Epistemology in International Relations Lecture Flashcards

This set of vocabulary flashcards covers key concepts from the lecture on Epistemology in International Relations, focusing on knowledge production, epistemicide, and decolonial perspectives such as Agaciro.

Political Economy of Knowledge

The concept that knowledge production reflects power relations, typically showing an imbalance where academic work originates in the Global North while the Global South remains underrepresented.

Mount Andeyo experience

A counter-plantation system and an alternative epistemology in Haiti that represents a sovereign society formed by formerly enslaved Africans beyond the French colonial order.

Ontology

As defined by Shawn Wilson in Research is Ceremony, the study of what is real.

Epistemology

The study of how we know what is real.

Constructivism

The core idea that reality is inseparable from human interpretation, where the mind mediates understanding and constructs reality rather than discovering a fixed world.

Post-Structuralism

A perspective that rejects objective truth, focusing on interpretation, language, and power, while asserting that all knowledge is shaped by discourses (systems of meaning).

Epistemologies of the South

A perspective (per Escobar 2016) promoting plural ways of knowing where "South" is considered epistemic rather than just geographic, representing the majority of the world.

Cognitive Justice

The principle that there is no social global justice without the recognition of diverse forms of knowledge.

Epistemicide

A term described by Boaventura de Sousa Santos as the destruction of diverse ways of knowing resulting from colonialism, land dispossession, and eurocentrism.

Non-Existence

A process where experiences or knowledge systems are excluded from dominant meaning frameworks and rendered invisible or irrelevant.

Eurocentrism

The placement of Europe at the center of global rationality, claiming universality while denying its own positionality and concealing its domination.

Wilsonian Interventionist Logic

A logic based on 1918 liberal democratic internationalism that assumes equality and self-determination depend on external intervention to achieve peace, democracy, and free trade.

Agaciro

A Kinyarwanda term meaning self-worth, dignity, and self-reliance; it serves as a Rwandan epistemic framework connecting personal dignity with collective responsibility.

Decolonial research strategy

Proposed by Olivia Rutazibwa to rethink international relations by decentering hierarchical binaries and expanding the plurality of knowledge.