Virtual Issue: The Politics of Knowledge

This virtual issue offers a selection of IPS articles that reflect on, and analyse, the way knowledge claims are made about the world. They encourage us to think harder about what counts as knowledge (e.g. secrets? Non-knowledge? Ignorance?), the specific spaces within which knowledge is produced (e.g. bureaucracies, jokes, in the shadows), and where it circulates. Most importantly, these articles demonstrate the force that knowledge claims exert in the world, and the uneven effects they have. What these interventions all share is an awareness of the contingent epistemological terrain upon which IPS operates; that is, they do not offer an account of knowledge that is secure or final, but rather foreground themes of uncertainty, contingency and ambivalence in their arguments. This is risky work, but it is absolutely necessary in a political climate currently predisposed to closure, exclusion and territorialisation.


In the Shadow of Asylum Decision-Making: The Knowledge Politics of Country-of-Origin Information
Jasper van der Kist, Huub Dijstelbloem, and Marieke de Goede
Volume 13, Issue 1

Making Migration Knowable and Governable: Benchmarking Practices as Technologies of Global Migration Governance
Corey Robinson
Volume 12, Issue 4

Seeing Like Bureaucracies: Rearranging Knowledge and Ignorance in Somalia
Jutta Bakonyi
Volume 12, Issue 3

Assembling (Non)Knowledge: Security, Law, and Surveillance in a Digital World
Claudia Aradau
Volume 11, Issue 4

Affecting Terrorism: Laughter, Lamentation, and Detestation as Drives to Terrorism Knowledge
Charlotte Heath-Kelly and Lee Jarvis
Volume 11, Issue 3

Hannah Arendt and the Art of Secrecy; Or, the Fog of Cobra Mist
William Walters and Alex Luscombe
Volume 11, Issue 1