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Mitchell Visiting Practitioner Fellows: Practitioner Exchange Series with visiting fellow Dr. Laurence Broers
In the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, decolonial debates have focused attention on the politics of epistemology shaping knowledge production about Russia’s neighbors. So often framed through the tropes of the crossroads, backyard or buffer, the central regions of Eurasia have rarely been centered in epistemological terms. This talk will focus on the South Caucasus, discussing the epistemological traditions shaping the production of political science knowledge about the region since it regained independence in 1991. It will explore the impacts of universalist knowledge prescribing transitions to democracy, the market and peace, and the policy knowledge wielded by practitioners, in framing the South Caucasus as a periphery destined for convergence with the West. The talk will also explore disparate approaches to asserting local knowledge, or ‘bringing the particular back in’. The result is a fiercely contested politics of particularism enacted between different epistemic approaches and actors, with a wider resonance for other ‘peripheral’ geographies confronting geopolitical subalternity in the production of knowledge about themselves.
