The workshop sought to analyse the actors by whom - or the mechanisms, channels and politics through which - knowledge is produced, disseminated, performed, and reproduced in international law. Underlying the workshop were questions about the power of expert knowledge and its political and democratic accountability – a theme of research for the Hirschman Centre.

The workshop brought together scholars from Geneva, Europe, North America, and Latin America, with opening remarks by Professor David Kennedy (Harvard Law School) and closing remarks by Professor Andrea Bianchi (International Law, IHEID). The workshop consisted of four panels, on international law as a field of knowledge, ignorance and the limits of knowledge in international law, determinants of international law scholarship, and emotions and international law. The panels explored different dimensions of the ways in which international law is structured sociologically to make its inner workings and claims to authority more or less transparent and politically accountable.

On the evening of 7 September, the Hirschman Centre and International Law faculty also co-hosted a public lecture by David Kennedy, Manley O. Hudson Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School. David Kennedy, an expert on law and the politics of expertise, delivered a public lecture entitled Law in a World of Struggle. Professor Kennedy tackled three main and related topics. First, the role of law and legal interpretation in producing and sustaining a global system of remarkable injustice. Second, the role of legal expertise in producing and justifying those laws and interpretations. Third, the ways in which legal expertise lets lawyers off the hook for the unjust effects of their legal work. David Kennedy concluded with a reminder of the importance of a thicker ethical account of the responsibilities of lawyers for the political economy of the world – an importance underlined by contemporary laments from the left and right about unaccountable and undemocratic governance by technocratic experts. He offered such an account – one in which lawyers and other experts would understand their work as a set of political choices to pursue one of many possible worlds in which power and resources are unevenly distributed, and to take up responsibility for those choices.