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1 results

  • 3 - Projecting the Rule of Law

  • Deval Desai, University of Edinburgh
  • Book:
    Expert Ignorance
    Published online:
    08 June 2023
    Print publication:
    22 June 2023, pp 49-106
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  • Summary

    This chapter shows expert ignorance in action. I focus on three common methods: organisational sociologies, Foucauldian discourse analysis, and ethnographies of practices. I develop a case study of a fictionalised agricultural reform project in sub-Saharan Africa, in which I advised on the project’s rule of law component. I analyse the project using these three different methods to show their contributions and limitations to understanding expert ignorance. I argue that all three approaches have some methodological assumption that experts claim epistemic or practical authority to give form and content to the rule of law. The politics of a rule of law reform project is embedded in the form and substance of accounts of that project; this assumption thus inhibits these accounts from showing how expert ignorance works in practice. I then introduce what they cannot adequately capture – ‘ignorance work’ and its operations.