There was an extensive epistemic community in historical East Asia that was central to the creation and dissemination of regional civilization that flowed mainly from China outwards, from core to periphery. This epistemic community was composed of Buddhist monks and Confucian scholars. They studied at Buddhist temples and Confucian academies, wrote in a common Chinese language using common styles, and made up the bulk of government officials in each country. These scholar-officials were also the ones who staffed diplomatic missions to other countries. This chapter will discuss in detail the flows of monks and literati between the various countries, and trace the influence of this transnational scholarly and religious community on the evolution of societies – as well as state formation – throughout the region.

The epistemic community research programme, which in the last generation helped frame International Relations understandings of the relationship between knowledge and power, rested on the influence of scientists and experts on policymaking through framing, persuasion, and socialization. In this chapter, we argue that while pioneering, the epistemic-community research programme was incomplete, since it neglected the relationship between knowledge, power, and practice. Because practices are at the core of what epistemic communities are, do, and aim to achieve, we suggest a pragmatist practice-based approach, according to which knowing requires active participation in social communities and knowledge is not a product but is bound with action. We, therefore, explain the political adoption of knowledge-generated practices by the very nature of practicing and joining communities of practice. With this purpose in mind, we propose understanding epistemic communities as epistemic communities of practice. By identifying epistemic communities as a special and heuristically important case of communities of practice, we will open new and exciting avenues of theory-making and empirical research. We illustrate our approach by examining the establishment of nuclear arms control verification practices during the Cold War and the recent spread of a populist ‘post-truth’ epistemic community of practice.

This chapter presents the book’s core theoretical contribution of the transnational lawmaking coalition (TLC), a concept that brings fresh insight to the IR and IO literatures. Operating outside the IO borders of the treaty body system, TLCs are informal and temporary coalitions of state-empowered expert bodies and issue professionals that, in pressing for clarification of state obligations through the instrument of treaty interpretations, can contribute to the development of international law without direct government involvement. This chapter distinguishes TLCs from other collective transnational actor-types, introduces the main triggers of a TLC’s genesis, explains the logic behind its members’ participation in such a coalition, and articulates how TLCs organize their drafting work and under which conditions they are influential.

Chapter 1 begins by invoking an intuitive distinction between the generation of knowledge and the transmission of knowledge. Very roughly, generation concerns coming to know “for oneself,” as when one reasons to a conclusion on the basis of good evidence. Transmission concerns coming to know “from someone else,” as when one is told by someone else who knows. Section 1.1 argues that some but not all testimony is at the service of knowledge transmission, with the result that some but not all testimonial knowledge is transmitted knowledge. Section 1.2 redraws some familiar categories in the epistemology of testimony so as to better characterize our target and related phenomena, better frame our questions, and better see the possible answers. Finally, a central thesis of the book is introduced and discussed: that knowledge transmission is irreducible to knowledge generation, and for that reason requires its own theoretical treatment. More specifically, it is argued that an adequate account of transmission must go beyond the usual theoretical resources of traditional epistemology – that is, beyond those resources that the tradition uses to theorize knowledge generation.

Chapter 2 introduces an “information economy” framework for approaching the epistemology of testimony. It is argued that, in a well-designed epistemic community, the norms governing information acquisition and information distribution will be different. This is because the dominant concern of information acquisition is quality control, whereas the dominant concern of information distribution is to provide access. The central idea, then, is to understand knowledge generation in terms of the norms governing information acquisition and to understand knowledge transmission in terms of the norms governing information distribution. The reason for adopting this approach is its explanatory power.In particular, the framework (a) explains a range of cases in the testimony literature; (b) provides a principled understanding of the transmission–generation distinction; and (c) explains the truth behind various and conflicting positions in the epistemology of testimony. Moreover, the framework nicely integrates with other plausible positions in epistemology, the philosophy of language, action theory, social science, and cognitive science.