Information is power? Transparency and fetishism in international relations

International actors, state and non-state, have embraced transparency as a solution to all manner of political problems. Theoretical analyses of these processes present transparency in a fetishtic manner, in which the social relations that generate transparency are misrecognized as the product of information itself. This paper will outline the theoretical problems that arise when transparency promotion is fetishized in International Relations theory. Examining the fetishism of transparency, we will note the problematic conceptions of politics, the public sphere, and rationality they generate. Confusing the relationship between data, information and knowledge, fetishized treatments of transparency obscure the historical dynamics responsible for the emergence of transparency as a political practice. This alters our understanding of the relationship between global governance institutions, their constituents, and the nature of knowledge production itself. Realizing the normative promise of transparency requires a reorientation of theory towards sociologically and historically sensitive approaches to the politics of knowledge.