Beyond the Veil of Knowledge: Triangulating Security, Democracy, and Academic Scholarship

257 Pages·2019·0.987 MB·English

by  Piki Ish-Shalom

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Beyond the Veil of Knowledge
Is there a need to remodel constructivism to be more politically attuned? Be-
yond the Veil of Knowledge suggests that essentially contested concepts are a key
medium that politicians use to try to minimize public resistance to their polit-
ical goals. For constructivists, this means that the social construction of social
knowledge and the social world ought better to be understood as the sociopolit-
ical construction of sociopolitical knowledge and the sociopolitical world.
Intersubjective knowledge is very important, but so is background
knowledge that is sociopolitically orchestrated in line with political agen-
das and by political and rhetorical means. The fixation of meanings closes
off democratic contestation and, when it is successful, places democratic
agency in limbo and degrades democratic deliberation and its beneficial
qualities. Piki Ish- Shalom calls for an engaged academy: an academy that
mobilizes its resources to engage society and the polity to prevent the wa-
tering down of democracy, while helping to create a space for criticism. In
this book, he suggests several concrete measures for engagement, within
the three spheres of individual theoretical work, the academic community,
and society and polity.
Piki Ish- Shalom is Associate Professor of International Relations at the He-
brew University of Jerusalem.
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Beyond the Veil of Knowledge
Triangulating Security, Democracy,
and Academic Scholarship
PIKI ISH- SHALOM
University of Michigan Press F  Ann Arbor
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Copyright © 2019 by Piki Ish- Shalom
All rights reserved
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any
form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright
Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the
publisher.
Published in the United States of America by
the University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid- free paper
First published January 2019
A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978- 0- 472-1 3120- 4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978- 0- 472- 12466- 4 (ebook)
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This book is dedicated to Emanuel Adler and Shlomo Avineri,
who took me soaring high above the clouds.
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Part I:  Concepts and Politics
1 F Theoretical Framework 17
2 F Essentially Contested Concepts: Democracy and Security 43
3 F The Essential Contestedness of Concepts and Politics 69
Part II: Engaged Academia
4 F The Responsibility to Engage 97
5 F The Individual Level: Zooming In, Zooming Out 105
6 F The Second Level: The Community of Communities 117
7 F The Third Level: Structural Problems 133
8 F Traveling Forward in Time: Forecasting and Realizing
the Spread of Democracy 151
9 F Moving Away from the Heart of Darkness:
Advising the Security Sectors 175
Conclusions: Having an Engaged Academia
in a Conceptually Contested Environment 195
Appendix: “Megalim Olam” 205
Notes 211
References 219
Index 239
Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform
via the following citable URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9852588
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Acknowledgments
We live in (yet again) troubled times, in which democracy is on the defen-
sive. When I started this project, sometime around 2010, my worries were
mainly for the state of democracy in my own country, Israel. Since then
more and more countries have entered the orbit of democracy in duress.
This process lent urgency to my project, urgency that I could not face ex-
cept in the tranquil and unhurried manner of academia. This is probably
why it took me almost a decade to write and publish this book. I cannot
but wonder how much longer it would have taken without the sense the
urgency.
The years it took to write this book explain the long list of people I
want to thank. I will start and end my acknowledgments with the same
addressees of my first book, a good sign for some continuity in my way
of thinking and living. I hope the book will prove that on top of the con-
tinuity there are also advantageous changes and development. Thus, my
first thanks go to those known by the professional title of “anonymous
reviewers.” They are “us” in the broadest sense, in the amorphous way that
academia is a community, an amorphous way I will try to concretize and
morally argue for in the second part of this book. My gratitude, indeed, is
to all of us who review and being reviewed, while keeping our sanity and
sense of responsible scholarship. I am especially grateful to those many
anonymous reviewers who met this project in its article and book forms,
reviewed it, commented on it, and pushed me to improve my arguments
and make the book what it is (though, as always, the mistakes still in it are
my own personal intellectual property).
But there are also those I know by name who in various ways have
helped me in writing this book. I offer my thanks to my two research as-
sistants, Viki Auslender and Or Israeli, who might well have lost hope that
anything would come out of this project but kept at it. And then there are
colleagues, some of whom read parts of the manuscript, many of whom