The authority of expertise is a well-established social fact, with the exercise of authority by some privileged groups regarded as experts now taken for granted. Who governs is important, not only in terms of outcomes but also in terms of social authority and representation. Jacob Sending looks at how aspiring experts jockey for authority. While the existing literature accounts for authority and expertise based on their relation to existing systemic properties and goals, he focuses on the practices by which experts seek to promote their own authority. He clearly asserts the need to focus on the practices of epistemology by aspiring actors, rather than looking at ontological factors that shape politics. The object of governance is coproduced with the authority for governance.

Sending relies on social theorists Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu for inspiration. For him, authority is the voluntary deference within a hierarchical (superordinate—superordinate) relationship. Authority is established through constant jockeying between aspiring experts within a social context. Bourdieu’s framework helps Sending account for the way in which authority is established, and who gets to enjoy authority.

According to Sending, “What actors do and who they are is to be determined through analyzing the particular social space in which they are situated, how they are related to other actors, and what resources they have” (p. 18). He focuses on the practices and understandings of experts themselves, largely by relying on secondary ethnographic studies, diplomatic history, and memoirs. He eschews the use of deductive abstract categories in favor of historically specific descriptive accounts of how actors vie for authority.

The Bourdieusian framework of fields, or “social topography” (p. 23), involves the interplay of three components: striving for recognition, a common understanding of the issue at hand by actors, and the social capital available to actors—all within a dynamic context of how concepts and authority relations have developed over time, or, as Sending writes, “established and perpetuated” (p. 24). Capital derives from both symbolic sources and material capabilities. Recognition and authority present an ongoing struggle and competition between aspiring experts.

Sending investigates three cases of contested authority: between diplomats and lawyers over international law and diplomacy in the League of Nations; between states and the Secretariat, as well as between Secretariat units in United Nations peacebuilding efforts; and between groups of demographers in transnational population governance. The first two cases rely heavily on diplomatic history and tell a story of how the development of the field of international law coevolved with its authority in articulating international law.

At the League, international lawyers wrested control over international rule from diplomats by dominating the staffing of national delegations and international secretariats. They helped to constitute the “international” by developing a new concept of appropriate rules of behavior and procedures for a domain that had not been previously understood to exist. In particular, they gradually created new international practices for dispute resolution. However, they continued to operate in the shadow of state sovereignty in peacebuilding and public administration. While saying that the “international” is coproduced by experts and their social context, Sending does not clearly specify the different meanings of international for different actors or over time, beyond noting that diplomats are more attuned to empathy and compromise, and lawyers apply deductive expectations for behavior.

Developments in UN peacemaking built on the administrative changes at the League, where an international technical identity by a professional staff had been developed based on the British Civil Service model, and further distanced the UN Secretariat from national civil servants. A culture of professionalism in the international space of the UN meant that they enjoyed technical expertise and an ethos of independence and impartiality, as they were responsible for mediating between state parties. Expertise and authority for directing peacebuilding was driven by two sets of competitions and cleavages: between the Secretariat and member states, and between professional groups within the Secretariat. Thus, the Secretariat tried to promote liberalism and universal principles, such as the responsibility to protect (R2P), in the face of sovereign claims by member states. But expertise within the Secretariat was riven by competition between political affairs and civil affairs, each with different kinds of knowledge and political capital within the UN, where political affairs was more closely tied into the Office of the Secretary General and civil affairs was more attuned to the specifics of conditions on the ground.

The study of transnational population governance is the author’s strongest case, and builds from intellectual histories of demography combined with policy studies. The population case is one of contending tribes of demographers, with demographic transition theory adherents prevailing. The authority dynamics were largely subject to the interests of funding foundations, most notably the Rockefeller Foundation. Transnational expert groups were established in new transnational international institutions, particularly the Population Council. In the face of multiple contending groups seeking to attenuate population growth, the group now widely associated with demographic transition theory prevailed as the dominant population doctrine. Family planning and socioeconomic development (including education and public information) were at the core of the doctrine, with women’s empowerment added later, and were widely embraced as ways to accelerate the demographic transition in developing countries. Expert guidance was provided to developing states by the Population Council, most notably India and Pakistan. They trained cadres of local experts worldwide. Ultimately, when the UN and specialized agencies became interested in population, the existing expertise had already been institutionalized throughout these networks of nongovernmental organization.

The Politics of Expertise provides a tantalizing framework for understanding how expert groups gain and consolidate authority. It helps reveal the strategies deployed by aspiring experts for acquiring authority. It reveals some forgotten facts and provides interesting interpretations. Because we take these things for granted, it is mind-bending to see how they were created. The civil service reforms introduced in the League are not widely treated in the international public administration literature. That “power” in the UN can be measured in distance from the 28th floor (where the UN secretary general’s offices are situated) is a worthy ethnographic touch. That the Cairo Programme of Action for the UNFPA is a continuation of the same authority structure in population policy is an interesting interpretation that follows from Sending’s framework, and it is not consistent with standard understandings of the new policy directions introduced by the Programme of Action.

The framework is not systematically applied across the cases studied: The three components of the field theory are not addressed explicitly in each case. Ultimately, Sending provides a toolkit for understanding the phenomenology of expertise. Still, the analysis is short on dynamics and how prior decisions and assignments of authority shaped subsequent periods, other than the ways in which administrative reforms in the League shaped the design of the UN Secretariat.

Sending problematizes the question of the sources of expert authority. He offers a valuable antidote to unreflective approaches to expertise, and provides a nuanced and granular resolution to the process of authority creation. His book should yield further interesting studies of the origins of authority in world politics.