A World of Struggle reveals the role of expert knowledge in our political and economic life. As politicians, citizens, and experts engage one another on a technocratic terrain of irresolvable argument and uncertain knowledge, a world of astonishing inequality and injustice is born. Charting a major new direction in global governance at a moment when the international order is ready for change, this critically important book explains how we can harness expert knowledge to remake an unjust world.

"Given the tendency of hidden background decisions and dominant scripts to reproduce inequality and injustice, what role should expertise play? World of Struggle argues less for abandonment than reimagination. In this work, Kennedy continues his long-term project of uncovering the hidden implications of multiple mundane expert decisions that shape a paradoxical world: one both unstable and unshakable. Here, fi nally, is the foundational ambition of World of Struggle and its challenge to readers: to undo the hegemony of common sense, to unlearn the boundaries of reason, to unsettle what has seemingly been seamlessly resolved, to untell the familiar stories of binaries and boundaries, to uncover the struggles that expertise obscures, and thus to unleash the possibility of remaking the world."---Zinaida Miller, Journal of Legal Education

Autorentext

David Kennedy is the Manley O. Hudson Professor of Law and Director of the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School.

Klappentext

How today's unjust global order is shaped by uncertain expert knowledge-and how to fix it

A World of Struggle reveals the role of expert knowledge in our political and economic life. As politicians, citizens, and experts engage one another on a technocratic terrain of irresolvable argument and uncertain knowledge, a world of astonishing inequality and injustice is born.

In this provocative book, David Kennedy draws on his experience working with international lawyers, human rights advocates, policy professionals, economic development specialists, military lawyers, and humanitarian strategists to provide a unique insider's perspective on the complexities of global governance. He describes the conflicts, unexamined assumptions, and assertions of power and entitlement that lie at the center of expert rule. Kennedy explores the history of intellectual innovation by which experts developed a sophisticated legal vocabulary for global management strangely detached from its distributive consequences. At the center of expert rule is struggle: myriad everyday disputes in which expertise drifts free of its moorings in analytic rigor and observable fact. He proposes tools to model and contest expert work and concludes with an in-depth examination of modern law in warfare as an example of sophisticated expertise in action.

Charting a major new direction in global governance at a moment when the international order is ready for change, this critically important book explains how we can harness expert knowledge to remake an unjust world.