Knowledge Warfare: Social Scientists as Operators of Global Governance

Abstract

The future of the world depends on the knowledge we have of it. Keynes famously added to this that the world is ruled by the ideas of economists and political philosophers—and little else. But while nobody would dispute the power of ideas, Keynes forgot to add that ideas are always somebody's ideas. Social groups seek to monopolize the ideas they consider valuable and to discredit those that are a threat. Therefore symbolic struggles over legitimate principles of domination are not only ideational, as constructivists and discursive institutionalists argue. Unless fused with material interests, ideas or ideal interests are powerless (Weber in Gerth and Wright Mills 1991:280). They require the sustained mobilization of a variety of powerful carriers of convergent material and ideal interests—social groups such as politicians, experts, political activists, and journalists. From this perspective, global governance boils down to a constant, mainly upstream, “under the radar,” and politically defused warfare over the knowledge and interests that steer it. Social scientists play a key but concealed part in the steering of global governance in a variety of social roles and fields of action. They partake in the development of influential transnational professional groups that operate under and beyond global institutions (Kauppi and Madsen 2013). By producing practical knowledge for everyday or “banal” global governance, social scientists shape the politically imaginable …