The “Global East”: Knowledge, Power, and the Production of Metageographic Ignorance

The article examines the concept of the Global East as a metageographical intervention in debates on global hierarchies and the geopolitics of knowledge. It seeks to move beyond the North–South dichotomy by incorporating post-socialist societies into global theoretical discussions. Drawing on theories of power/knowledge, field theory, and agnotology, it conceptualizes the Global East as a discursive formation within a hierarchically structured transnational academic field. Rather than referring to a stable geographical region, the Global East is understood as an effect of uneven distributions of symbolic and epistemic capital that determine the legitimacy of knowledge in global academia. The analysis shows how the concept emerges from the interaction between externally imposed classificatory regimes and internal strategies of epistemic positioning. It also highlights its limited internal coherence, as it aggregates diverse post-socialist contexts into a single category. The article argues that the Global East functions as a positional effect within global knowledge production, revealing how macro-spatial categories reproduce epistemic hierarchies and contribute to metageographical ignorance.