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Working Lunch with Maria Birnbaum: “Politics of Ignorance: The Power of Not Knowing”
Maria Birnbaum gave a presentation entitled “Politics of Ignorance: The Power of Not Knowing” at the working lunch on 11 December 2024, focusing on the meaning, practice, and power of ignorance in the context of international politics. The event was organized by the Institute for European Global Studies.
The starting point of Dr. Birnbaum’s current project was the strange appointment of Cyrill Radcliffe as Chairman of the British Empire’s Punjabi Boundary Commission (1947), who was considered as an ideal candidate due to his near-ignorance of knowledge about India at the time. During this study “in dusty archives in Oxford,” Maria’s main explanatory principle shifted from “Imperial Arrogance” to “Imperial Ignorance” – the latter concept she hoped to work on. In addition to the relationship between the ignorance and neutrality demonstrated in this case, she also illustrated how ignorance relates to the maintenance of power and the identity of selfhood by reviewing studies on ignorance in various disciplines, including history, anthropology, politics, and sociology. She then pointed out that there is little research on the relationship between ignorance and the socio-political order – or, more specifically, a change thereof.
After introducing the current gap in the field, Maria shared her thoughts on the methodologies in her project. She took silence, invisibilities, and forgetfulness as examples, and claimed that these concepts should be studied relationally. She then briefly outlined her three proposed case studies, where she intends examine practices and “performativity” of ignorance found around the world: 1) collective action by African American women like the “Rest is Resistance” movement, which challenges ignorance in the form of a resistance against hateful racist “knowledge” that must be “unlearned”; 2) governments of the Arctic North employing ignorance as an instrument of power which is protested by indigenous and environmental groups; 3) ignorance being applied as a source of political change with regards to Middle Eastern affairs.
During the lively discussion, the audience raised various questions about the project, ranging from the boundaries of the concept of “ignorance” or “not knowing,” to scenarios in which different forms of ignorance are instrumentalized, which deepened the understanding of both the presenter and the audience.
Maria Birnbaum is a post-doctoral researcher at swisspeace and the University of Basel. She holds a PhD in Social and Political Science from the European University Institute and is an associate researcher at the Institute for Advanced Studies associated with the University of Princeton and the University of Bern.