Responsibility not to be silent: Academic knowledge production about the war against Ukraine and knowledge diplomacy

Abstract

This article investigates the role that academics have played in knowledge production about Russia’s war against Ukraine. Focusing on Aotearoa New Zealand – a like-minded country with Ukraine but distant from it and with few historical links – we examine how many academics chose to engage with the war through their teaching, public outreach, and interactions with policymakers. We situate our analysis within the emerging literature on knowledge diplomacy, the ‘contribution that education and knowledge creation, sharing and use make to international relations and engagement’ (Knight in Int Higher Educ 80:8–9, 2015). Drawing on 20 in-depth interviews with academics across seven NZ universities and a range of disciplines, we show that academics who undertook the responsibility not to remain silent have become spontaneous contributors to knowledge diplomacy processes. In doing so, they have avoided its potential trap, namely to use knowledge for power-projections and manipulations. On the contrary, the reflections revealed how academics – as subject and objects in knowledge-production – exercise their independent self-motivated agency to ensure a two-way process: (1) to foster knowledge among students and various communities as a tool for better-informed, critically-approached international relations and (2) to use international relations developments to strengthen higher education tools and research.