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Abstract

This article examines the meaning and implications of doing epistemic justice in the study of International Relations through the prism of the recovery of the international thought of Fannie Fern Andrews and Amy Ashwood Garvey and in dialogue with feminist epistemology. It argues that doing epistemic justice involves going beyond restorative justice for excluded voices in which the historical record is set straight, inclusionary justice in which previously excluded voices are added to disciplinary conversations, and transformative justice, in which the perspectives of the marginalised and oppressed become sources of epistemic authority and new knowledge. Over and above all of these things, doing epistemic justice entails practising a particular kind of epistemic collective responsibility, which actively and reflexively recognises and engages with power-laden relations between knowers, worlds and audiences in the production of international thought, then and now.

Keywords

Knowledge international thought epistemic justice gender race epistemology

Introduction

Over the last two decades, International Relations (IR) scholars have become increasingly concerned about questions of epistemic injustice in IR knowledge production. These are complex questions that combine ethico-political concerns about harms done to individuals and communities by the production and application of IR knowledge with epistemic concerns about how these injustices have produced partial, distorted or false accounts of world politics and the history of international thought. Simply put, work on epistemic injustice is concerned with harms done to both knowers and knowledge by predominant epistemic frameworks, by prevailing citation and pedagogical practices and by assumptions about appropriate genres for the expression of IR knowledge. In practice these dimensions of epistemic injustice are not clearly separable. Harms include the denigration and silencing of whole populations and categories of person as authoritative knowers (Dotson, 2011; Tickner and True, 2018; Trownsell, 2022), the complicity of IR knowledge with racist, sexist, colonial practices of IR (Anievas et al., 2014; Sabaratnam, 2020; Van Milders and Toros, 2020), damaging effects on the lives and careers of scholars (Maliniak et al., 2013; Owens, 2018; Owens et al., 2022a; Phull et al., 2019) and drastic limitations and distortions on the range of knowledge, ideas and methods available for understanding international and global politics (Ackerley et al., 2006; Bell, 2019b; Causevic et al., 2020; Dauphinee, 2010; Tucker, 2018).

The identification of epistemic injustice in IR knowledge has been accompanied by demands for change. Accounts of what this might mean range from making IR knowledge more inclusive of neglected sources of epistemic authority to replacing dominant epistemic paradigms with those that have been silenced and marginalised or with those committed to the emancipation of the silenced and marginalised (Ackerley et al., 2006; Brigg et al., 2022; Causevic et al., 2020; Hagmann and Biersteker, 2014; Loke and Owen, 2022; Van Veeren, 2019; Woons and Weier, 2017). Doing epistemic justice appears variously as a matter of restorative justice, inclusionary justice and transformative justice. The aim of this article is to examine the implications for IR knowledge production of addressing epistemic injustice drawing on the example of the identification and recovery of the thought of Fannie Fern Andrews (1867–1950) and Amy Ashwood Garvey (1897–1969). The argument builds on but also complicates predominant accounts of what doing epistemic justice entails.

There is now a body of work on women’s international thought in the early to mid-20th century, in which IR was becoming established as a discrete field of academic enquiry (Blain, 2018; Owens, 2018; Owens and Rietzler, 2021b; Owens et al., 2022b; Sluga, 2014, 2017; Sluga and James, 2016; Stöckmann, 2018, 2022; Umoren, 2018). The emerging literature on women’s international thinking has demonstrated the falsity of the claim of women’s absence, which remains commonplace in IR textbooks, canons of international thought and intellectual histories (Owens and Rietzler, 2021a). It has identified hundreds of women thinkers and opened up their ideas and texts for examination (Owens et al., 2022b); epistemic communities in which women shaped emergent intellectual agendas in the study of IR (Confortini, 2012); rich intellectual legacies outside of the academy and elite circles in the work of women activists and revolutionaries (Rupp, 1998; Umoren, 2018). It has established the importance of women-dominated professional work in shaping the study of international and world politics (Huber et al., 2021; Rietzler, 2022). It has also begun to identify some of the mechanisms through which women’s thought vanished from accounts of the history of international thought (Hutchings and Owens, 2021).

The recovery of women’s thought has brought a familiar catalogue of harms to the surface: women’s denigration as authoritative knowers; the active reproduction of sexist assumptions about who counts as an international actor; the misogynistic damage done to women’s careers by male scholars and patriarchal institutions; and the distortions to IR knowledge that have followed. Nevertheless, it is not clear that this recovery work has affected or will affect the reproduction of IR knowledge in mainstream textbooks, canons, curricula and research. Previous history suggests that developments in IR research and pedagogy linked to gendered and racialised bodies is liable to ghettoisation, the attribution of status as a ‘critical’ perspective but not as core to disciplinary knowledge (Carpenter, 2007; Foster et al., 2012; Mügge et al., 2018; Owens, 2018; Phull et al., 2019; Tyler, 2012). This article builds on the recovery history already accomplished to make explicit the epistemic reasons why doing epistemic justice to historical women is not only about doing better intellectual history, but also about our epistemic responsibilities in producing knowledge about international and world politics today.

In the first section of the article, drawing on the examples of Fern Andrews and Ashwood Garvey, I use insights from feminist social epistemology to draw out the nature of the epistemic injustices done and how they might be redressed. In the second section, drawing on the same cases, I examine the nature of epistemic injustice beyond direct discrimination against individual thinkers on grounds of race, sex and class. The arguments of the first two sections suggest that restorative and inclusionary epistemic justice do not exhaust the meaning of epistemic justice, because they depend on an oversimplified understanding of knowledge production. In the third section, I consider the significance of transformative accounts of epistemic justice, drawing on standpoint epistemologies and epistemologies of ignorance. I argue that these arguments enrich our understandings of epistemic injustice, but that they need to incorporate insights into the production of knowledge that emerge out of historical work. I then develop an account of the meaning of epistemic justice for contemporary IR scholarship. On this account, doing epistemic justice as an international thinker, entails practising a particular kind of epistemic collective responsibility, which actively and reflexively recognises and engages with power-laden relations between knowers, worlds and audiences in international thinking, then and now. This work has an irreducibly historical, genealogical dimension, resists epistemological quick fixes and is a political, pedagogical and open-ended task.

