Based on an integrative review of research on European post-socialist civil societies over the past three decades, we critically examine: (1) how civil society is conceptualized and from whose position; (2) the methodologies employed in this knowledge production, including any reflections on the usefulness and conditions of such knowledge; and (3) existing knowledge gaps and areas where further development is needed within this body of literature. We distinguish between three theoretical approaches to European post-socialist civil societies, the Western-centric, critical, and triple-embedded approaches, based on their embeddedness in the field, closeness to the research subjects, and aspirations to include them in theory-building. We argue that a shift from a structural perspective on civil societies in the region has taken place into a perspective focusing on agency and developments on the ground in the past decade.

This article compares the knowledge produced by the academic and practical communities regarding the collective impact (CI) approach to social innovation, exploring its implications for the fields of social innovation and nonprofit organizations. We conducted a literature review of articles published in journals focused on practitioners and academic journals, covering the approach's first ten years (2011–2021). The findings highlight seven key themes of comparison. They concern different understandings of CI, various fields of application, equity in the CI approach, CI application in advocacy initiatives, criticisms of the CI approach, real-world applications and methodological approaches, and the importance of community integration and a bottom-up approach in CI. The article's contributions revolve around building a bridge between the knowledge produced by each community and providing a critical analysis of key themes addressed by them, including equity, cross-sector collaboration, and advocacy, while connecting empirical findings to both theoretical and practical implications for NPOs.

What channels can an authoritarian state employ to steer social science research towards topics preferred by the regime? I researched the Chinese coauthor network of civil society studies, examining 14,088 researchers and their peer-reviewed journal articles published between 1998 and 2018. Models with individual and time fixed-effects reveal that scholars at the center of the network closely follow the narratives of the state’s policy plans and could serve as effective state agents. However, those academics who connect different intellectual communities tend to pursue novel ideas deviating from the official narratives. Funding is an ineffective direct means for co-opting individual scholars, possibly because it is routed through institutions. Combining these findings, this study proposes a preliminary formation of authoritarian knowledge regime that consists of (1) the state’s official narrative, (2) institutionalized state sponsorship, (3) co-opted intellectuals centrally embedded in scholarly networks, and (4) intellectual brokers as sources of novel ideas.

This article reflects on the significance of Ukraine’s European choice—a series of pro-European political choices that both Ukraine’s citizens and its political elites gradually committed to, and which crystallized during and after the 2013 Euromaidan protest. Russia refused to accept Ukraine’s European choice, starting the first wave of aggression against Ukraine as soon as the Euromaidan won in early 2014, and ultimately launching the full-scale invasion in February 2022. As Ukrainians defend their European choice, important lessons can be drawn from their resistance to Russia’s aggression. We identify three lessons for Europe and three lessons for political science.

This empirical study examines knowledge production between 1925 and 2015 in nonprofit and philanthropic studies from quantitative and thematic perspectives. Quantitative results suggest that scholars in this field have been actively generating a considerable amount of literature and a solid intellectual base for developing this field toward a new discipline. Thematic analyses suggest that knowledge production in this field is also growing in cohesion—several main themes have been formed and actively advanced since 1980s, and the study of volunteering can be identified as a unique core theme of this field. The lack of geographic and cultural diversity is a critical challenge for advancing nonprofit studies. New paradigms are needed for developing this research field and mitigating the tension between academia and practice. Methodological and pedagogical implications, limitations, and future studies are discussed.

Recent debate in Voluntas and elsewhere has paid a great deal of attention to the subject of mapping the nonprofit sector. However, very little attention has been paid to the ways in which the practice of mapping is a political mode of knowing and the ways in which knowing is governing. In this essay, we turn to critical theory and political anthropology in order to demonstrate how mapping as it is currently practiced is a mode of knowledge inquiry that facilitates statecraft. In light of these interdisciplinary perspectives, we wrestle with the implications of knowing—and thereby governing—voluntary collective organization in this manner. We conclude that this approach potentially disciplines the qualitative dimensions of democratic associational life and misrepresents the possibilities of social change.

This article analyzes the path of establishment of the Journal of Regional Security (JRS), an open-access journal which was built from scratch by a group of scholars interested in security and peace in the Western Balkans. The article shows that a successful building of an International Relations journal from scratch on the semiperiphery requires not only long-term commitment with slow and uncertain payoffs but also a lot of creativity and flexibility. Initially, the article delves into the Journal’s history, situating it within broader institutional and sociopolitical contexts that have shaped its development. Subsequently, it examines how JRS has positioned itself on the semiperiphery and within the emerging global International Relations program. The third section discusses effective strategies employed by the editorial team to navigate International Relations hierarchies and rankings, emphasizing creativity, innovation, networking, and dedication to the journal’s mission. Finally, it concludes by addressing the challenges and opportunities faced by JRS, suggesting that despite being a small, independent journal operating in a semiperipheral context, it can leverage its unique position to its advantage.

The knowledge produced about the third sector in one country can provide useful insights to understand the nonprofit sector in other countries. It goes without saying “Knowledge not shared is knowledge wasted.” While the volume of research on the South Korean third sector has been growing in recent decades, its readership has been mostly limited to Korean language users, missing the opportunity to globalize knowledge. Recognizing an opportunity to spark conversations about how to share the third sector research done in one country with global readers, we conducted semantic network analysis to identify long-term patterns of research in South Korean third sector knowledge production, reviewing about 6500 nonprofit studies published between 1987 and 2019. With a bigram and trend analysis of key themes, we find key characteristics and discuss them in detail. This study contributes to the literature by highlighting the benefits of sharing knowledge produced in one country with scholars and practitioners in other countries.

