Introducing A World of Struggle

In A World of Struggle,1 I pursue three related ideas. First, a picture of the international situation and a way to think about world political economy; secondly, a proposal for thinking about the power of knowledge—and the work of expertise—in the organisation and management of our world; a story about what we might call ‘technocracy’ or ‘managerialism’ and the search for alternatives to it; and thirdly, an account of what law has to do with all this. There, I focus on law’s distributive role in global political economy and on law’s articulative or performative power as a form of knowledge work or expertise. My thinking on each of these themes arose from my experiences in the fields of economic development, human rights, international law and warfare. I aim to reframe the international situation less as order or system than as a continual struggle—hence the title, A World of Struggle. The social sciences often start with conflict—a Hobbesian state of nature or the competitive market of Adam Smith—and then work to explain how things nevertheless turn out well ordered: through a ‘balance of power’ or ‘invisible hand’. I share the intuition that people’s interests in both political and economic life are adverse. In my picture, however, struggle and conflict are more prevalent—and constitutive of our everyday world—than images of a well-ordered system or equilibrium market suggest.