Description
Existing research emphasizes that expertise bolsters international organizations (IOs) with authority and legitimacy. Within an IO, however, any authority granted to experts also means a potential loss of authority and control by states. This results in a situation whereby states attempt to regulate the production of expertise without openly intervening into established modalities of science and “objectivity.” How is expert authority at the same time tamed and preserved? This paper takes a practice-theoretical approach and argues that, in such situations, expert authority and state power reside at two different levels of practice: whereas expert authority resides mostly in micro-routines such as data gathering and verification processes, state power is waged at the level of macro-processes, such as the architecture, sequencing and embedding of expert missions with regards to decision-making processes. In turn, expert routines can be selected from a pool of possible routines and assembled in manifold ways, resulting in the flexibility necessary to map them onto the realpolitik of the decision-making processes between states. The argument is developed through three case studies form the monitoring of UN sanctions in different political contexts. The study contributes to the understanding of IOs and the integration of expertise and diplomacy.
