The Silent Drift: Populism and the Epistemic Unraveling of International Organizations

As global power shifts intensify, a deeper disruption is unfolding within international organizations (IOs): the epistemic erosion of their knowledge systems. This paper argues that populist assaults on expert agencies in the United States foreshadow broader threats to the organizational memory of IOs—defined here as the institutional processes through which information is generated, transformed into knowledge, and stored. While International Relations (IR) has often approached populism as a challenge to foreign policy or multilateralism, we refocus attention on its corrosive effects within IOs themselves. Populism undermines not only the legitimacy of expert authority but also the infrastructures through which IOs make sense of the world. This is not a rupture marked by collapse, but a slow, silent drift in how knowledge is valued, remembered, and operationalized. Even as IOs adapt, the very foundations of how they organize information and claim epistemic authority are being reconfigured. Though these shifts may democratize IO knowledge systems, they also risk fragmenting the epistemic coherence of global governance. We propose a research agenda that theorizes IOs as epistemic processes and examines how populism reshapes the lifecycle of organizational memory in a post-liberal order increasingly defined by contestation over what counts as valid knowledge.