Epistemology first.

‘What are the grounds for knowledge claims?’ asked Sandra Harding (1992) in her seminal work on standpoint theory and ‘strong objectivity’. Revisiting questions about the validity of knowledge claims appears urgent today when the Oxford English Dictionary has consecrated ‘post-truth’ as the new word of 2016.1 Declarations of an age of post-truth abound across the political spectrum. Echoes of post-truth debates have been felt in critical security studies and international relations, as well as the social sciences more widely, including science and technology studies (e.g. Berling and Bueger, 2017; Fuller, 2016a, 2017; Jasanoff and Simmet, 2017; Sismondo, 2017). Diagnoses of ‘how we got here’ rushed to pinpoint the role of social media, Facebook ‘echo chambers’, the decline of the print press that had long sustained our ‘imagined communities’, but also the role of post-structuralist approaches, the so-called postmodern intellectuals, and science and technology studies ideas of the ‘universalization of symmetry’ (Fuller, 2016a, 2017). Post-structuralist, feminist and postcolonial approaches have dismantled the universality of truth and have exposed the power relations that underpin different regimes of truth. Understanding knowledge as something that is socially and politically enacted – that is, acted into being as well as acted upon – rather than methodologically derived from or corroborated by empirical worlds has put such approaches back in the dock for having done the intellectual groundwork for the current rise of post-truth. Such accusations are not new and are not limited to political fluctuations. From its inception, anti-foundational work that did not primarily ground knowledge in epistemological standards was challenged on grounds of undermining the possibilities of scientific knowledge in international relations (Keohane, 1988).

Recent engagements with questions of method and methodology in critical security studies have also rearticulated the question of validity, in particular how to make valid empirical statements within critical security studies. These attempts to formulate standards of validity have returned largely to epistemological debates, focused on the similarities or differences between qualitative and quantitative methods. They have sought to define standards that are internal to knowledge, rather than social or historical. In particular, standards of rigour, systematicity, objectivity and consistency have been invoked, contested and rearticulated (e.g. Hansen, 2006; Jackson, 2011; Klotz and Lynch, 2007; Salter, 2012).

Although at first sight current post-truth debates and methodology questions within critical security studies do not seem to have much in common, they engage similar stakes concerning the status and validity of critical knowledge. Moreover, in the context of claims about ‘post-truth’ and accusations directed at particular kinds of critical work, revisiting the claims to validity in critical security studies and international relations will become politically intense (again). By taking the quest for validity in critical security studies seriously, we can also reformulate the debates around post-truth. Drawing on science and technology studies, we want to reposition debates about standards of validity in critical security studies and international relations by placing them in a line of thought that attends to the co-constitution of knowledge and power, science and society.

For example, critical approaches in security and international relations have drawn attention to the mechanisms of governing through risk and their pernicious political a series of analytical tools effects by deploying such as preemption, exceptionalism, (racializing) biopolitics or ‘social sorting’. Yet what has been missing in these critical analyses has been the struggles over the validity of the statistical production of risk versus big data analytics and their mobilization for the purposes of counter-terrorism. This cannot be simply an epistemological debate about the standards of validity of statistics or big data and their methodological limitations. It demands looking at how statistics played a key role in making the nation-state and in the conduct of national social policies since the 17th century. It also demands exploring how current economic and social changes are related to the increasing use of big data analytics in governance practices, from local governments and states to the UN Global Pulse initiative to accelerate the adoption of big data for humanitarian action. The disputes are taking place at least as much in different policy circles, private markets and judicial sites defining what is acceptable evidence in court cases, media, and so on, as in the scientific community of statisticians, computer scientists, psychologists and political scientists. This brief example shows that acquiring knowledge-validating power derives from gathering and sustaining credibility in and across multiple sites rather than from epistemologically grounding it in scholarly practice as such.

Therefore, rather than either developing or jettisoning epistemological and methodological standards of validity, we propose to understand the validation of critical knowledge production through the assembling of credibility. In our approach, credibility is not a new standard. Assembling credibility captures the practices of making, circulating and crediting of knowledge, which are neither internal nor external but transversal to social sites. Assembling credibility thus draws attention to the impossibility of a strict separation of internal conditions of validity and external social and political factors.2 It is transversal in that it understands conditions and practices of validation to depend on connections that work across multiple fields – for example, the scientific field, the legal field, the bureaucratic field and the diplomatic field in cases such as inquiries into crimes against humanity and the use of big data analytics in counter-terrorism.

To develop our argument about the importance of credibility to critical security studies, we proceed in three stages. The first section gleans a series of recent moves in critical work on (in)security to claim epistemological and methodological validity to argue that it is indicative of a desire for scientificity. Thus, recent critical scholarship is set at odds with the post-structuralist and feminist debates of the 1980s and 1990s, which worked through the implications of taking knowledge as socially and politically enacted. In the second section, we revisit the debate between Bourdieu and science and technology studies to develop an alternative conception of validity that questions the existence of a strict boundary between scientific and other areas of practice. This leads us to a conception of assembling credibility in which the latter operates through the formation and circulation of credits and credentials, along with negotiations and disputes over credence and credulity in transepistemic arenas.3 Finally, we caution against organizing debates in terms of post-truth and propose assembling credibility as a critical mode of engaging questions related to the validity of knowledge.