Description
This article explores the politics of expertise in global health emergencies, asking how expert authority can be successfully challenged right at the moments where experts seem the most vital. It considers some of the prominent explanations for this – misinformation, motivated reasoning, and co-production – and applies them to a past case: the US response to the 2013-2016 Ebola outbreak. Like COVID-19 today, the Ebola response saw prominent experts denigrated, their knowledge dismissed, and their policies rejected. Exploring how expertise in general and specific experts were disputed, the paper argues that these explanations all offer insight but fail to appreciate a core aspect: the specifics of emergency politics. As critical security scholars have demonstrated, the contemporary politics of emergency is increasingly concerned with the management of catastrophic futures, demanding speculation to grasp the possibilities and expertise to understand and act upon them. Yet while this can authorize experts, this case demonstrates that it can also undermine them by revealing the politics in the choices they make and the contexts in which they make them.
