While much work on expertise has explored the mobilisation and production of knowledge, the development of epistemic communities, and the mechanisms through which expertise operates – little work has been done exploring how expertise is understood across academic literature on particular regional cases such as the Arctic. In this article, I scope a broad literature review of the Arctic, seeking out how expertise has been depicted and framed in academic and theoretical literature. The results are framed around five different themes: (1) expertise serving the interests of great powers, (2) recognition of the overall importance of expertise in Arctic governance, (3) the purpose of experts, (4) science diplomacy and expertise: a murky barrier, and (5) how to study experts, but also find that Indigenous knowledge is often left out of literature that relies upon Western frameworks of expertise. This incongruity suggests that there are two competing conceptualizations of Arctic expertise, one in theory and another in practice – which has consequences for how the region and its expertise are narrated.

In contrast to a view of secrecy as a tool of statecraft, where the game of ‘covering/uncovering’ dominates as the central way of interpreting secrecy’s power, we set out ‘secrecy games’ as an approach for understanding secrecy’s power and influence. To do so, we offer a set of three games to illustrate the more varied ways that secrecy operates and draw attention to the ways in which non-state actors use secrecy and shape its effects. In particular, we offer an analysis of: (1) the secrecy games of tunnelling in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the role of mobility as part of secrecy; (2) the secrecy game of camouflage and how stowaways blend in to facilitate access to global shipping routes; and (3) the secrecy game of maze-running and maze-making within urban warfare. Drawing these together, we show how secrecy involves a wider set of actors, practices, and associated knowledge-(un)making strategies than currently understood within International Relations. In turn, this expanded understanding of secrecy helps to make sense of the more complex ways in which secrecy is presented, used, resisted, and transformed – including and especially as a force that limits sovereign power – and, therefore, as central to what shapes global politics.

Historically, education has often varied by curriculum, access, and stature based on location, race, gender, economic status, religion, and time period. In addition, many educational institutions and much scholarly research have been significantly impacted by private foundation support. This essay discusses the politics of knowledge as it relates to gender and race as well as the impact of philanthropy on the production of knowledge with these groups. While many aspects of these themes have changed in the past sixty years, many of them remain highly contested.

Increasing engagement with Indigenous knowledges (IKs) in mainstream tertiary educational institutions presents both ethico-political and epistemological challenges. This article engages these challenges by first cautioning against making wholesale distinctions between IKs and Western knowledges (WKs) and then examining the epistemological and politico-cultural entailments of the figure of the mainstream WK knower. Although the WK knower is typically cast as a sovereign being in command of knowledge, the practicalities of processes of knowing reveal the knower as at least partially relational. While the sovereign knower typically returns to his/her self in mainstream WKs, thereby disavowing or subsuming cultural others in ways that compromise serious engagement with IKs, relationality suggests more positive possibilities for becoming susceptible to Indigenous concerns and ways of knowing. This does not spell a relativist agenda. Rather, it shows that knowledge is established through relational processes and that WK knowers might better engage IKs by become less sovereign and more relational knowers.