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

by David Kennedy

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691146782
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	02/23/2016
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

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 Abroad; Of 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).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

INTRODUCTION Could This Be 1648? 1

PART I Political Economy and Struggle 21

CHAPTER 1 Political Economy: World-Making Stories 23

CHAPTER 2 Struggle: Toward a Cartography of Engagement 54

PART II Expertise 87

CHAPTER 3 World-Making Ideas: Imagining a World to Govern and Resist 89

CHAPTER 4 Expertise: The Machinery of Global Reason 108

CHAPTER 5 Expertise in Action: Rule by Articulation 135

PART III Law 169

CHAPTER 6 Law and the Global Dynamics of Distribution 171

CHAPTER 7 International Legal Expertise: Innovation, Avoidance and Professional Faith 218

CHAPTER 8 Legal Expertise in War 256

EPILOGUE Let It Be So 277

Notes 281

Index 293

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"A World of Struggle offers a dramatically new and important analysis of the logics, techniques, and sites of global rule. In it, Kennedy draws attention to the significance of expert work in the global exercise of power, shedding new light on the background processes by which the world is interpreted for ‘decision makers,' and by which those decisions are then interpreted in and for the world. Written with subtlety and startling insight, this book will take its place in the canon of essential reading for those interested in the nature of contemporary global governance."—Andrew Lang, London School of Economics

"To change the world, you must understand how it is put together. Kennedy's powerful analysis reveals how inequality and injustice become entrenched and what might be done in response. A must-read for people of good heart who inhabit the professions of law and policy. Our technocratic world can be remade: Kennedy helps us see how—and where to begin."—José Ramos-Horta, former president of East Timor and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize

"David Kennedy, one of our most cerebral and critical thinkers, here challenges the tyranny of ‘experts,' whose strident cacophony of claims all too often passes for the apex of policy debate. Drawing on history, law, and economics, and highlighting the new salience of regulation as a principal vector of policymaking, he charts a highly original path and calls for profound change in how we conceive of international society."—David Malone, rector of the United Nations University

"A World of Struggle, David Kennedy's brilliant study of global governance, takes the reader on a tour de force through every modality driving international legal norms today. As the global system struggles with enormous international change, this book will be regarded as a powerful touchstone of innovation and intellectual reflection that helps us coherently remake the world."—Admiral James Stavridis, dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, former supreme allied commander at NATO

"Kennedy believes we are at a crucial moment in world making and urgently need to transcend the limits of global expertise. This important book opens up a whole new way of thinking about how the world is—or is not—governed."—David M. Trubek, University of Wisconsin–Madison

"Absolutely original and brilliant. In A World of Struggle, Kennedy uses critical legal technique to produce a sharp, fully convincing analysis of the dysfunction of an international system ruled by experts in constant struggle with each other."—Martti Koskenniemi, author of From Apology to Utopia: The Structure of International Legal Argument

Editorial Reviews

Selected for The New York Times Book Review’s “What’s the Best Book, New or Old, You Read this Year?” 2016

From the Publisher