Epistemic injustice in the history of international thought

The last two decades have seen a blossoming of work on the overlapping but distinct fields of history of international thought and the disciplinary history of IR. The history of international thought as a field of enquiry has a much longer historical trajectory than the discipline of IR. It includes work on canonical thinkers, but also on histories of concepts, ideologies, institutions, organisations, political movements and professions that have shaped ways of thinking about international, imperial and global relations across historical time. In contrast, disciplinary history is concerned with establishing and explaining the foundation and development of the study of IR as an academic field of enquiry. The study of the history of international thought has been pioneered by intellectual historians (Armitage, 2012; Bell, 2007; Sluga, 2013), although increasingly IR scholars have also produced specialist work on historical thinkers (Bell, 2019a); disciplinary histories have been developed by IR scholars and by historians focussed on histories of knowledge production in the social sciences (Ashworth, 2014; Guilhot, 2011; Schmidt, 1998; Schmidt and Guilhot, 2019; Stöckmann, 2022; Vitalis, 2015). These historical fields of enquiry intersect in a variety of ways, most obviously in the role that the history of international thought plays in the education of IR scholars and in forming and accounting for the repertoire of concepts and theoretical frameworks that define the contemporary field. IR scholars do not need to be experts on historical figures such as Machiavelli or Morgenthau, but it is expected that they recognise what kind of approach to their field of enquiry these figures represent. The history of international thought is an intrinsic part of IR and its reproduction as an academic discipline (Hutchings and Owens, 2021).

From at least the late 19th century, women thinkers contributed to conceptual debates about IR (Ashworth, 2021; Owens et al., 2022b). There is an historical irony in the fact that the person who coined the expression ‘international thought’ disappears from histories of international thought written since the middle of the 20th century (Sluga, 2021: 224). The fate of Florence Melian Stawell’s work is emblematic of many other women international thinkers. This fate is complex. In some cases, women’s international thought had appreciative audiences in its own time, within and outside of the university. Even where they may have had initial recognition, the exclusion and marginalisation of women thinkers was often accomplished later, from the mid-20th century onwards, as IR became an established field of academic enquiry, the IR canon was constructed and the textbooks were written for IR students (Hutchings and Owens, 2021; Owens and Rietzler, 2021a; Owens et al., 2022a).

The exclusion and marginalisation of women thinkers in the history of international thought is an obvious case of epistemic injustice, in which unwarranted harms to women as thinkers, to the accuracy of histories of international thought and to the epistemic resources of international thought have been done. Within contemporary social epistemology, the thinker who has done most to define and develop the concept of epistemic injustice is Miranda Fricker, a British philosopher whose work draws on feminist and social epistemology as well as virtue ethics. She developed the term ‘epistemic injustice’ to capture ways in which subject knowers are unjustly discredited as epistemic authorities and her work has been widely debated in social and critical epistemology literatures (Coady, 2010; Fricker, 2010: 175, 2016, 2017; see also: Alcoff, 2010; Anderson, 2012; Kidd et al., 2017; Medina, 2012; Polhaus, 2012). The book in which she sets out her main argument is focussed largely on testimonial epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007: 17–19, 30). The exemplars Fricker (2007) has in mind are knowledge claims made by women and/or Black and/or non-heteronormative subjects that are discounted or disbelieved by hearers because of what she terms ‘identity prejudice’ on the part of those hearers concerning the speaker or the style in which their claims are expressed (pp. 14–15).

Testimonial injustice occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word. (p. 1)

- those social groups who are subject to identity prejudice and are thereby susceptible to unjust credibility deficit will, by the same token, also tend simply not to be asked to share their thoughts, their judgements, their opinions - - -. This kind of testimonial injustice takes place in silence. (p. 130)

If we think of testimony as claims to knowledge made by a specific, identifiable author, then the category can be extended to written as well as spoken testimony and to discrimination in readers’ as well as hearers’ responses to particular authors’ claims about the world and the styles and genres in which they are expressed. To illustrate this, let us look at the cases of Fern Andrews and Ashwood Garvey. The two women belonged to different generations but they were both active in thinking about international and imperial relations in the period between 1914 and 1945 during which IR emerged as a distinctive field of intellectual enquiry, and which was retrospectively definitive of IR’s disciplinary identity after 1945 (Thies, 2012). They also form a strong contrast in terms of the substance and style of their international thinking, which is helpful for teasing out the complex forms that epistemic injustice takes. In both cases there is already a body of work that has started to recover their international thought and the reasons why they are ‘disappeared’ in histories of international thought in the second half of the 20th century (Huber et al., 2021; Shilliam, 2021). This work has demonstrated that the substance and style of their thought, when linked to their identities as privileged White woman, on one hand, and marginalised Black woman, on the other, discredited their authority as international thinkers for gatekeepers of IR knowledge.

Fern Andrews was a teacher and educational reformer, a key player in influential transnational networks of peace activism, and held official positions in government (Fern Andrews, 1948; Snider, 1997). She was a leader of the movement to integrate peace into citizenship education in the school curriculum and later was heavily involved in the Central Organisation for a Durable Peace (CODP) (Cabot et al., 1914; Huber et al., 2021; Martin et al., 1906; Owens et al., 2022b: 536–540; Stöckmann, 2022; Threlkeld, 2017). Central to Fern Andrews’ international thought was the importance of the personal development and skills of pupils at all educational stages, with students being taught how to cultivate empathy to resolve conflicts at the interpersonal level, and to scale this up to the international through learning to understand and identify with foreign ‘others’ (Cabot et al., 1914; Fern Andrews, 1948: 28–46; Huber et al., 2021: 127–130; Threlkeld, 2017: 518). Fern Andrews was an expert on international law and committed to the construction of a law governed international order (Fern Andrews, 1924). She completed a PhD at Harvard in 1923 on issues inherent in the League of Nations mandate system. It was well-received by experts at the time (Fern Andrews, 1948; Huber et al., 2021: 131; Stöckmann, 2022: 3). She later embarked on fieldwork in Palestine and published a book, The Holy Land Under Mandate (Fern Andrews, 1931), in which she wrote impressionistically about the experience of being in the region, and: ‘also accurately analysed the Mandates system at work and, crucially, the United States’ part in it’ (Huber et al., 2021: 131).

