The Technocratic International

Most international organisations today — from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to the World Health Organisation — present themselves as technical institutions separate from political concerns. And yet they are frequently accused, whether by the public or by governments, of hiding behind this technocratic veil only to privilege a few rich and powerful nations. Experts appear as guardians of stability and protectors of an unequal status quo. Scholars of International Relations (IR) and international law have illuminated the production and contestation of expertise. But its historical emergence and distinctiveness remain under-explored.The Technocratic International is the first book to historically examine and comprehensively theorise the role of experts in the institutionalisation of modern international order.

How exactly did technical expertise come to be a central tenet to the work of international organisations? Based on archival material from Paris, London, and Geneva, The Technocratic International reconstructs the neglected history of expert mobilisation at early moments of institutionalised international cooperation in the nineteenth century. To understand how expertise works at the international level, examining how expert status and knowledge are produced is not enough. Instead, we must bring into view how expertise relates to claims about the very domain in which it operates. Historically, experts were not merely — as institutionalist and functionalist accounts assume — mobilised to epistemically optimise international policymaking. Instead, technocratic elites constructed "the international" through Eurocentric performances of expert approval.