BOOK: Governing the past

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Co-authored with Hannes Hansen-Magnusson, Ingrid Medby, and Christoph Laucht. 

Identifying, filling, and creating gaps in knowledge have triggered, driven, and defined political action and collective identities of political actors over the centuries. We argue that these phenomena are parts of what we call the ‘politics of voids’. Voids play a central role in societies’ internal and external politics, but they have been largely overlooked, treated as epiphenomena, or as individual cases. 

Drawing from the multidisciplinary background of the authors of this monograph in International Relations, Politics, Geography, and History, the book underlines the central role of voids for the functioning of societies, especially through the way they are embedded in political projects. The emptiness of voids is addressed through an exploratory and interpretive approach that enquires questions of power and agency while exploring cases that speak to high politics as well as everyday and bottom-up perspectives. As a co-authored, collaborative project, the conceptual framework and 

empirical parts offer an integrated perspective throughout the book, building on a typology that can be made accessible from different disciplinary angles. As such, the book builds bridges across different subfields of IR and between neighbouring disciplines like ontological security, IPS, critical geography, social movement analyses, transnational history, and critical security studies.

This book project is in the final stage of development.

This project investigates how war as an object of inquiry came to be known by historical international fact-finding commissions. Underpinned by theories of epistemic violence and postcolonial methodologies, the project 1) explores how the commissions shaped commonsense views of war, produced epistemic subjects and organized relations among them to establish war as governable; 2) interrupts the commonsense views by drawing on plural interpretations from multiple connected sites to challenge silences and hierarchies and 3) evaluates the continuities and disruptions of such epistemic violence in contemporary global governance of knowledge. 

This project is in the early stages of development.

 With Mariam Salehi and Christine Andrä.

In contemporary global politics, common ways of knowing conflict and its harms, agents, responsibilities, and repairs are shaped by coloniality.  Today’s international norms of peace and conflict are primarily derived from the ontologies and epistemologies of the Global North, prioritizing individualistic and atomistic over relational, spiritual, and pluriversal ways of knowing. Epistemic subjects from the Global South, in turn, struggle to gain epistemic authority and shape global standards. Contemporary global politics is characterized by epistemic differences between hierarchically positioned subjects and worldviews. To counter these dynamics, decolonial thinkers have called for epistemic disobedience, de-linking from the Eurocentric standards, and nurturing alternative worldviews. What epistemic disobedience means in practice, however, is barely spelled out.

Taking on this key challenge, this project asks: How do disobedient knowledges form, gain access to spaces of power, and exert political influence?

The project’s main objectives are to 1) investigate different ways of knowing by political actors operatingat different scales of political action (national, transnational, international)in both Global North and Global South, examining their underlying logics; 2) assess how these logics challenge common sense views of harm, agency, responsibility and repair in peace and conflict; 3) examine how such knowledges become political effective, drawing on epistemic resources to negotiate epistemic differences; and, 4) develop a methodological framework for advancing the productive potential of epistemic disobedience in global politics.