In the first decades of the 20th century, Fern Andrews was a very well-known authority on IR as both a peace educationalist and expert in international law. Nevertheless, her name disappeared from IR’s account of itself, even as an example of the despised ‘idealist’. Although we do not yet have the full story of the mechanisms through which her exclusion was accomplished, there are some clues in the historical record uncovered so far. In their discussion of her work on the mandate system, Huber et al. note that Fern Andrews was not able to get her PhD published, in spite of its dealing with a very hot topic at the time and being positively endorsed by other experts in international law. In part because of this, Fern Andrews did fieldwork in Palestine to write a book that was more publishable, written in a non-academic travel-writing, autoethnographical style. The book was published but male IR scholars, Quincy Wright and Raymond Leslie Buell, both of whom had used Fern Andrews scholarship in their own work and applauded her understanding of the mandates system, objected to the book’s impressionistic tone and ‘coded her book as emotional and thus unserious’ (Huber et al., 2021: 130–131). Fern Andrews was caught in a double bind. Her mainstream, technical academic work could not get a publisher, she wrote a book in a more ‘feminised’ style to get her analysis in the public domain, which was then condemned for being ‘unserious’. To write and speak as a woman seems to make it more difficult for the worth of ‘serious’ academic work to be recognised, while also lending itself to the feminisation and concomitant denigration of what is written and said (Caroll, 1990; Hutchings and Owens, 2021).

The modes in which Ashwood Garvey becomes a victim of epistemic injustice are more complex and over-determined. In contrast to Fern Andrews, she suffers from pre-emptive epistemic injustice because it is presumed that she is the kind of person and thinker that can have nothing to do with international thought. Ashwood Garvey undermined the foundations of what Fern Andrews, Wright and Buell would all have deemed to be international thought and did so completely outside of the academy (Blain, 2018; Martin, 2007; Reddock, 2014; Shilliam, 2021; Taylor, 2003). For Ashwood Garvey, European colonialism, imperialism and racism were the driving forces of contemporary national and international orders. Within Ashwood Garvey’s lifetime, her struggles for Black liberation encompassed Black Nationalism and the UNIA’s Pan-Africanist commitment to enable Black self-determination in Africa, anti-colonialism and also campaigning against discrimination against Caribbean immigrant communities in the United Kingdom in the 1950s (Shilliam, 2021: 174). In addition, as with many other Black women internationalists, she recognised and addressed the entrenchment of gender hierarchies in a racialised and colonial world order (Blain, 2018; Farmer, 2017; Martin, 2007: 74; Reddock, 2007: 259, 2014; Shilliam, 2021: 161, 169, 174; Taylor, 2003). Unlike Fern Andrews, Ashwood Garvey did not produce a large amount of text that survives in the form of curricula or of books and articles. Her international thought was articulated in speeches, journalism, theatre, the building of political networks and organisations and direct political interventions (Martin, 2007: 144–161; Shilliam, 2021; Taylor, 2008). Her thought is preserved in its resonances with her multiple audiences and collaborators as much as in the scattered reflections in her textual archive (Ashwood Garvey 2022; Martin, 2007: ix–xv; Taylor, 2008).

As has been well documented, Black nationalist and internationalist thought was pre-emptively deemed irrelevant to the Eurocentric and state-centric history of international thought as it was written in the latter half of the 20th century (Vitalis, 2015). In addition, as a Black woman whose thought was not collected and curated, Ashwood Garvey is pre-emptively epistemically victimised because of the ways in which her thinking is articulated. As Shilliam has argued, Ashwood Garvey’s theorising was that of what Ula Taylor refers to as a ‘street stroller’ or Keisha Blain a ‘street scholar’, a fundamentally oral, interactive, collaborative genre of thinking, developed in exchanges with particular audiences, which was distinguished by its capacity to respond to complexity and what would now be called ‘intersectionality’ (Blain, 2018; Shilliam, 2021: 168; Taylor, 2006, 2008). In addition, in common with many other women international thinkers, recognition of Ashwood Garvey’s international thought has tended to be overshadowed by attention paid to that of her husband (Bair, 1992: 164–165; Martin, 2007: 318). Within the UNIA itself, her divorce from Marcus Garvey, after their short-lived marriage, was accompanied by accusations against her of alcoholism, adultery and financial venality, which made her a highly controversial figure within the movement (Martin, 2007: 63; Taylor, 2003: 186). Until research on the history of Black women’s internationalism began to recover the role of women such as Ashwood Garvey, her work was marginalised within histories of Black Nationalism and anti-colonialism, as well as entirely missing from histories of international thought more generally (Blain, 2018; Blain and Gill, 2019; Cooper, 2017; Shilliam, 2021; Taylor, 2003, 2008; Umoren, 2018: 8–9). Even within the Black Nationalist movement that she helped to found, Ashwood Garvey’s identification as an immoral woman, whose life clashed with the gendered politics of ‘respectability’ characteristic of Black Nationalism, undermined the authority of her voice (Bair, 1992; Cooper, 2017; Taylor, 2003 – though see Farmer, 2017 for an alternative reading of the gendered politics of Black Nationalism).

Fern Andrews is discredited because she is identified with a particular kind of ‘virtuous’ woman in a context in which classically feminine, sentimental preoccupations were defined in contrast to male rationality. Ashwood Garvey is discredited for being a different kind of woman in a very different context, in which Black resistance movements were fighting against White sexualised stereotypes of Black women. In both cases perceptions of their individual identity and character corrupt the usefulness of their thought for particular audiences. On one hand, it is the women’s authority as knowers that is denied or side-lined, on the other, it is their insights into IR and world politics.

