'Unknown unknowns'

This article is part of a Symposium in International Theory on Peter Katzenstein and the late Lucia Seybert's book on Protean Power: Exploring the Uncertain and Unexpected in World Politics. The book proposes to think of world order not based on control power, but of protean power which is defined as "the effect of actors’ improvised and innovative responses to an incalculable environment or their experience of the world as equally uncertain’.

The article investigates this attempt to use power analysis to link three domains: ontology, explanation, and the strategy of political actors. It shows how Katzenstein and Seybert develop an ontology of open social processes that serves as the backdrop for explanations that need to be causal yet indeterminate, and a cautious political practice. It exposes tensions in two important links. First, the open ontology becomes retranslated as an explanatory cause. Second, the call for being cautious because of‘unknown unknowns’ may just as well invite strategies of doubling down in control power.