The ignorance of hypervigilance: agnotology and halal along the Belt and Road

When actors engage in attentional biases, they focus on one area of knowledge at the expense of others. In contrast to previous literature, we contend that these biases do not necessarily result in selective ignorance. This is because different attentional biases, informed by dissimilar emotions and logics, affect not just what knowledge is approached over others but how it is approached. It hence produces different types of ignorance or non-knowledge—and by extension, forms of power—in the political economy. We develop a novel conceptual framework on hypervigilance as attentional bias. Then, through discourse analysis, we demonstrate how hypervigilance engendered practices of knowledge distortion; knowledge avoidance and elimination; and knowledge rejection which resulted in the (re)production of inaccurate knowledge and willful blindness that stifled the growth of China’s fledgling halal industry and halal Belt and Road Initiative. This article contributes to the literature on social identity’s influence on economic policies and politics, particularly to nascent scholarship on the links between non-knowledge, ethnoreligious identity and political economy. It proposes pathways through which attentional biases as ignorance extend racialized power, affecting access to resources, opportunities, and participation in the domestic and international political economy.