Fricker argues that the way to address this kind of epistemic injustice is through the cultivation of epistemic virtue, in which the recipient of knowledge claims learns to detect and correct for the influence of identity prejudice on their judgements (7; 86–108). Translated into the context of historical women international thinkers, this suggests that the remedy for epistemic injustice is to enable their knowledge claims to be read and taken seriously as bona fide elements of larger histories of international thought. This is restorative justice, in which the women are put back into narratives of the history of international thought, having previously been excluded. However, the reliance on individual epistemic virtue, though it may be necessary only goes part of the way to satisfy the requirements of epistemic justice (Fricker, 2010, 2017; Kidd et al., 2017). The focus on individual recipients of knowledge claims side-lines structural factors that constrain the acquisition of epistemic virtue and therefore the likelihood of a restoration of excluded thinkers to the mainstream history of international thought. Moreover, the assumption that ‘restoration’ can be accomplished at all fails to interrogate what it means to ‘put back’ women thinkers into what remains conceptualised as a pre-existing narrative. What if the women’s international thinking does not fit with pre-existing categories, and is therefore unrecognisable as thought? Even in the context of inter-individual claims about matters of fact one is reliant on existing conceptual resources and criteria as to what counts as knowledge and the expression of knowledge, for example, in different disciplinary contexts. This goes beyond the purview of any specific individual, most obviously when the focus is on historical claims to knowledge about IR that are embedded in specific historical and contemporary epistemic communities and contexts.

Epistemic injustice as structural injustice

There is more involved in the epistemic injustice from which Fern Andrews and Ashwood Garvey suffered than the unjust discrediting of their epistemic authority due to sexist, racist and class prejudiced attitudes. The reasons for their marginalisation relate also to the substance and frameworks of their thinking and its mode of expression. These are bound up with logics of feminisation and racialisation, not simply because of the characterisation of the knower as feminine, White or Black, but also by the characterisation of their knowledge/ thought as being unrecognisable as knowledge/ thought by different audiences at different times. Here we move away from individual prejudice towards the exclusions inherent in accounts of knowledge that become increasingly hegemonic in the academy through the 20th century. These exclusions are reinforced by the use of gendered and racialised categories to police the distinctions between what counts as knowledge or thought and what does not (Carroll, 1990; Gardner, 2003; Hutchings, 2008; Shilliam, 2021; Taylor, 2006; Weiss, 2009).

Huber et al. draw attention to ways in which Fern Andrews’ thought challenged emergent standards for what could count as international thinking as IR became established as an academic discipline. Fern Andrews argued for the importance of affect in perpetuating peaceful or warlike relations between peoples. This can be seen in the centrality of emotion and the aesthetic in her prescriptions for citizenship education (Fern Andrews, 1917), and in her alertness to the importance of collective feelings (‘the human aspect of the problem’) in the complex politics of the Palestinian mandate (Fern Andrews, 1931: 30; Huber et al., 2021: 131). Moreover, her account of the workings of the Palestinian mandate mixed conventional scholarship with descriptions of her personal journeys and responses to the geography, history, institutions and politics of the region and made reflexive connections between the findings of her research and her own positionality, contrary to assumptions of universality and/ or objectivity that later dominated what could count as international thinking (Fern Andrews, 1931; Huber et al., 2021: 131).

At the time Fern Andrews was writing, in the first decades of the 20th century, it was not unusual for ‘serious’ international thought to be expressed across a range of genres, or for close links to be made between the dispositions of individual citizens and the possibility of world peace (Bell, 2020; Owens et al., 2022a: 4; Roden Buxton, 1915). As IR became professionally institutionalised in the second half of the 20th century, neither emotions nor the identity or motives of the researcher were recognised as relevant to understanding and researching the workings of IR or international law. In Fern Andrews’ case, an incapacity to see her work as contributing to ways of understanding the international was exacerbated also by her association with a strand of ‘idealism’ that was retrospectively classified as naïve and unscientific in the aftermath of the Second World War (Guilhot, 2011; Schmidt, 2012; Thies, 2012). The form of epistemic injustice at stake here is not a matter of whether Fern Andrews’ specific claims, about the relation between the education of children’s emotions and peace, or of the relevance of the researcher’s experience to what is being researched, were or were not correct. Neither is it to do with direct identity prejudice against her as a woman. Rather, it relates to the gendered denigration and de-legitimation of her epistemic assumptions.

In the case of Ashwood Garvey, the epistemic blocks to the ability of disciplinary IR scholars to count her ideas as international thought are more profound than those of Fern Andrews. Fern Andrews is retrospectively identifiable as thinking in the wrong way, but the object of her analysis is still acknowledged to be the subject matter of IR and she communicated her thought in conventional outlets. By the time IR become institutionally embedded in academic departments during the Cold War, in contrast to its original concerns with race and imperialism, it defined itself as a field of enquiry centred on relations between states, making a very clear distinction between matters of domestic as opposed to international politics (Anievas et al., 2014; Bell, 2019a; Guilhot, 2019; Long and Schmidt, 2005; Vitalis, 2015). In this context, Ashwood Garvey’s emphasis on the transnational phenomenon of racial oppression, its manifestation in the control of the movement of racialised populations across borders, the injustice of colonialism and Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism as responses to that injustice, was not intelligible within prevailing disciplinary norms. Nor, of course, was her view of the significance of gender in racist, colonial and imperial oppression, and the ways in which it should be fought, intelligible for what became academic IR. Although the ‘woman question’ had been very deeply bound up with strands of international thinking in the earlier part of the century, questions of gender had become categorised as irrelevant in a field of enquiry dominated by the notion of states as key actors and, increasingly, by rational actor models of states and of elite foreign policy actors within states (Tickner and True, 2018).

As with Fern Andrews, the level at which epistemic injustice operates is not to do with the specifics of Ashwood Garvey’s analyses, which shift across time. The injustice involved is in the shutting down of what counted as legitimate analytical frameworks and objects of enquiry in IR. This clearly applied to a very large swathe of Black Nationalist, Black internationalist and, more broadly, anti-colonial thinking in the period in which histories of international thought, and canons of international thinkers, found their way onto the curriculum in the post-1945 period. In Ashwood Garvey’s case, her epistemic exclusion was reinforced by the ways in which she thought with categories of both race and gender (Martin, 2007: 225; Reddock, 2007, 2014; Shilliam, 2021; Taylor, 2003). It was further reinforced because her thought was primarily formulated and articulated orally, dialogically and collaboratively. As international thought becomes increasingly ‘canonised’ in the second half of the 20th century, individual authorship, texts and a level of systematicity become valorised as the only possible sources and types of ‘thought’. This means that Ashwood Garvey’s thought is not only particularly unlikely to be recognisable as ‘thought’, being neither primarily textual nor systematic, but is also much less likely to be recovered (Forestal and Philips, 2018; Hutchings and Owens, 2021; Kramnick, 2013; Smith, 2007; Weiss, 2009).

