The Knowledge and threat construction: reflections on the sociopolitical impacts of the security “normative dilemma”

Abstract

This article seeks to understand the political impacts of knowledge and its consequences on the processes of threat construction, as described in the international security constructivist literature. For this, the work is based on the bibliographical reviewand problematization of theorists that, to some extent, equate the dynamics of the power-knowledge binomial, namely Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu and their correspondents in the field of International Relations, as Peter M. Haas and Jef Huysmans. The argument is that, in the context of international security, two dominant tendencies coexist: one of a more rationalist and positivist character, which understands the existence of a neutral relation between the production of knowledge and the decision making in the political arena, and another, with a critical foundation, for which the production of concepts invariably impacts political structures. In terms of international security, this impact is described by Huysmans’ concept of “normative dilemma”, whose principle is the idea that there is no innocent knowledge in this subfield, something that is attested by the analysis of the processes of securitization and threat construction and its relation to the reproduction of certain analytical and conceptual lenses. From a similar locus of observation, this work aims to explore the arguments of the two currents mentioned, in order to apprehend the impacts of knowledge and the normative dilemma in the threat construction. With this, it is intended to locate such a discussion in the broader debate on the sociopolitical role of academia in contemporary times.