Taking Knowledge Seriously: Towards an International Political Economy Theory of Knowledge Governance
Haggart, Blayne. “Taking Knowledge Seriously: Towards an International Political Economy Theory of Knowledge Governance.” In Information, Technology and Control in a Changing World: Understanding Power Structures in the 21st Century. Blayne Haggart, Kathryn Henne, Natasha Tusikov, editors. 25-52. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
The treatment of knowledge—most notably commodified knowledge—as a source and vector of power is a key blind spot in our understanding of the global political economy. This chapter offers a theoretical framework, based on the work of Susan Strange, for considering the relationship between what she called the “knowledge structure” and the other key sources of political and economic power—security, production, and finance. This framework is applied to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (now the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership) and the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (concluded in September 2018), demonstrating how a direct focus on knowledge governance reveals power relations and economic effects that are otherwise obscured.
Keywords: Theory; Knowledge