The article examines informal carers’ experiences of co-producing care, combining notions of carer roles with the strategies used by carers in their interactions and negotiations with the health and social services. The aim is to contribute to the theoretical understanding of carers’ role in co-production. On the basis of interviews with carers with a wide range of experiences, we find that they wish to be treated as co-producers, but their roles and impact depend on whether they are tasked with co-producing knowledge or co-producing care. In knowledge production, informal carers are encouraged to take active part and use their voice to further the interests and values of the person in need of support. However, their impact is conditional on their initiatives being recognised by formal caregivers and, to some extent, the person in need of support. In providing care, their efforts largely go unnoticed, and they are less likely to make their voices heard, but their room to manoeuvre appears to be greater. However, when the work of carers is not recognised, formal carers forego resources that are important to the quality and effectiveness of care. The findings, we argue, have important implications for the theory and practice of co-production.

Cultural objects are sold via global, public networks, where market stakeholders rely on the services of other actors such as academics, authenticators, and restorers to facilitate and legitimate this trade. This article will build on Neil Brodie’s examination of the role scholarly facilitators play in the illicit trade in cultural objects by exploring the harmful consequences of such scholarship, using the case studies of Emma Bunker and Mary Slusser as examples. This article argues that those of us with intellectual authority and control interacting with cultural objects should reflect on the broader social context of our research and the consequences of our knowledge production—and reckon with the exploitative and colonial foundations of the knowledge we build on. Ongoing ethical awareness and reflexivity need to be integrated into our practice to support and foster social justice. The article ends with some recommendations on how to incorporate these ideas into academic practice.

Critical approaches to research on war-affected societies emphasize the necessity for a more empirically grounded approach to the production of knowledge. Presently, research on war-affected societies is undergoing a shift toward localization with a call for more “voices” with local knowledge and expertise. This research is an attempt to analyze the challenges of reliable knowledge production in war-affected societies and their circulation in academia, the policy-making community, and feeding media discourse. The research focuses on the Russian war against Ukraine since 2014 as a prism through which to examine the main challenges for localized knowledge production. We consider several aspects of knowledge production including the problems and issues of framing and wording that define the character of the conflict, challenges of research design and data collection, researchers’ positioning dilemmas, participants’ responses, differences between policy and academic research, and the role of the media. The purpose of this study is to engage with and attempts to advance the literature on knowledge localization. We argue that a move toward the localization of fieldwork requires a more sensitive and transdisciplinary approach to knowledge production. Based on our own experience of fieldwork during wartime, we point out possible ethical and methodological challenges and offer workable responses to them.

This article critically examines the major shortcomings in multi-country security investments in East Africa during the war on terror. It argues that these investments have not only failed to adequately recognise African contexts but also falls short of recognising the agency of local communities in counterterrorism efforts. Drawing on critical terrorism and security studies, as well as excerpts from interviews with practitioners in Kenya, the article identifies gaps in the prevailing approach that treats Africa as a unitary entity and critiques the notion of universality of knowledge ingrained in these interventions. By taking a decolonial perspective, the article challenges some prevailing constructions about Africa, linked to the war on terror, as the source of this notion of universality of knowledge. By highlighting the connection of counterterrorism strategies to coloniality and the systemic exclusion of subaltern voices, the discussion suggests that a more contextually informed approach is a precursor to envisioning Africa positioned beyond the war on terror.

Although calls to decolonise International Relations (IR) have become more prominent, the endeavour becomes infinitely more complex when searching for concrete approaches to decolonise IR knowledge production. We posit that decolonising IR, a global counter-hegemonic political project to dismantle and transform dominant knowledge production practices, must be enacted according to context-specific particularities. Contexts shape practices of epistemological decolonisation, since knowledge hierarchies are enacted and experienced – and must be challenged and dismantled – differently in different sites. Yet although acknowledged as important, contexts are understudied and under-theorised. This raises several questions: how do contexts matter to IR knowledge production, in what ways, and with what effects? This article disaggregates six contexts in IR knowledge production – material, spatial, disciplinary, political, embodied, and temporal – and explores how they impact academic practices. We bring together hitherto-disparate insights into the role of contexts in knowledge production from Global IR, Political Sociology, Feminist Studies, Higher Education Studies, and Critical Geopolitics, illustrating them with empirical evidence from 30 interviews with IR scholars across a variety of countries and academic institutions. We argue that an interrogation of the inequalities produced through these contexts brings us closer towards developing concrete tools to dismantle entrenched hierarchies in IR knowledge production.

The gender and politics literature offers diverse views on the causes of gendered practices and the best methodologies for studying them. This article advances efforts to take stock of and systematize this diversity by grounding the feminist institutionalist perspective in critical realism. The article posits that gendered institutions are real entities with independent powers, while also emphasizing the crucial role that human ideas play in upholding and contesting gendered practices. To faithfully capture gendered institutions and their relationship with human agency, the article promotes the use of the abductive-retroductive research design. This approach allows feminist institutionalist scholars to construct and test multiple competing theories about gendered institutions, drawing from various empirical manifestations of institutional power. These expressions range from observable actions to codified rules, socially shared norms, and other subtle discourses. By shedding light on the principles at the heart of realist-oriented feminist research, this work paves the way for a more standardized and transparent approach to feminist inquiries.