Objects of Expertise. The Socio-Material Politics of Expert Knowledge in Global Governance

Conflict prevention is a core item on the agenda of major international organizations and fora. In this article, I trace how war became a problem accessible to international governance. Adopting an object-centered approach to international relations (O-IR), I argue that war’s constitution as a problem of international governance unfolded in three interrelated processes. Firstly, pacifists and philanthropists designated war as a scientific object, thus giving rise to a “science of peace.” Secondly, scholars and pacifists compiled statistics on war, thus translating it across contexts and representing it as a global phenomenon. Statistics helped to make war accessible to advocacy and policymaking as an object of expertise. Thirdly, peace advocates problematized war as a governance object by representing it as a cost-benefit problem and a major cause in the reversal of economic development. By tracing the historical development of war as an epistemic object that can be investigated systematically, an object of expertise that can be measured and compared, and an object of governance that can be manipulated, this article bridges the strands of O-IR that have previously only focused on either knowledge and expertise or governance. Further, it adds to peace and conflict scholarship by providing an intellectual history of the prevention idea and its entanglement with modernism. Finally, it advances broader IR scholarship by offering an analysis of the role of scientific developments and nonstate activism in producing ideas and enabling policy agendas.

Pacifism, the Science of Peace, and the Constitution of War as a Governance Problem

Rodehau-Noack

2024

Objects in Relations: Competing Visions of International Order at the Nexus of Human Rights and Development

Pantzerhielm

2024

How is international order constructed and maintained, disrupted, and struggled about? In this article, I throw new light on these perennial questions of IR scholarship by turning attention to how expert knowledge and the objects it brings forth invite different ways of ordering. Theoretically, I develop a relational ontology of objects through a rereading of Foucauldian archeology and work in political ontology. My empirical story examines two objects of expertise that relate the more encompassing and elusive governance objects “human rights” and “development” in sharply contrasting ways. Born out of postcolonial legal discourse at the United Nations and the political project of “Third World” solidarity, the notion of a human right to development posits development as a human right and makes sense of its realization within an anti-colonial imaginary that politicizes international institutions and interstate relations. In contrast, the “human rights-based approach” that has lately been embraced as a normative methodology by United Nations development agencies evokes a hierarchical vision that privileges norms and knowledge that are seen as international, global, or universal, while seeking to improve and remold actors and practices in developing countries in their image. Despite their seemingly technical nature and international organizations’ well-documented tendency to downplay their value judgments, objects of expertise are thus entangled in and co-constitute different, potentially conflicting visions of international order.

Narratives, Knowledge Objects, and the Making of Great Power Competition

Müller

2024

What makes great power relations more (or less) competitive? One key argument in International Relations (IR) is that interpretations matter and shape how competitive great power relations are. This article seeks to further develop this argument. Drawing on objectual IR and the sociology of expectations, it proposes a constructivist framework that unpacks two crucial, yet surprisingly little studied aspects of the making of great power competition: (i) the constitution and organization of great power relations as a contest over scarce goods and (ii) the interplay of narratives and knowledge objects that underpins it. To illustrate the framework and contribute to theory development, the article reconstructs the dynamics of two prominent dimensions of great power competition in the past decade: The tensions between NATO and Russia in Europe and the economic competition between the United States and China. It shows that the making of great power competition involves three interrelated elements: the framing of relations among powerful states as contests over some valued goods, the production of knowledge about the distribution of these goods, and governance arrangements stipulating rules for the contests. What underpins the three elements is an interplay of narratives and knowledge objects: General narratives of what the competition is about and what is at stake preconfigure which knowledge objects are regarded as pertinent. The pertinent knowledge objects, in turn, shape the specific narratives that are told about how the competition unfolds.