Current crises in world politics such as climate change, health pandemics, or (cyber) war have brought to light a puzzling finding. These crises highlight the importance of expertise for politics to deal with complex problems, while at the same time alerting us to the uncertainties and multivocality of expert knowledge. But if non-human entities – CO2 emissions, viruses, or algorithms – and their effects can only partially be known, what kind of expertise and by whom do policy makers and the (global) public trust? What are the mechanisms by which competing expertise is translated into a problem or object of governance?

This workshop bundles these questions by exploring the concept of objects of expertise. This concept breaks with the narrow framing of conventional approaches by shifting the attention from the subjects to the objects, that is, from the experts to a more encompassing notion of expertise. Workshop participants will discuss how objects of expertise are made and maintained as well as how they, often unnoticed shape world politics.

The event is co-organised by the Global Governance Centre, the dept. of International Relations and Political Science and the Institute for World Society Studies, Bielefeld University.