international politics and in the foundations of IR-related (sub-)disciplines for years, many scholars are today proceeding toward decidedly counter-hegemonic and decolonial bodies of knowledge with a view to transforming and subverting the dominant paradigm. While providing groundbreaking analyses of epistemic violence in international politics and drafting ways of doing IR without reiterating and/or perpetuating its colonial core, these scholars often deploy the term without adequately unpacking it.

If scholars do take the time to explicitly define and/or conceptualize the term, they usually hark back to Gayatri C. Spivak's seminal, and by now canonical, feminist postcolonial description of what epistemic violence is - 'the remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other' - which I will return to shortly. Work that is more recent also refers to Boaventura de Sousa Santos' even stronger term of 'epistemicide'. While neither Spivak nor Santos are IR scholars, their framing of epistemic violence and epistemicide, respectively, has become indispensable for analyzing and theorizing international politics in colonial modernity. There are, however, more approaches to talk and write about the problem than we commonly cite. Between the obliviousness toward epistemic violence that undergirds hegemonic IR and IR-related expertise and the history of actively engaging with it from a post-/decolonial and/or feminist perspective, there is space to further conceptualize the term in order to promote it within and beyond IR-related fields.

Consequently, I am going to introduce a variety of approaches from outside IR in the next but one section: besides a few contributions from peace studies and critical geography, it is especially feminist strands of the humanities and postcolonial global sociology that are most rewarding.

This interdisciplinary assemblage then lays the groundwork for outlining the contours of epistemic violence as framed along the lines of the coloniality of power, knowledge, and Being. In conclusion, I discuss how we can potentially transform and attempt to undo epistemic violence, while keeping in mind that we are all operating within 'modernity's epistemic territory'. Before unpacking my conceptual assemblage, however, let me locate my argument by way of semantically breaching the 'epistemological monoculture' of Euro-American academic discourse, to which this text must comply as well.