Monitoring and the Politics of Ignorance
Workshop at the Graduate Institute
May 20th 2015
Christina Boswell and Grégoire Mallard
SKAPE-Net/ESRC project on the Politics of Monitoring
Program
The workshop will be open to participants only, so as to maximize the informality of the exchanges. We plan on giving 10 minutes to each author so that they present the content of their paper as well as how the paper relates to the theme of the workshop, followed by 30 minutes of informal discussion. We have included “discussants” for each paper, but we do not plan on having 10 minutes of questions by the discussant: rather, all participants should read all papers, and discussants should read more in-depth the paper which has been assigned to them, to prepare at least a few questions. Thus, we would like to keep an informal format for the Q&A.
9:30am Welcome and introduction, by Christina Boswell and Grégoire Mallard
10:00am -11:20am: Ignorance, Numbers and Monitoring 1
Christina Boswell, “Seeing Illegal Immigrants: State Monitoring and the Politics of Ignorance in German and UK Immigration Policy.”
Discussant: Annabelle Littoz-Monnet
Wendy Espeland, “What Numbers Can't Tell Us: ThePolitics of Knowing and Not Knowing with Metrics”
Discussant: Steve Sturdy
11:40am -12:20Ignorance, Numbers and Monitoring 1
David Demortain, “Evacuating controversies, evaluating governments: an investigation of international risk governance frameworks”
Discussant:Alessandra Arcuri
12:20 – 1:30pm Lunch
1:30pm- 2:45pm: Deniability, Plausible Folk Theories, and Monitoring 1
Terence Halliday, “Plausible FolkTheories: Throwing Veils of Plausibility over Zones of Ignorance inGlobal Governance.”
Discussant:Richard Freeman
Linsey McGoey, “Pioneers of industry, pioneers of denial: strategic ignorance in the building of 19th-century industrial empires.”
Discussant: Grégoire Mallard
3:00pm- 4:15pm: Deniability, Plausible Folk Theories, and Monitoring 2
Grégoire Mallard, “Convenient Untruths in Counter-Proliferation Policy:Understanding the UN Global Monitoring Efforts.”
Discussant:Christina Boswell
Aurel Niederberger
Paper Title: “The ‘Knowledge’ behind Sanctions: The Work of Expert Panels on UN Targeted Sanctions in Africa.”
Discussant:Filipe Calvao
4:20pm – 5pm: Conclusions
Conclusive Remarks, by Benedict Kingsbury
Next steps, by Christina Boswell and Grégoire Mallard
Participants’ Bios
Alessandra Arcurriis Associate Professor at the Department of International and European Union Law, Erasmus School of Law. Dr. Arcuri has held prestigious positions in various international academic institutions, including the European University Institute (Jean Monnet Fellow), New York Univeristy (Hauser Global Research Fellow), Hamburg University (Marie Curie). Her research focuses on the global governance of risks and the intersection of international economic law and risk regulation. She has published extensively in the field of risk law, international economic law and law and economics. Dr. Arcuri is the coordinator of LL.M. Programme in International and European Public Law at the Erasmus School of Law. Besides teaching regularly at the Erasmus School of Law (International Economic Law, Advanced Public International Law, Economics of Public Law), she has taught courses in several universities, including at the Department of Law of the European University Institute (EUI), Florence, Italy, at the International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics, Lund University, Sweden, at the African Universities in Lomè, Togo, at the Luiss Guido Carli University, Rome, and at the University of Siena, Italy. Dr. Arcuri holds a law degree from La Sapienza University, Rome (cum laude), an LL.M. from Utrecht University (Honourable mention) and a Ph.D. from the Erasmus School of Law (Governing the risks of ultra-hazardous activities: challenges for contemporary legal systems).