Extending the concept beyond transactional relations between particular authors and particular readers towards a more structural understanding changes the nature and scope of harms done by epistemic injustice and forces a rethinking of what may need to be done to redress it. Fricker attempts to conceptualise this sense of epistemic injustice in the idea of ‘hermeneutical injustice’, which she illustrates with the example of ‘sexual harassment’ (Fricker, 2007: 168–175). This concept, she argues, captured and opened up for analysis and judgement a phenomenon long experienced by women workers, but which they (and perpetrators) had previously not been able to articulate in ways that could be collectively understood and therefore addressed (Fricker, 2016: 149–152). Essentially, this move enables Fricker to preserve the possibility of progress towards universal, non-discriminatory knowledge, while recognising the pervasiveness of epistemic discrimination and pinpointing its injustice. However, as we have seen with Fern Andrews and Ashwood Garvey, this account of epistemic injustice is unpersuasive, it massively overstates the epistemic autonomy of individual ‘knowers’ as both victims and perpetrators of epistemic injustice and underestimates the structural, collective, collaborative and material conditions for knowledge claims. The epistemic injustice from which Fern Andrews and Ashwood Garvey suffered blurs distinctions between individual and collective agency, intentional and non-intentional epistemic injustice and between the transactional and the structural in the production and reception of knowledge. It is incompatible with a teleological model of knowledge as a process of inclusionary justice, in which epistemic frameworks which have been previously unheard or silenced are added to a common stock of conceptual resources for mutual benefit (Alcoff, 2010; Anderson, 2012; Medina, 2012; Polhaus, 2012; see responses: Fricker, 2010, 2016, 2017).

For Fern Andrews, her epistemic frameworks had, but then lost, credibility with different audiences at different points in time, and might be seen to have regained contemporary credibility in the study of IR by being linked to recent developments in IR research on emotion and autoethnography (Bleiker and Brigg, 2010; Van Rythoven and Sucharov, 2020). For Ashwood Garvey, the epistemic resources she drew upon were crucial to international thinking at an earlier stage and are again at the forefront of significant strands of international thinking within and beyond disciplinary IR today, and they were also intelligible to the audiences to whom she was (mostly) speaking at the time, even if contested (Anievas et al., 2014; Martin, 2007; Reddock, 2014). It is not the case that the epistemic resources employed by these thinkers were not there and could not be intelligible. Rather, they were differentially recognised and used by different epistemic communities in diverse spatial and temporal contexts (Medina, 2012). This includes their epistemic resources being effectively written out by a set of developments in the epistemic community of academic IR that then legitimated this exclusion in part by the feminisation and racialisation of those epistemic resources. In other words, there is more than straightforward identity prejudice or a lack of available, shared hermeneutical resources going on. Rather, there are bids for hegemony and counter-hegemony across time by epistemic communities with very different stakes in the economies of credibility they are defending and constructing. This means that if we are to do epistemic justice to women international thinkers we need to go beyond restoration and inclusion. In the following section, we turn to alternative transformative accounts of epistemic justice and consider them in the light of the cases of Fern Andrews and Ashwood Garvey.

Doing epistemic justice to knowledge and ignorance

Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice was published in the same year as Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, which built on Charles Mills’ work on the epistemic consequences of the ‘racial contract’ (Sullivan and Tuana, 2007) and on earlier Marxist and feminist standpoint epistemologies (Code, 1991; Haraway, 1991; Harding, 1991; Hartsock, 1998; Hill Collins, 1991; Mills, 1997, 2007, 2017):

- on matters related to race, the Racial Contract prescribes for its signatories an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made. (Mills, 1997: 18)

Mills’ work has been particularly influential because of the way that it captures the importance of the epistemic dimension to the politics of White supremacy. The epistemology of ignorance validates and reproduces mistaken perceptions of the world by Whites, or those identified with Whiteness, whether in the form of false claims to racial superiority or readings of history as progress. It blocks genuine understanding and explanation of the origins and history of European colonialism and the centrality of racism to Western modernity.

One could say then, as a general rule, that white misunderstanding, misrepresentation, evasion and self-deception on matters related to race are among the most pervasive mental phenomena of the past few hundred years, a cognitive and moral economy psychically required for conquest, colonization and enslavement. (Mills, 1997: 19)

In contrast, the falsity of dominant White representations of the world is easily recognised by those marginalised and oppressed by White supremacy. For Mills, those excluded by the racial contract are those who are best able to understand its workings, precisely because their own experience and interests enable them to know the actuality that contradicts White misrepresentations.

There is shared ground between Fricker’s and Mills’ concerns, both of them speak to the issue of epistemic injustice, and both associate this injustice with the systematic marginalisation and exclusion of certain categories of people from the prevailing knowledge economy. In addition, both argue for a veritistic epistemology, one that is oriented towards the establishment of authoritative knowledge and that does not embrace postmodernist relativism (Mills, 2017). Both thinkers connect doing epistemic justice to producing epistemically better understandings of the world, whereas Mills associates this better understanding with recognising the centrality of positionality to knowledge production (the structural standpoint of privileged or marginalised knowers), Fricker associates it with the neutralisation of bias and the growth of common, universally sharable and applicable resources for knowledge (Fricker, 2016).

Mills’ notion of epistemologies of ignorance, along with the Marxist and feminist standpoint epistemologies on which it draws, moves us away from the idea that doing epistemic justice is a matter of simply putting excluded thinkers, such as Fern Andrews and Ashwood Garvey back into histories of international thought, or extending existing epistemic frameworks and resources of international thought to make them more inclusive. It poses a much more radical challenge to prevailing knowledge production practices as being systematically embedded in the reproduction of ignorance and of relations of domination. Not only does it condemn as ignorance what is counted as knowledge, it connects the frameworks and resources of knowledge developed by oppressed populations with authoritative (or more authoritative) knowledge and with transformative epistemic and political possibilities. Instead of being about a process of correction and improvement, doing epistemic justice entails the transformation of prevailing knowledge economies. What does this imply for the kind of epistemic injustice/ justice being done in recovering the thought of Fern Andrews and Ashwood Garvey? How and to what extent is the knowledge produced through that recovery challenging or reinforcing ignorance in Mills’ sense? To answer these questions we must look more carefully at all of the dimensions of this recovery, which include the history of how Fern Andrews and Ashwood Garvey were able to be knowing subjects, the relation between their knowing subjectivity and the aspects of IR that they describe and analyse, their relation to the audiences to whom they communicated then, and to whom they may now communicate.

