Bringing the Economic Back! Thinking about the Politics of Expertise Within and Beyond the Social

Abstract International Political Sociology has played a crucial role in foregrounding the question of expertise in global politics, bringing under critical scrutiny the social processes that are central to the politics of expertise. In doing so, however, questions pertaining to the political–economic conditions that intersect with these have often been left aside. We show that attending to the political–economic conditions that contain and shape the politics of expertise and cut through its “micro” elements enables us to identify three shifts. First, we identify a shift in epistemic sites, which tend to move away from international organizations and public research infrastructures toward powerful private epistemic centers that not only become core providers of knowledge that is seen as “expert,” but also shape the criteria through which knowledge is validated and even the aesthetics of expertise. Second, it enables us to see that knowledge is not only valued through social processes, but through economic imperatives, so that expertise has become a seductive “commodity” like any other, even when deployed by public institutions. Third, turning to the contestation of expertise, we show that despite the preponderance of spaces of “counter-expertise,” these also need to filter through market-aligned evidentiary cultures and aesthetics, to become visible.