Christina Boswellis Professor of Politics at the University of Edinburgh, where she co-directs the Centre for Science, Knowledge and Policy (SKAPE). She is currently leading an ESRC project on "The Politics of Monitoring: Information, Indicators and Targets in Immigration, Defence Procurement and Climate Change". Recent books include The Political Uses of Expert Knowledge: Immigration Policy and Social Research(Cambridge, 2009/2012), and (with Andrew Geddes),Migration and Mobility in the EU (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Filipe Calvao(PhD University of Chicago) is an Assistant Professor in Anthropology and Sociology of Development at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID). In addition to his book manuscript, based on extensive field research in Angola’s diamond-rich provinces of Lunda, Calvão is currently developing a research project provisionally titled “Transparent Minerals.” This project builds on previous work on the material qualities of diamonds – framed in the tension between transparency and hiddenness, clarity and visibility – as well as historical research on the securitization of mining communities – where technologies of truth detection in divination rituals and corporate surveillance become interlaced between revelation and concealment. This new research project examines the institutional architecture of the diamond industry in its move towards “transparent” and “ethical” mining: what is concealed or revealed in the meaningful distance between the tangibility of minerals and the elusiveness of the mining business?
David Demortain is a sociologist based at the research centre Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Sciences Innovations Sociétés (LISIS), a centre of INRA, East Paris University and CNRS. He is also a member of the Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation (CARR) of the London School of Economics and Political Science. My research broadly concerns the relation between knowledge and (transnational) regulation of risk. Current projects are about the history of risk governance models in environment and health; the negotiation and validation of standards of evidence in toxicology; the rise of computational simulation methods in regulatory science.
Wendy Espeland is professor of sociology at Northwestern University. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 1992. She works in the fields of culture, organizations, law, and knowledge production, with an emphasis on quantification and accountability. She is currently completing a book, with Michael Sauder, on the effects of law school rankings on higher education. She is also conducting research, with Stuart Michaels, on the relationship between measures of sexual behavior and the gay rights movement. Her articles have appeared in The American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Law and Society Review, Annual Review of Sociology, European Journal of Sociology, and Annual Review of Law and Social Science. She has received fellowships from the Russell Sage Foundation, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Science and theWissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.
Richard Freeman is Professor of Social Science and Public Policy at the University of Edinburgh, where he is also Co-Director of the Academy of Government. He is co-editor of Knowledge in Policy: embodied, inscribed, enacted (Policy Press 2014), of Palgrave Studies in Science, Knowledge and Policy, a special issue of Evidence and Policy (2011) and the journal Critical Policy Studies.
Terence Halliday is Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation and the Director of the Center on Law and Globalization. He focuses on globalization of markets and politics, with particular attention to global norm-making in international organizations. Halliday co-directs theWith Professor Bruce Carruthers, Halliday published in 2009, Bankrupt: Global Lawmaking and Systemic Financial Crisis, an empirical investigation of global norm-making and national law-making on corporate bankruptcy, which was awarded three distinguished book prizes by the American Sociological Association. He is completing a research project with Professor Susan Block-Lieb, Law, Fordham University, on the law-making of international trade law organizations, with special reference to the United Nations Commission on International Trade law (UNCITRAL). He is also Co-Principal Investigator with Professor Lucien Karpik (Ecoles des Mines and EHESS, Paris) and Professor Malcolm Feeley (University of California, Berkeley) on a National Science Foundation funded project for a long-standing international research collaboration of scholars who study the mobilization of legal occupations (the “legal complex”) in the rise and fall of political liberalism, including basic legal freedoms. Their latest book, Fates of Political Freedom: The Legal Complex in the British Post-Colony (Cambridge University Press, 2011), shows how the involvements of lawyers and judges influenced three different trajectories of legal-political change in the new nations that got independence from Britain after World War II.