Fern Andrews was academically trained, she had a PhD, she published her thoughts in books and articles which were published under her name and was read by an educated, academic audience as well as by a wider public. All of this fits with the idea of an international thinker as an independent authority contributing to something pre-defined as ‘international thought’. What historical scholarship has shown us, however, is that if one looks more closely at how she was able to be a ‘thinker’ or ‘knower’, the picture becomes more complicated. As Lorraine Code puts it, every person as a knowing subject is always a ‘second person’, consciously and unconsciously incorporating epistemic assumptions and substantive knowledge acquired at secondhand in all of their claims to know (Code, 1991: 71–109). Fern Andrews capacity to be a thinker was clearly enabled by a range of intellectual and material conditions, most notably by the opening up of education and professional opportunities to women in the United States in the latter part of the 19th century and by her positioning within Progressive era circles. Her articulation of a particular brand of law-governed internationalism echoed and intertwined with strands of internationalist thought that were part of the social, intellectual and elite political circles within which she moved. Her educational work was collaborative and emerged out of the work of the American School Peace League (APSL). In the sole-authored book that grew out of her PhD research and then her fieldwork, Fern Andrews is explicit about all the ways in which her analyses rely on her own background assumptions, the scholarship of others and the particular sources she chose to inform her work, from newspaper articles to individual representatives of various groups and interests within the mandate region.

In terms of her relation as thinker to the objects of her analysis, we have seen that the international world to which Fern Andrews directed her attention had a particular form and substance. Its spatial and temporal dimensions were western-centric and civilisational, structured by broad historical trends towards the predominance of a specifically US model of the meaning of western civilisation (Snider, 1997; Threlkeld, 2017). As Threlkeld points out, it is clear in the formulation of her classes in citizenship education that the ideal-type of child being addressed in Fern Andrews’ curriculum was not the child of indigenous people, Black, poor or even the latest waves of immigrants – for all of whose difference the educable subject must acquire understanding and empathy (Threlkeld, 2017). As Mills put it, ‘The fish does not see the water, and whites do not see the racial nature of a white polity because it is natural to them, the element in which they move’ (Mills, 1907: 76). It is clear, from the political twists and turns of Fern Andrews campaigning, her resistance to grassroots activism within the ASPL, her distancing from the pacifist wing of the Women’s Peace Party and her entry into professional politics after the United States entered the war in 1917, that she increasingly identified the core drivers of change in international politics with a White and masculinist world of governmental and non-governmental elites, elites in which she participated as an activist and political professional. (Snider, 1997; Zeiger, 2003: 152). She was part of the world and audience that as an international thinker she was most keen to understand and address, and this limited as well as enabled what in that world she was able to understand and address.

This rather cosy and mutually resonant set of relationships, between thinker, world and audience allowed Fern Andrews to be recognised and even amplified her status as an authoritative international thinker for a period of time, but this changed as the alignment between her second personhood, her world and her audience shifted. While her own thinking as an internationalist and educational reformer did not change, the world in which she was positioned and to which her thinking related, both the first-order world of practices of IR and international law and the second-order world of international thought through which those practices were interpreted, did change. These changes were consolidated from the late 1940s as Fern Andrews’ position outside of the academy put her on the wrong side of lines being drawn between professional/ activist expertise and being an international theorist or social scientist. Interestingly, what was most obviously dissonant in her thinking from the point of view of the responses to her 1931 book on mandates, her focus on emotion and her situating of self in her research is potentially most resonant for certain strands of international thought within IR in the present.

As with many others whose ‘thought’ emerged outside of the academy in activism, journalism or other professions, the extent to which Ashwood Garvey is, in Code’s terms, a ‘second person’ seems much more obvious than in the case of Fern Andrews. In his biography, Tony Martin comments:

The Marcus Garveys, the W. E. B. Du Boises, the George Padmores, the Kwame NKrumahs, these were the superstars occupying the very highest echelon of Pan-African struggle. But also important for the history of Pan-Africanism were the countless lesser activists of the second, third and lower tiers - - -. Amy was certainly one such. (Martin, 2007: 318)

The point here is not to undermine the significance for Pan-Africanism of the superstar activists that Martin lists but to highlight some of the epistemic dangers of canonisation, in which certain leaders in practice and thought are lifted out of history and others remain mired in ‘second person’ status. Setting aside whether Martin is correct or not, his judgement echoes the assumptions of canonical thinking. ‘Superstars’ we understand are ‘first persons’ rather than ‘second persons’. They are less the product of embedded relations and of engagement with the epistemic frames and ideas of others than ‘lesser’ men and women, they shape and influence ideas and set the agenda for action in a way that others do not. Ashwood Garvey developed her analysis of world politics on the basis of her experience at different points in her life in dialogue, collaboration and contestation with personal (political) others, building on her Grandmother’s testimony about her heritage, developing ideas about Black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, racism, colonialism and gender from her engagement with British rule in Jamaica, the UNIA, with Garveyism, with anti-colonial activists, with women’s movements (Ashwood Garvey, 2022; Martin, 2007; Shilliam, 2021; Taylor, 2008). In Ashwood Garvey’s case, as for Fern Andrews, the enabling conditions for the development of her thought were tied to her intellectual and material conditions. However, whereas Fern Andrews formation as a thinker was in tune with perceptions of the world that at one time dominated thinking about IR, Ashwood Garvey’s thinking was shaped by her inhabiting of counter-publics that rejected mainstream Eurocentric, civilisational thinking about histories of nations and empires, following Mills’ metaphor, from the point of view of White ignorance she was a fish out of water (Medina, 2012; Mills, 1997: 76).

