Ignorance is power: the antiepistemology of international order International orders need shared knowledge, but they also depend equally on what remains systematically unknown. This article shows how recognizing ignoran

Link to the article (open access): doi.org/10.1093/ia/i...

The argument has implications beyond our conceptual understanding of international order(ing). As we hurtle toward the AI age, traditional boundaries between knowledge and ignorance begin to dissolve, transforming the very foundations on which all social orders are built.

Examining in turn the LIO and human rights, the China order and sovereignty, and MAGA and ethnonationalist civilisationism, I show that proponents of different ordering visions deploy distinct ignorance regimes to preserve coherence in domains central to their legitimacy.

In this sense, ignorance is not an anomaly or a deficiency, but a productive social force, as sociologists of ignorance have argued before me.

Ignorance operates through two key pathways: it enables the intelligibility of ordering norms in the first place and manages the dissonance between proclaimed norms and actual behaviour.

Whether it's the liberal order, the China order, or the MAGA order, all rest on antiepistemological foundations – systematic practices of producing not-knowing. These range from positive (eg. disinformation) to negative (eg. dismissal) to grey-area forms (eg. silence).

All international orders depend on systematic ignorance production. That’s what I argue in my fresh-out-of-the-oven @iajournal.bsky.social article.

We were privileged to have you among us, Irene. Thank you for making it and for your constant engaging reflections throughout!

Yes, absolutely. We're expecting publication as a special issue in Middle East Critique later this year. We'd be delighted to have your thoughts on the papers as they come out.

... Gianni Del Panta, @irenefmolina.bsky.social, @gabrielgarroum.bsky.social, Funda Hülagü, Salwa Ismail, Hazem Kandil, José Ciro Martínez, Glen Rangwala, Gökhan Şen, Lisa Wedeen, and Michael Willis.

Above all, our thanks go to the workshop participants -- contributors and discussants -- for genuinely stimulating and formative conversations over many hours in the last couple of days: Maha Abdelrahman, Madawi Al-Rasheed, Andrew Arsan, Lina Benchekor, Amel Boubekeur, Ahmed Dailami...

The workshop wouldn't have been possible without the invaluable support of Pembroke College, the Margaret Anstee Centre for Global Studies, and the Cambridge Centre for Southwest Asian and North African Studies. Special thanks to @meznaqato.bsky.social for her support in making this happen.

The papers we discussed will form a special issue in Middle East Critique, an ideal platform to critically interrogate the analytical and political articulations of the two concepts. Many thanks to Matteo Capasso for endorsing the project.

... of the two words and what it reveals about social positionality, the structural determinants of the conflation of state and regime under global capitalism, the varied ontologies underlying conflicting conceptions of state and regime, and many other issues.

The workshop brought together an exceptional group of scholars with whom we were privileged to discuss questions such as whether state and regime are distinguishable (conceptually and empirically), the conditions under which we see distinction or fusion, the popular deployment...

Much scholarship shows slippage between these concepts. Their political use is not innocent either, with the Global South somehow uniquely having “regimes” -- a pejorative legitimating intervention. Look no further than the current war on Iran.

Over the past two days, @kaoutarghi.bsky.social and I hosted a workshop at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, to rethink the concepts of 'state' and 'regime' in the Middle East and North Africa.

Are you a researcher working at a EU university? Are you fed up with our institutions turning a blind eye to genocide? Consider signing this. uppsaladeclaration.se/europe/

Absolutely. And great to hear about the writing exercise! I’m teaching this academic skills course next month and plan to do most activities in class. Looking forward to my therapeutic treat haha 😇

They’re not any lazier than we were. The temptation to outsource to AI is real and I totally get why they turn to it. Just irks me how central the technofascists have become to whole generations’ education.

Wait, I didn’t know about feeds! Any in particular you’d recommend?

Something about the algorithm here feels off. Sure, it’s better than the racist sexist shithole Twitter has become. But it somehow manages to be consistently boring, keeping the spicy and interesting bits that do exist away from me. (Or is it me who hasn’t “trained” the algorithm to know me enough?)

Desperate to show they’re still somehow relevant but who fucking cares

Wow, hunger really went rogue in Gaza. And that food! So rude of it to stop going in. If only someone would kindly tell it to go in and the dying to stop!

A lost peace: great power politics and the Arab-Israeli dispute, 1967–1979 Published in Contemporary Levant (Ahead of Print, 2025)

New online from @contemplevant.bsky.social: @karimeltaki.bsky.social reviews A lost peace: great power politics and the Arab-Israeli dispute, 1967–1979 by Galen Jackson: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Job alert!
Fully-funded PhD @facultyofartsug.bsky.social, with myself, @karimeltaki.bsky.social and @bherborth.bsky.social on post-imperial geopolitical imaginations in/of the Arab world.

Please help spread the word among interested candidates!

Full details here: karimeltaki.com/phd-position...

Last few days to send us your abstracts! More below 👇

If you are interested in participating in this project, or know someone who might be, please don't hesitate to contact me with any questions, share the call for submissions, and send us your contribution.

More information here 👇

Rather than dismissing this conflation as a flaw, we propose a critical examination of its origins, mechanisms of reproduction, and analytical and political implications for understanding power in the region.

📄 Research articles, 8-9k words
💬 Workshop in June 2025

Call for Submissions for a Special Issue in Middle East Critique entitled 'Rethinking State and Regime in the Middle East and North Africa: Conceptual, Historical, and Methodological Clarifications'

📢 CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Together with @kaoutarghi.bsky.social, we are curating a special issue for Middle East Critique that seeks to address a fundamental challenge in Middle Eastern and North African politics scholarship: the persistent conceptual confusion surrounding ‘state’ and ‘regime.’