Producing Knowledge to Problematize War: A Foucauldian Approach to Knowledge Practices

This chapter proposes a Foucauldian approach to the study of knowledge practices in international politics. Based on the work of Michel Foucault, the chapter theorizes knowledge practices to be inherently political, historically contingent, and co-emergent with larger epistemic-political formations, for instance problematisations. The chapter develops an analytical framework that combines the genealogical study of archival materials with three interpretive steps for the reconstruction of locally specific co-emergences of knowledge practices and problematisations. The framework focuses the analysis on the political character of knowledge practices as arising out of conflicts; as contingent, non-necessary, and changeable; and as contributing to the reproduction of problematisations and other epistemic-political formations. It thereby seeks to open up for critique the knowledge practices of both practitioners and scholars of international politics. To illustrate the proposed approach, the chapter studies how, in the example of an international commission of inquiry into the Balkan Wars (1912-1913), practices of direct observation and report-writing co-emerged with a problematisation of war as deviant.