Ashwood Garvey inhabited the world of what Getachew has referred to as world makers, the anti-colonial activists pursuing visions of self-determination in the wake of Versailles (Getachew, 2019). Ashwood Garvey’s world upended Fern Andrews progressive, liberal internationalist vision. She could not have been the child to whom Fern Andrews spoke in the Course in Citizenship, or the peace activist and educator who sought to work within machinery and mind-sets set up by the Versailles peace process. Like Fern Andrews, she thought that race, imperialism and internationalism mattered, but in a wholly different way. Fern Andrews knew that the world was potentially united by a common teleology, Ashwood Garvey knew that it was fundamentally, hierarchically divided. Like Fern Andrews, Ashwood Garvey often spoke to audiences with whom her vision resonated, but within a world that was self-consciously dissonant to dominant narratives of world order, and one that actively contested the world Fern Andrews inhabited. In this respect, the legitimacy of the conceptual resources on which Ashwood Garvey’s thinking relied could be amplified in some contexts, but be virtually meaningless within mainstream debates in liberal internationalism or in post-war ‘scientific’ IR. In the current era, Ashwood Garvey’s thought resonates differently, confirming the growth in anti-colonial and decolonial theorising in IR.

Fern Andrews clearly enjoyed epistemic privilege, not just because she was rich and educated, but because she participated in a very successful strand of internationalist thought, which made a bid for epistemological and political hegemony in the early years of the 20th century. Her brand of internationalism put her, in her view and that of many of her peers, on the right side of history, entrenching, as it were, the invulnerability of her thought to changes in the first- and second-order worlds that she inhabited. In contrast to Fern Andrews, Ashwood Garvey’s understanding of the world was premised on the experience of her vulnerability to it, starting with the shocking revelation of the enslavement of her ancestors (Ashwood Garvey 2022). On her own account, this led her to fundamentally re-think the understanding of the world she acquired from her educators, to challenge rather than endorse the worldview that she was taught. Her marginalised positionality, in engagement with numerous others, enabled her to think the world differently and to be self-conscious about the link between knowledge and political commitments that stemmed from that positionality.

Restorative and inclusive forms of epistemic justice are focussed on the ‘knower’ and their ‘knowledge’ as if these existed in distinction from the worlds and audiences within which both knower and knowledge are situated and which they seek to affect. But, as recovery history shows, knowers, worlds and audiences are mutually constitutive. This directs our attention to the ways in which understanding mediates and is mediated by experience, including experience of, or exposure to, different epistemic communities, and by the interests and purposes to which experience gives rise. Fern Andrews and Ashwood Garvey have been marginalised as international thinkers by later scholarship. However, they occupied very different positions as producers of knowledge in their time. From the point of view of standpoint epistemologies and epistemologies of ignorance, the positionality of these two thinkers raises the question of whether recovering the thought of Fern Andrews is actually a work of epistemic injustice, given the way in which her thought is premised on, and reproduces, White ignorance. How can her ideas be seen as contributing to any kind of transformative agenda in IR thinking?

The notion of transformative epistemic justice shifts our attention to the contemporary effects of the recovery of marginalised and excluded thinkers and thought. As with restorative and inclusive models of epistemic justice, however, a tension emerges between the epistemic lessons learnt from the recovery of women’s international thinking and notions of transformative epistemic justice that rely on a static, binary distinction between knowledge and ignorance. Marxist, feminist and decolonial epistemologists have shown us that being a member of marginalised epistemic communities provides the possibility of novel, powerful insights because those insights do not derive from a standpoint according with predominant views about the direction of history or of what counts as scientific or objective. Exposure to alternative epistemic communities takes us out of the echo chamber of hegemonic knowledge production and invites reflection and challenge. It provokes thought in a more fundamental way than encounters with familiar ideas and arguments (Harding, 1991: 151: Hill and Collins, 2017: 120). Thought is expanded and adjusted through confirmatory relations between knowers, world and audience, more radical shifts in thinking emerge out of dissonance between these elements and contestation over the epistemic assumptions embedded in them.

However, what the recovery of international thinking of historical women tells us is that the way in which epistemic assumptions and substantive claims operate as confirmatory or transformative itself changes. To do epistemic justice to either Fern Andrews of Ashwood Garvey’s work involves more than restoring their epistemic authority as individuals, the inclusion of the conceptual resources on which their international thought drew in contemporary IR theoretical debates or the pre-emptive categorisation of their thought as oppressive or emancipatory. Rather, it involves doing justice to the ways in which at different points, including now, they played or could play a part in expanding or transforming international thought. This means looking carefully at the politics inherent in their production as knowers, the production of their knowledge, and the complicated relation between them as knowers, their worlds and audiences, then and now.

Code discusses the implications of the power of ignorance, in Mills’ sense, for the epistemic responsibilities of knowledge producers (Code, 2007). In contrast to Fricker’s conception of epistemic virtue, located in the individual and capable of correcting for discriminatory epistemic injustice, Code’s idea of epistemic responsibility is focussed on collective epistemic practices and premised on the embeddedness of all knowers in experience and in communities of knowledge production. To start from this understanding is to reject any ‘on-off switch’ that takes epistemic communities from darkness into light, either individually or collectively. Knowers are always vulnerable to the power of ignorance. There is no place of epistemic ‘innocence’ from which they can think, nor do they control the effects of their claims on different audiences in different times and places (226). One way to act on the epistemic responsibilities that follow from the messy and power-laden conditions in which knowledge is produced, Code argues, is to engage in the ‘patient, meticulous, gray’ work of genealogy (225). This is explicitly historical work that reveals how constraints on knowledge (the ways in which particular knowers and knowledge are legitimated) are constructed and resisted to demonstrate that these are not given or natural but historically contingent. Such historical work releases the theoretical imagination as to potential alternatives and is a reminder of the need for constant reflexivity on the part of epistemic communities, academic and otherwise. But the kind of transformation such work makes possible is never going to be a dramatic revolutionary shift enabled by a single revolutionary thinker. ‘Careful, often fragile, collective initiated change is the only possibility’ (225). Evidence of this type of transformative epistemic work has been uncovered by the historical investigation of women’s international thought, which has shown us the significance of collaborative knowledge production in contexts ranging from the professional work of women librarians, teachers and researchers to the collectivist, activist work of Black women in shaping anti-colonial and anti-racist international political theory (Blain, 2018; Farmer, 2017; Huber et al., 2021; Rietzler, 2022; Umoren, 2018).

