In this sense, ignorance is not an anomaly or a deficiency, but a productive social force, as sociologists of ignorance have argued before me.
Ignorance operates through two key pathways: it enables the intelligibility of ordering norms in the first place and manages the dissonance between proclaimed norms and actual behaviour.
Whether it's the liberal order, the China order, or the MAGA order, all rest on antiepistemological foundations – systematic practices of producing not-knowing. These range from positive (eg. disinformation) to negative (eg. dismissal) to grey-area forms (eg. silence).
Ignorance is productive for social orders, writes @karimeltaki.bsky.social (@rug.nl).
Read more about how ignorance has been functional for diverse kinds of world orders to succeed: https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiag048
Examining in turn the LIO and human rights, the China order and sovereignty, and MAGA and ethnonationalist civilisationism, I show that proponents of different ordering visions deploy distinct ignorance regimes to preserve coherence in domains central to their legitimacy.
The argument has implications beyond our conceptual understanding of international order(ing). As we hurtle toward the AI age, traditional boundaries between knowledge and ignorance begin to dissolve, transforming the very foundations on which all social orders are built.
All international orders depend on systematic ignorance production. That’s what I argue in my fresh-out-of-the-oven @iajournal.bsky.social article.
Link to the article (open access): doi.org/10.1093/ia/i...
My article on ignorance as constitutive of international order has now found a home in print. I argue that every international order, including the liberal order, rests on systematic practices of ignorance production. Do have a look if you haven’t already!
doi.org/10.1093/ia/i...
