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Keywords: post-truth, international law, justice, reflexivity, cosmopolitanism
INTRODUCTION
Donald Trump's presidency sparked a moment of profound anxiety in Western academe. Beyond the failure of positivist science to predict the electoral results (as it also failed to predict Brexitand the failure of the Colombian peace plebiscite), subsequent attacks on the media have challenged the universality of'facts' and 'truth' as the lowest common denominators for political discourse, causing a debate on the accountability of post-modern scholars in providing tools of deconstruction/destruction. Alongside the analysis of an accelerating political rift within the demos of liberal democracies between, well, cosmopolitan liberals and right-wing nationalists, there is a corresponding delivery of antagonism in international liberal governance with attacks on the universality of human rights, international law, and multilateral governance in general. This short piece delves into these developments through a personal account of intellectual work under the breaking of the universal. It is based on a roundtable discussion at the International Studies Association Annual Convention in 2018 on post-truth and academe. This relationship was not only a pertinent and timely issue (as befits roundtables) but also an unusually challenging one as it immediately upsets two central biases in the social production of knowledge.
The first one concerns the inclination to read change, novelty, and rupture into continuities, nuance, and resilience. The academic imperative to produce scholarship beyond the state-of-the-art travels with an urgent temporality, and one which is receptive to moving with the velocity of social media in its lust for clicks/citations/downloads/likes/views. With this pace, these 'buzzword' conversations on post-truth, fake news, and the accountability of post-modern discourse for providing tools for right-wing nationalists and intellectuals to deconstruct truth claims seem already a bit devoid of meaning (the unwillingness to take post-modern thought seriously might just as well be blamed, if blame is what is sought). At the same time, recent revelations about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica (The Guardian, 2018) have been a brutal wake-up call for more attention to how technology changes the conditions of politics today, and carries the potential of increasing democratic participation as well as undermining it altogether by adding fuel to a fire of a politics based on identity rather than ideas, and turning public spaces into different echo chambers that hamper rather than...