As with other standpoint epistemologists and epistemologists of ignorance, Code argues that the shifting line between knowledge and ignorance is not an overarching epistemic failure stemming from human inadequacy, but rather an epistemic, ethical and political opportunity which producers of knowledge need to recognise and respond to with care (Hemmings, 2012; Hill Collins, 2017; Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis, 2002).

What it does, I think, is refocus epistemological inquiry away from unrealistic hopes for ubiquitous certainty, incontestably moral believing and knowing, and an overblown veneration of homogenous autonomy toward acknowledging the pervasiveness of ambiguity and human vulnerability, where the task is to work well with the responsibilities they engender. (Code, 2007: 226)

Conclusion

Recovery of past thinkers is often challenged by a ‘so what’ question. Why does the inclusion or exclusion of women thinkers in histories of international thought matter for the production of international thought in the present? The discussion of Fern Andrews and Ashwood Garvey spells out why this question is based on mistaken premises. The question assumes either a cumulative model of knowledge or a clear-cut distinction between knowledge that lives up to the ‘right’ normative standards and knowledge that does not. There is no simple answer to the ‘so what’ question because the degree to which international thinking will yield novel, powerful insights is thoroughly dependent on the politics of the relation between knowers, worlds and audiences at any given time and place, including of course the present in which the work of historical thinkers may be being recovered. This means that doing epistemic justice is not about the restoration and inclusion of marginalised and silenced great thinkers in a new more comprehensive canon, nor about the replacement of one canon by another better or more emancipatory one, but about pedagogical practices grounded in epistemic humility in which the ways in which the credibility economy is constructed and transmitted are subject to scrutiny and always open to question.

Within this context the doing of epistemic justice to women as international thinkers involves the unpacking of how relations of privilege and of marginalisation are both at work in how ideas come to gain or lose epistemic authority. Historical work allows us to see how this is never a matter of free-floating ideas but of a complex and shifting relation between authors, their worlds and audiences. Fern Andrews work exemplifies White ignorance in her taking for granted of the progressive nature of a hierarchical racial and imperial world order, one that could be (and was) seen differently in her own time (Polhaus, 2012; Sholock, 2012). Why, therefore, is it worth excavating her thought and integrating it within the histories of international thought that we teach to our students? Concomitantly, should we not be focussing only on the thought of ‘really’ marginalised thinkers, such as Ashwood Garvey, whose ideas clearly challenge the epistemological mainstream in IR in both their content and form? The answer is that doing epistemic justice involves paying attention to the thinker, not as a ‘superstar’, but as a second person bound up with the world they are seeking to analyse and the audience to whom they speak, directly or indirectly, then and now. As in Code’s argument about the relations between historical, genealogical work and practising epistemic responsibility, recovering historical women’s international thinking reminds us of the complexity and power-laden nature of knowledge production, it demonstrates its contingent, constructed and political character and thereby encourages epistemic responsibility as ongoing, careful reflexivity. This reflexivity recognises that epistemic assumptions are reproduced precisely through the stories that academic disciplines tell about themselves and through the ways in which those stories are transmitted to the next generation of scholars through canons, textbooks and teaching. This level of reflexivity is likely to provoke what José Medina and Rachelle Chadwick refer to as ‘discomfort’ and Raluca Soreanu as ‘an unsettlement of the legitimate units in the organization of knowledge’. It troubles any particular set of assumptions embedded in IR economies of credibility, whether of a ‘positivist’ or a ‘critical’ kind. But this in itself opens up possibilities both for being able to better defend existing epistemic practices and the worlds in which they are embedded or alternatively for provoking change in disciplinary imaginaries (Chadwick, 2021; Medina, 2012; Soreanu, 2010: 382).

We cannot know the difference recovering the thinking of Fern Andrews and Ashwood Garvey, or the very many other women thinkers whose thought is now also being recovered, may make for contemporary international thinkers trying to comprehend their world. But the mere process of that recovery raises epistemic and ethico-political questions that should make us reflect on our own knowledge production practices and make us wary of claims to have identified definitive sources of epistemic authority. Interestingly, both Fern Andrews and Ashwood Garvey were acutely conscious of the role of affect and activist organisation in enabling new pathways for thought. For both of them change in epistemic assumptions followed from the education of feeling through collective effort. At the very least, introducing these women as epistemic authorities in accounts of the history of international thought shifts the affective climate in classrooms where students are unaccustomed to being taught liberal or Black internationalism with reference to women thinkers or to contextualising ‘thinking’ in its epistemic and material conditions. To make this change does epistemic justice, incorporating restorative, inclusive and transformative elements, by practising collective epistemic responsibility in Code’s sense. Because knowledge is produced through the interrelation between knowers, worlds and audiences, and because feminised and racialised subjects are much more obviously ‘second persons’ than ‘first persons’, recovering these thinkers challenges canonical thinking and the various ways in which conceptual resources for international thinking have been parsed and fixed as ‘theories’. It also challenges binary and static understandings of the relation between knowledge and ignorance. In this respect it is in line with work in IR epistemology that argues for the democratisation of knowledge production, pointing away from liberal and critical teleological understandings that posit an endpoint of ‘truth’ towards the irretrievably plural, contestable and political dimension of knowledge claims.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Many thanks also for comments from two anonymous referees, and for early feedback from members of the QMUL TheoryLab.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: Thanks are due to the Leverhulme Trust for funding the project ‘Women and the History of International Thought’ (RPG-2017-319) which supported the research for this article.

ORCID iD

Kimberly Hutchings

Author biography

Kimberly Hutchings is Professor of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of Kant, Critique and Politics (1996); International Political Theory (1999); Hegel and Feminist Philosophy (2003); Time and World Politics (2008); Global Ethics: An Introduction (2nd Edition, 2018); Violence and Political Theory (with Elizabeth Frazer, 2020). She is currently co-investigator for the Leverhulme-funded project, ‘Women and the History of International Thought’ (2018-2023) and Co-Editor of the anthology Women’s International Thought: Towards a New Canon (2022).

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Doing epistemic justice in International Relations: women and the history of international thought

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Epistemic injustice in the history of international thought

Epistemic injustice as structural injustice

Doing epistemic justice to knowledge and ignorance

Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Funding

ORCID iD

Author biography

References