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amenable to a far greater degree of horizontally structured social dynamics.22 Public will formation, in turn, embraces an extensive network of organisations and institutions featuring the mass media, the production and reception of art, schools and universities, the relations between scientific communities and non-expert opinion, sport, religion, health, and the diverse dimensions of civil society. These include the culture of daily life, historical memory, and coming to terms with individual and collective trauma. In evaluating the extent to which law and politics
occur in different, mutually closed discourses. It is at once transaction, production and obligation – but at the same time it is a fourth thing, the ‘in-between’, the interdiscursive relation between the various performative acts. An expert contract may serve as an example to illustrate the importance of distinguishing among these three dimensions. 4 There is a whole array of concrete projects of
field of technical and economic expertise deployed through global institutions, ambivalent about if not actively hostile to national democracy, and underpinned by a particular discourse of human rights which sees a class of experts – academics, United Nations (UN) special mechanisms, non-governmental organisations, consultants, businesses, and courts – imposing a vision of what rights are on the hoi polloi beneath them. It is small wonder that this is a deeply unattractive image of world society to large numbers of people outside of that “expert” class. To them
Coda I n lieu of a summary restatement of the preceding chapters, it seems more appropriate to finish by considering the role of affective politics in our contemporary moment. Much has already been written about 2016 marking a uniquely turbulent year of political upheaval, expressive of widespread discontent with the ‘establishment’, elites, and experts. What might a critical theory of affect have to say in response to the ostensibly seismic political events encompassed in Brexit, Donald Trump, and our supposedly new ‘post-truth’ age? Let us take the last
” bias on the part of the authors. Their explanations pertain to the technique of the agitator who reckons with certain psychological dispositions upon which to play with psychological means. These, on the other hand, he puts into the service of definite though not always fully conscious political aims. In this sphere, psychology is not an end but a means. The agitator may be defined as the expert propagandist who assumes the role of the leader. The most important Nazis were agitators by profession and it seems to be an intrinsic characteristic of the
that term. Because international legal regimes have purposes or projects which are to be realised, and because the realisation of such a purpose or project is not automatic but subject to constant challenges and difficulties thrown up by the randomness of events, the project has to be able to react, and in order to undertake this, “there have to be experts.” 8 There must be a class of people whose role is to pursue implementation – to see the project through. From the existence of such experts there are, then, two necessary consequences. First, a complex array of
expertise of the accountant. Performance review through indicators does not entirely replace the lawyer, civil servant, or politician, of course, but it subordinates their knowledge to the audit process. 35 What becomes relevant when evaluating whether a State is a good human rights performer becomes not the view of the independent expert but the abstracted measurement that, in effect, anybody can use to perform the evaluation. Whether the perinatal mortality rate is declining is transparent to observation, as is the status of ratification of the relevant treaty or
strict they may prove inflexible. This means that standards are best left open-ended, which in turn means that a class of experts must come into existence “with sufficient latitude to adjust and optimise, to balance and calculate.” 5 Implementation of the purpose, in other words, is too nuanced and complex for as blunt an instrument as law, and must be replaced with the “contextual ad hocism ” of technical expertise. 6 The result is a turn to policy making: a shift from “international law’s archaic mores [to] a political science-inspired language of
I The new constitutional question Once again, Google has become the target of a passionate political debate. 1 The global search engine's 90 per cent market share, its questionable handling of users’ private data and its massive expansionist tendencies into other sectors of the Internet raise not only political but also constitutional questions in the strict sense. Experts
-Romani peers. It argued that the qualified experts had placed the children in the classes that they believed would benefit the children's development the most: ‘[s]eparate classes were not established for the purpose of racial segregation in enrolment in the first year of primary school but as a means of providing children with supplementary tuition in the Croatian language and eliminating the consequences of prior social deprivation’ ( Oršuš and Others v. Croatia , 2010 , para. 60). In the case at the ECtHR Grand Chamber, the court implicitly agreed with the assumption