Abstract International orders need shared knowledge and understandings: constructivist scholarship has established this much. Yet orders depend equally on what remains systematically unknown. This article argues that ignorance-production practices—what Peter Galison calls ‘antiepistemology’—are vital for making order. Building on the sociology of ignorance, I approach ignorance not as an aberration but as a productive social force constitutive of international order. Ignorance functions through two key pathways: it enables the intelligibility of ordering norms, and it manages the dissonance between proclaimed norms and actual behaviour. All international orders require an antiepistemology, yet they deploy distinct combinations of ignorance-production practices: positive (e.g., the fabrication of falsehoods), negative (e.g., the dismissal of uncomfortable knowledge), and subtle, grey-area practices (e.g., strategic ambiguity). Examining how the liberal international order, the China order and the ‘Make America Great Again’ order sustain their respective claims about human rights, sovereignty and ethnonationalist civilizationism reveals how proponents of each vision employ different ignorance regimes to preserve coherence in domains central to their legitimacy. The stakes of this analysis extend beyond theoretical reframing: artificial intelligence threatens to disrupt existing antiepistemologies by collapsing the distinction between knowledge and ignorance altogether. Recognizing ignorance as constitutive of order reframes our understanding of the current moment and the future possibilities for world politics.
Karim El Taki (Wed,) studied this question.