Context-Centred Approaches to Knowledge and Expertise in International Politics

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This chapter gives a brief introduction to the book’s context-centred section, which approaches context as the social, cultural, political, and economic milieu of knowledge making, diffusion, contestation, and obstruction. Recognizing that the study of context and its impact on epistemic practices is fraught with challenges, this section shows—based on concrete examples—that engagement with context is indispensable if we are to take seriously the calls to place the production of knowledge about the world on firmer empirical grounds. If our goal is to engage thoroughly with knowledge about international politics, our enquiry cannot be limited to the outcomes of that process, such as a specific ‘Western’ or ‘non-Western’ International Relations (IR) theory. Rather, we need to explore the circumstances involved in and surrounding knowledge production and use. Chapters in this section discuss how and to what effect a given socio-political context influences epistemic practices, knowledge outputs, and their broader use. The first four chapters set the scene by exploring the broad contexts of knowledge production: hierarchies present in IR knowledge production globally, the Global IR agenda, cultural contexts, and academic freedom. The three subsequent chapters look at the conditions and outcomes of producing knowledge in various political settings around the globe, including the conditions of possibility for knowledge making and dissemination in (non)democracies. Those chapters zoom in on the Global Easts, Latin America, and the everyday practices of the global university as seen from Australia, Argentina, and Puerto Rico. The last two chapters draw attention to how context plays out in two distinct institutional settings: the International Studies Association and the policy field of climate change.</jats:p>