My first book.

Westmalle, BE 8.2024

At the end of last year, I published my first book. Essentially the publication of my doctoral thesis, Unthinking Epistemicide spans a decade of working on the simple question of why the West struggles to take other ways of knowing seriously. It does so by looking into the ways the cognitive violence of the West can be undone or indeed unthought. Yet this was by no means the initial goal of the project. After finishing my postgraduate studies in 2012, I became interested in pursuing a doctoral degree on the ways of knowing that emerge out of the specific contexts of lived experiences. These are to be juxtaposed to the insulated vestiges of academic knowledge production, which celebrate everything that is universal, objective, and scientific. My initial proposal enshrined this within the specific context of so-called humanitarian military interventions, whereby the question on whether to intervene or not often fails to account for the specific needs of the local context outside of generic blueprints and ideological frameworks.

After spending a year coming up with an approach that largely relied on Aristotelian virtue ethics (and in particular phronēsis or practical wisdom), I came to the realization that my approach was not only theoretically naive but also politically foolish. Put simply, taking these interventions at face value excuses the structural causes that have produced them in the first place. And looking at the empirical trackrecord, I found it increasingly harder to convince myself that these military campaigns - more than often waged by Western states in non-Western contexts - were truly a force for good. This sparked a bit of a crisis at the time as I was no longer convinced that my project as a whole was worth pursuing. Fortunately, the director of graduate studies at the time took note of this and reshuffled my supervisory committee in order to work on what became the kernel of my research from then on: Why does the West always claim to know what is good for others?

The aim here is not to give a tedious account of my entire doctoral research but rather to share a reminder that no project ever travels in a linear direction. At the risk of romanticising the extent to which doctoral research is often a grueling assault on one’s mental and physical health, it was the crisis of questioning just exactly who I was and what I wanted to do that gave the project a more urgent and radical tone. This is by no means a comment on how other people should conduct their research. But for me, true research - which is just another word for thinking - speaks from a place where the thinker has experienced something that has profoundly changed their view of the world and themselves. This is a place where they have been compelled to assess their assumptions on what truth fundamentally is for them. I was fortunate enough to have lived my life unaffected by these questions up until that point yet once I understood the true extent of what the systemic violence of knowledge production entailed, I could no longer look the other way and work on things that eschew the more profound questions about who is a subject and who is an object or who is a knower and who is known.

The ego will of course always find a way to slip back into our beliefs and experiences. As such, I spent the subsequent three years of my doctoral work on crafting a way of resisting the so-called murder of knowledge (epistemicide) and ultimately felt that this account could have a substantial impact. I still stand behind every idea uttered in this book but I have very little illusions about the impact it will have. This is not because I have become cynical or disheartened but the simple truth is that the world has continued to move in ways that I could not have predicted in 2017, the year when I successfully defended my PhD. What has therefore become a fundamental shift in the book, published seven years later, is that the conclusion seeks to address this frustration more compassionately. When we think or write with the intention of improving certain conditions, we can quickly expect the culmination of our efforts to automatically alter these conditions. And when this does not happen, we often fall into indifference or withdraw into a place where we feel right. Refusing this unhelpful stalemate is what makes any form of thought and authorship one of the most difficult things to do in this world.

All of this is just a long and convoluted way of saying that this book is an attempt to make sense of a world that, at best, shows little interest in improving the conditions for the majority of those beings living in it and, at worst, works hard at making them decidedly worse. It is an attempt to build tools for thinking our way out of this conundrum without claiming to have easy answers. It is in this context ironic that most interest in this book has come from friends and family to whom the ideas appeal yet the academic discourse (which I still struggle to liberate myself from) prevents them from accessing them clearly. Of course the pricing of academic publications also does not exactly help this situation. Either way, I am very grateful for the interest this book has received and, most of all, for the people that have helped my work on this project for eleven years. I therefore want to thank everyone who has helped me - knowingly or unknowingly, human or more-than-human - in writing this book. Finally, there will be an event in which this book is presented and discussed as part of the wider series Global Epistemics at Rowman & Littlefield International. The details are yet unclear but as the event, organised by the Centre of Global Knowledge Production,  is likely to have an online component, I will share any more information soon.