Between conspiracy and critique: the politics of epistemic insecurity in the “lab leak controversy”

Abstract Technoscientific controversies are not only public disputes over science and technology. Some of them may also evolve into security events that shape how security knowledge is produced and contested. A prime example of this dynamic is the “lab leak controversy” about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on this case, the article asks: how was the epistemic authority of liberal global health institutions challenged throughout this controversy, and how did this shape the prospects of making security public? To explore how the authority of established security knowledge producers is challenged and destabilized, the article introduces the concept epistemic insecurity and develops a framework for analyzing the construction, management, and political effects of epistemic insecurity. Through this lens, the paper studies the transformation of the “lab leak” conspiracy theory into an expert hypothesis considered by established political and scientific authorities and examines how this process interacted with the epistemic authority of global health institutions and shaped the space for their critique. It finds that the management of epistemic insecurity by liberal institutions initially delegitimized any critique and later led to the personalization and technocratization of critique, thus preventing a deeper critical reflection on the entanglements of science and security.