The peer review process is held up as the bulwark of science.
In my discipline Communication Studies for instance, the scientific process is enacted through the performance of double blindness. A double blind peer review means that the assigned reviewers aren't able to tell the identity of the author(s), and the author(s) aren't able to tell the identity of the reviewer(s).
The double blind process of peer review is projected as integral to holding up good science, with the strategies for masking the identity of both the authors and reviewers seen as necessary to the production of knowledge. As a discipline, we have accepted uncritically the sanctity of this process, assuming that it works to hold up scientific knowledge.
What this uncritical upholding of the review process leaves unchallenged is the underlying ideology that shapes the construction of knowledge within established structures. The ideology is constituted within the ambits of capitalist power and control, with the narrative that the marketplace of ideas is upheld through objective and anonymous peer reviews. This way, the ideology underlying double blind peer reviews holds up entrenched power inequalities, and is vital to sustaining and circulating power structures in the academe. The notion that the elaborate processes of masking actually work to produce good/objective science obfuscates the entrenched inequalities in distribution of power in the production of knowledge. It also assumes that the process of double blind peer review guarantees objectivity.
This inequality became powerfully evident in the recent experience of a junior woman of colour colleague receiving a toxic peer review for our work on the labour oppressions of precarious migrant workers in a neoliberal authoritarian regime. This was the fabled Reviewer 2 who worked through the review to tear down the colleague, largely uninformed by the underlying literature, mocking the key terms in the literature, and driven by the political motive to project the authoritarian neoliberal regime's labour management as progressive (indeed, reviewer 2's statement that the review undermined the progressive work being done by the regime).
The review was performed precisely as a politically motivated attack to protect the entrenched power structures, working with impunity under the veneer of double blindness. In authoritarian neoliberal regimes that thrive on elaborate knowledge management performed to whitewash the corruption and the labour oppressions of the regime, entire cadres of academics are placed in cushy roles to hold up the propaganda infrastructure of the regime. These propagandists form the layer of expertise on knowledge about the regime, actively working to protect the regime's lies and erase empirically-based critiques of the regime. Entire armies of academic minions are listed on the payroll to do the whitewashing of the regime. Note here how the process of blind peer review works antithetically to the spirit of peer review-based knowledge generation through argumentation and dialogue.
The review was also performed as a toxic personal attack, meant to discourage the voice of the colleague, and to silence the articulation of the plight of precarious migrant workers. Indeed, this is the exemplar of the political as personal. It is the personal attack that sustains the mediocre and corrupt infrastructure of knowledge production in the regime. Any empirically-based account that departs from the hegemonic state narrative and that interrogates it is a threat to the lazy and mediocre academic minions in the service of the regime, and is read as a personal attack, calling for a personal response.
The double blindness of the peer review process in this instance is incorporated into the corrupt processes of protecting entrenched power elites in postcolonial contexts. The scientific knowledge about for instance the regime's failure in addressing the fundamental health needs of precarious migrant workers is strategically obfuscated by academics-as-propagandists strategically placed in positions of power to co-opt the academic peer review process.
In hegemonic structures where entire infrastructures of expertise have been incorporated into the authoritarian state organized in the pursuit of neoliberal capital, any performance of double blind peer review circulates the propaganda from positions of power, invisible to outsiders to the process. The corruption of the postcolonial condition works hand-in-hand with the silencing processes of Whiteness to erase critical articulations challenging the trickle down logics of neoliberal capitalism.
Double blind peer reviews are therefore vital to the circulation and catalysis of entrenched power inequalities. The processes of knowledge generation held up as necessary to creating good science are also the instruments in the perpetuation of the politics of the status quo.
Getting reviewers to place their names on reviews is perhaps a first step toward dismantling these entrenched power inequalities.