Doing International Relations from the local’s point of view? Situated knowledges, scientific inquiry, and the performative limits to social agency

The ‘turn to the local, micro, and situated’ has been one of the key developments in IR over the past decade. It has drawn attention to the need to re-center IR inquiry around the ‘lower levels of analysis where structures are enacted and contested’, and sensitized us to the importance of reflexive methods and methodologies to help us foreground situated knowledges and subaltern perspectives. A number of recent contributions have, however, highlighted the dangers of prioritizing the local becoming an unscrutinized end in itself. I build on these sympathetic warnings to problematize the tendency of the turn to the local to become subsumed into IR’s quest for epistemological reflexivity. I show how making the local into a source of epistemic authority leads to a ‘fetishization of difference’ that blurs the distinction between knowledge production and the practical struggles to assemble transformational agency. I draw on Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology of critique and performativity theory to outline an interactional (rather than constitutive) account of the ‘co-production’ of scientific knowledge and social order. I show how a relational and pragmatic analysis of transformational agency helps clarify the ‘meta-pragmatic function’ of (social) scientific inquiry in helping social actors reflexively un- and re-make social realities.