Program on Science, Technology and Society at Harvard

Harvard Kennedy School of Government | Harvard University

A World of Struggle: How Power, Law, and Expertise Shape Global Political Economy

David Kennedy

Harvard Law School

February 24, 2016, 4:30-6:00PM
Bell Hall, 5th Floor, Belfer Building, Harvard Kennedy School

Abstract

Book Description: 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.   This event is a book launch followed by a reception.

Panel

David Armitage

Harvard, History

Samuel Moyn

Harvard Law School

Kathryn Sikkink

Harvard Kennedy School

Moderated by

Sheila Jasanoff

Harvard Kennedy School

About the speaker

David Kennedy is the Manley O. Hudson Professor of Law and Director of the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School. He is the author of The Rights of Spring: A Memoir of Innocence AbroadOf War and Law; and The Dark Sides of Virtue: Reassessing International Humanitarianism, and the editor of The Canon of American Legal Thought (with William Fisher) (all Princeton).