Between the state and global civil society: non‐official experts and their network in the Asia‐Pacific, 1925–45

• Published in: Global Networks
• Main Author: Akami, Tomoko
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Wiley 2002
• Subjects: Pacific; North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1471-0374.00027; https://api.wiley.com/onlinelibrary/tdm/v1/articles/10.1111%2F1471-0374.00027; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1471-0374.00027

This article stresses the need for a more rigorous scrutiny of the power structure in which an expert network produces its ‘expert knowledge’. It defines a pioneering multinational expert network in the Asia‐Pacific region in the interwar years as a prototype of an epistemic community, and examines how far it challenged the state‐centred and North Atlantic‐centred dominant structure of international politics, and became ‘global’. In this article I argue that this particular network largely reinforced the dominant structure. This meant that it remained inter‐national and colonial, and served the interests of the state/empire, neither becoming global nor advancing a universalist cause for the global civil society. The failure owes a lot to historical circumstances. Yet this case study also demonstrates that the structure in which the expert network produced specific knowledge is still dominant and that a constant scrutiny of the role of an expert network remains critical.