Benedict Kingsburyis theMurry and Ida Becker Professor of Law and Director, Institute for International Law and Justice. Hisbroad, theoretically grounded approach to international law closely integrates work in legal theory, political theory, and history. With NYU colleague Richard Stewart, he initiated and directs the Global Administrative Law Research Project, a pioneering approach to issues of accountability and participation in global governance. They launched the Global Administrative Law Network, and together with Andrew Hurrell edit the Law and Global Governance book series for Oxford University Press. Kingsbury has directed the Law School’s Institute for International Law and Justice since its founding in 2002. He and NYU Professor José Alvarez became the editors-in-chief of the century-old American Journal of International Law in 2013. Kingsbury has written on a wide range of international law topics, from trade-environment disputes and indigenous peoples issues to interstate arbitration, investor-state arbitration, and the proliferation of international tribunals. His edited volumes include Governance by Indicators (2012), and books on Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) and Alberico Gentili (1552-1608). After completing his LLB with first-class honors at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand in 1981, Kingsbury was a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford. In 1984, he graduated at the top of his class in the MPhil program in international relations at Oxford. He subsequently completed a DPhil in law at Oxford and has taught at Oxford, Duke, Harvard Law School, the University of Tokyo, the University of Paris 1, and the University of Utah.
Annabelle Littoz-Monnet is Associate Professor in IR/Political Science at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. She received her PhD in political Science from Oxford University in 2005. Before joining the Institute in 2009,she was Assistant Professor in European Studies at the Central European University, Budapest (2005-2009). She has also worked for the Socio-Legal Studies Centre at Oxford University and as a Research fellow at the Royal Institute of International Relations, Brussels. In 2007 she published The European Union and Culture: between economic regulation and European cultural policy (Manchester University Press). Her articles have appeared in journals such as Governance, the European Journal of Political Research, West European Politics, the Journal of European Public Policy, and the Journal of Common Market Studies. Her current research interests include global governance, the politics of knowledge, international organizations, bureaucratic expension, and the concept of ethical expertise. She is now working on aproject funded by the Swiss National Science Fund whichexamines uses of ethical experts by bureaucrats and policy-makers.
Grégoire Mallard is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology of Development at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva). Before joining the Institute, he obtained a PhD in sociology from Princeton University in 2008 and he was Assistant Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University from 2008 to 2013. He is the author of Fallout: Nuclear Diplomacy in an Age of Global Fracture (University of Chicago Press, 2014) and co-editor of Global Science and National Sovereignty: Studies in Historical Sociology of Science (Routledge 2008). His recent publications focus on nuclear governance in Europe and the Middle East, postwar financial negotiations, and the study of harmonization as a social process. In 2016, Cambridge University Press will publish a book he co-edits with Jérôme Sgard titled Contractual Knowledge: A Hundred Years of Legal Experimentation in Global Markets.
Linsey McGoey is senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Essex. She is editor of An Introduction to the Sociology of Ignorance: Essays on the Limits of Knowing (Routledge, 2014), and co-editor, with Matthias Gross, of The Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies (2015). She is author of No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy (Verso, forthcoming, 2015). Her research explores the sociology of knowledge, ignorance, economic development and global health governance, with a recent focus on the relationship between philanthropy and growing inequality.
Aurel Niederberger is a PhD candidate in Political Science/International
Relations at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva.
He holds a Master in Political Science from the University of Zurich.
Steve Sturdy studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge, then Philosophy of Science at the University of Western Ontario, before taking a PhD in Science Studies at the University of Edinburgh. After a period of post-doctoral research and teaching in the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester he returned to Edinburgh, where he is currently Head of Science, Technology and Innovation Studied and Professor of the Sociology of Medicine Knowledge. His research revolves round the interaction between medical science, practice and policy from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, and draws especially on insights from the sociology of scientific knowledge. He currently holds a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award in Medical Humanities for a project entitled Making Genomic Medicine. He previously spent six years as Deputy Director of the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum, and his recent publications include a volume of original papers co-edited with Richard Freeman and entitled Knowledge in Policy: Embodied, Inscribed, Enacted (Policy Press, 2014).