On the “Construction” of Knowledge and the Knowledge of “Construction”

Since its arrival in IR about 20 years ago, the idea of “the social construction of reality” has firmly established itself in the discipline. While acknowledging that not everything was socially constructed “including, say, the taste of honey and the planet Mars” (Hacking 1999:25), the scholarly notion that “the social” is at the core of the (re-)production of order took center stage. With it, numerous innovative concepts like norms, ideas, and identities officially entered into our vocabulary along with the promise to enable a better study of “the political.” Yet, unfortunately, rather than embarking on new theoretical or empirical avenues, many scholars merely “poured the newly emerging patterns of thought into the old framework” (Wight 2002:40) and stalled any processual dimension inherent in the new vocabulary. The concept of knowledge has been repeatedly at the receiving end of this dilemma. Quite frequently borrowed from phenomenologically primed sociologists and usual suspects for the legitimization of the constructivist turn, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, the concept of knowledge features prominently as one access point to the study of the social dimension of international politics. To be sure, the upside of the turn with regards to this concept was the definite end to any rationalist illusions about “true knowledge.” Instead, today, knowledge can be understood in an undogmatic fashion “as the certainty that phenomena are real and that they possess specific characteristics” (Berger and Luckmann 1966:1). In fact, such a minimalist vantage point makes way for the rather fundamental question of “Who believes which knowledge to be true?” Knowledge thus becomes contingent on truth claims. Our attention is shifted to the social character and hence the social determination of knowledge. We can then understand knowledge as socially relevant, objectified, and distributed meaning. In other words, what is real is defined in the communities constituting (world) society and the form of this definition is what is considered valid knowledge (ibid.:17). Consequently, assuming that the struggles over the recognition of the definitions of reality lie at the heart of “the political,” we in fact need to understand how knowledge and social action go together in the formation and distribution of knowledge as a phenomenon which bonds individual and community in the (re-)production of political order.