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

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.

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

Pantzerhielm

2024

Knowledge Machineries and Their Objects of Expertise. Knowing Bodies, Moves, and Moods through “Mobile Health” Data

Littoz-Monnet

2024

This article argues that the politics of socio-material objects should be examined in relationship with the machineries of knowing these objects are embedded in and also sustain. Objects of expertise are embedded in discursive constructs, material infrastructures, and relationships that “surround” and permeate their production. In turn, such objects give traction to the machineries of knowing that enable their emergence. The article uses the concept of “knowledge machinery,” coined by sociologist of science Karin Knorr-Cetina, to denote a focus on the “machinery” and its “parts” at the same time, or to the “macro” and the “micro,” as highly intertwined and mutually reinforcing in processes of knowledge production. The article explores these questions in the context of global health governance, with a specific focus on the politics of mobile health and the data it generates, conceived as an object of expertise of its own kind. It shows, first, that mobile health data have specific characteristics and claims attached to them; they are, in themselves, the turning of bodies and lifestyles into standardized and fully mobile “data units” that feed into data flows. As such, they produce ordering, norming, and governance effects, which do not disrupt but sustain the knowledge machinery of global health.

Oceans, Objects, and Infrastructures: Making Modern Piracy

Bueger,

Stockbruegger

2024

The agenda of objectual International Relations has shown why object matters, how they arise and with what effects. Far less attention has been paid to how objects are maintained and stabilized over time and how their coherence is achieved. To add this dimension to the debate, we suggest turning to the infrastructures of object maintenance. Infrastructures are social material arrangements that maintain objects and enable their use. We introduce a framework for the study of object infrastructures and illustrate it by drawing on the case of “maritime piracy”. Providing a historical reconstruction of the infrastructures that produce piracy as an international object, we show that the growing proliferation of these infrastructures does not lead to an internal coherence of the object over time, but rather objectual fracturing and instability. We reveal how objects are often multiple rather than unitary. The article adds an important new dimension to the study of objects in International Relations.