International Relations scholarship has shown that persisting epistemic hierarchies rooted in colonial domination continue to exclude, silence, or sideline alternative knowledges in global governance, even as International Organizations increasingly open up to formally marginalized groups and attempt to pluralize their expertise. While building on such accounts, this article argues that epistemic hierarchies are deeply entangled with political-economic logics, which permeate global epistemic politics in multiple ways. These intersecting epistemic and political-economic logics produce complex forms of ‘political-epistemic disciplining’, which do not simply exclude alternative knowledges, but rearticulate them. I identify three intertwined modalities of this process: de-epistemization, whereby alternative knowledge claims are recoded as social or identity concerns rather than treated as competing epistemologies. This operation recognizes the subjects of the critique but not the epistemic critique itself. Conditional recognition occurs when prevailing criteria of validity regulate the acknowledgement of such claims. Finally, transposition constitutes or reformulates alternative knowledge claims through the lenses of dominant epistemic frameworks and categories. These processes rearticulate alternative knowledges and transform them a new into ‘globalized alternative knowledges’. The argument is developed through an in-depth analysis of engagements with Indigenous knowledges in Global Mental Health governance.
