Relational Approaches to Knowledge and Expertise in International Politics

Relational approaches to knowledge and expertise in international politics encompass a theoretically rich set of perspectives which recognize the ontological primacy of relations over established units of analysis in International Relations (IR). As such, they challenge the engrained substantialism in IR according to which phenomena, including knowledge and expertise, are composed of pre-existing, fixed, separate, and stable entities with concrete properties. Beyond this basic premise that unites them, relational approaches to knowledge and expertise are varied and often incommensurate as they conceive of relations and practice relational analysis in their unique ways. This section showcases this theoretical and empirical span of historical and contemporary relational approaches to knowledge and expertise in IR, maps out the disciplinary reception of such perspectives, and briefly explicates disagreements between them. It takes stock of the current landscape of coexisting frameworks, offering in particular an intersubjectivity-focused constructivist outlook, non-Western relational takes on decentring the discipline, including indigenous cosmology, anthropological theorizing, field methodology in the sociological tradition of Pierre Bourdieu, and posthumanist and complexity theory.