Brain worlds: information order and interwar intellectual cooperation

Abstract

Information is ubiquitous in International Relations (IR), but typically gets treated as a self-evident epistemic resource. A burgeoning IR literature on the politics of knowledge resists such reification, but has not thus far examined information as such. Mobilising its constructivist premises in historical perspective, this article argues that information is not just an epistemic resource but also an ordering concept. The article examines its emergence in and around the interwar League of Nations Organisation for Intellectual Cooperation (OIC), a predecessor of UNESCO. It focuses on two notable but neglected proposals – Paul Otlet’s Mundaneum and H.G. Wells’ World Brain – which considered advances in microfilm storage and bibliography as opportunities to rethink global order. Worried about a crisis of ‘intelligence’ and reducing political conflict to information gaps, Otlet and Wells introduced systems that mimicked imperial global order: information could be organised, curated and shared to ‘diffuse the European mind’. To both, information was not just an epistemic resource but a means of global ordering. Crucially, promoting a world united by information was entirely compatible with infrastructurally reproducing an imperial division of the world by degrees of ignorance. League officials rejected the utopianism of these proposals but held on to the pacifying promise of information. Recovering this history shows how historical perspective allows us to contextualise artificially disembedded IR concepts and objects of governance. It also puts hopes for information as inherently pacifying into perspective: without considering the broader political embeddedness of information, such hopes risk leaving underlying hierarchies intact.