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.

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.

Reviews
"Selected for The New York Times Book Review's "What's the Best Book, New or Old, You Read this Year?" 2016"
"David Kennedy's A World of Struggle describes our world more accurately than any book I have read this year."---Pankaj Mishra, New York Times Book Review
"In his new book on how the world is ruled today through expert knowledge, Professor David Kennedy enters this continuing discussion in brilliant, pathbreaking, and trademark fashion. . . . Presented without theoretical encumbrance or jargon, A World of Struggle is a straightforward but sophisticated account. . . . The superlative book wins its distinction not only because it constructs a novel theory but also because it applies that theory to how the globe as a whole is ruled--something no one in the canon of social theory has really done."---Samuel Moyn, Harvard Law Review
"Accounts of global politics are usually organized around time periods of settled order, during which powerful states laid down rules and established institutions. In this illuminating study, Kennedy tells a different story, in which contemporary international relations play out as a continuous struggle between technocratic elites around the world, in which nothing is ever settled and everything is negotiable."---G. John Ikenberry, Foreign Affairs
"A profound and arresting account of how globalization is constructed by experts who obfuscate their own role. . . . It is surely worth reading to understand yesterday's world--and very likely tomorrow's as well."---Tom Ginsburg, American Journal of International Law
"Given the tendency of hidden background decisions and dominant scripts to reproduce inequality and injustice, what role should expertise play? World of Struggle argues less for abandonment than reimagination. In this work, Kennedy continues his long-term project of uncovering the hidden implications of multiple mundane "expert" decisions that shape a paradoxical world: one both unstable and unshakable. Here, fi nally, is the foundational ambition of World of Struggle and its challenge to readers: to undo the hegemony of common sense, to unlearn the boundaries of reason, to unsettle what has seemingly been seamlessly resolved, to untell the familiar stories of binaries and boundaries, to uncover the struggles that expertise obscures, and thus to unleash the possibility of remaking the world."---Zinaida Miller, Journal of Legal Education



Book Information
ISBN 9780691180878
Author David Kennedy
Format Paperback
Page Count 312
Imprint Princeton University Press
Publisher Princeton University Press