Between the state and global civil society: non-official experts and their network in the Asia-Pacific, 1925–45
his 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 h...
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Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
Language: | unknown |
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Wiley
2014
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Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1885/12225 |
Summary: | his 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. |
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