Babelic organisations and the interpreters of geopolitical knowledge production

Abstract

This paper addresses how babelic organisations seek to organise interpretation to facilitate geopolitical knowledge production and its circulation. Language and its interpretation have been neglected by political geographers and political scientists in their extensive work on international organisations. Babelic organisations are ephemeral accomplishments, a temporary product of constant battles with dysfunctionality. Drawing upon detailed ‘inside’ research methods in three major babelic organisations-the UN, the EU and NATO, and focused on interpreters-the ‘hidden messengers’ of geopolitics- I demonstrate how interpretation is unable to escape the dysfunctional behaviours that routinely and intractably blight these organisations. Despite the stringent competitive recruitment of interpreters, their training, mentorship, and performance evaluation, all of which are designed to ensure the quality and accuracy of interpreting geopolitical knowledge, interpretation struggles in the face of disordering situations. These situations make geopolitical knowledge harder to identify, and its messages less easily definable. Responding to them is challenging in organisational terms. I expose how interpreters within these babelic organisations operate in spaces where the messy co-functioning of languages, words and their meanings exists alongside the collection of equally indistinct political qualities, things, and relations. Critically, language permeates politics and vice versa and interpreters are inevitably caught up in this relation.