From ‘people with projects’ to ‘encountering expertise’: a feminist reading of Kennedy’s A World of Struggle

Abstract

A World of Struggle is a lively, interdisciplinary and challenging account of how international actors might map the global order with greater accuracy.1 In this, his latest book, David Kennedy encourages the reader to understand the role of expertise and technical vocabularies in the contemporary international order. In situating experts—and their struggles to assert a position, an approach, or technique—within the discourse and decision-making structures of international institutions, Kennedy renders the complexity of the global order of the early 21st century with greater nuance. This is an important work for international lawyers and for institutional actors in the international realm, or indeed for anyone who regards expertise itself as a solution to legal dilemmas and competing demands, be they within international humanitarian law, the law of the sea, international financial law, international environmental law or international human rights law. In this brief comment on Kennedy’s book, I celebrate the potential it holds to transform our international legal methodologies, while inserting a series of feminist questions on structural biases (and the role of privilege in maintaining them) to draw out the substantive claims of the book. I also briefly engage with what I regard as the central challenge in the text: Kennedy’s optimism about the value of mobilising continued projects within the global order. Ultimately, I conclude, A World of Struggle provides an interesting juxtaposition between the optimism of its concluding chapter and Kennedy’s own latent scepticism about the capacity for a responsive (and responsible) international order.