Your PhD project investigates the role expertise and how certain objects can become targets of global action. So, how does something become “governable” globally?
We tend to think that global governance agendas are responses to already existing problems. Malnutrition, the use of psychoactive substances, and the development of new biopharmaceutical drugs are among the issues that are presented as common challenges awaiting global responses. In this thesis I want to stress that these problems are not simply external events but are also given shape and meaning through concrete governance practices. Objects do not simply exist in the world but require continuous work and power to be stabilized and represented. My research also emphasizes that the range of solutions to address these problems is always partial and exclusionary. Global governance is a highly hierarchical process in which certain forms of knowing are considered more authoritative than others, sometimes only on the basis of their expert status.
What inspired you to examine these questions?
While doing my master’s in Geneva, I had the opportunity to work at an United Nations agency for a period of time. While it was a very enriching experience, I observed that there was a constant urge, sometimes constrained by donors, to portray the agencies’ activities as technical. But, despite this aura of impartiality, what the agency was doing was underpinned by assumptions and values about how the world ought to be. It then became clear to me that knowledge cannot be fully separated from the politics that led to its production. Under the supervision of Professor Annabelle Littoz-Monnet, I started to investigate this complex relationship between knowledge and politics during my master’s thesis, in which I studied the production of global indexes and metrics. My research experience as a master’s student was very enriching, so much so that I decided that my next step would be to embark upon a PhD to better understand these knowledge production dynamics in the domains of global health, biotechnology and food policy.
Early work on global governance and the politics of expertise was focused almost exclusively on institutions and actors. Your work emphasizes processes in governance. Why is this analytic move significant for you?
Global governance remains often defined either by its actors or its broader institutional architecture. I believe that an emphasis on processes enriches the study of global governance in two different ways. First, it makes it possible to provide a fine-grained analysis about the informal ways in which governing takes place. For instance, it allows us to better observe the unwritten, the unspoken and the informal character of governance that increasingly takes place in sites that go beyond the traditional decision-making spheres. Second, a focus on processes has also allowed me to bypass static conceptions of global politics. In my the-sis, I have been able to put greater emphasis on dynamics that are never complete but al-ways in the making.
