Introduction

Book section : Chapter

Whether it is criticism of the World Health Organization’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, South Africa’s 2023 case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, or the United States’ 2025 announcement to withdraw from the Paris Agreement under the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change: when world-political turbulence receives attention, challenges to international organizations are often mounted as rejections of expert governance. In response, they typically invoke their impartial authority and emphasize their distance from politics. This raises difficult questions for both policymakers and academics: how does the work of experts in turbulent times affect the resilience and legitimacy of international organizations? How and under what conditions do experts strengthen or weaken international organizations? This introduction presents the volume’s conceptual reframing of the topic. The chief innovation of this volume is to recover the notion of turbulence, which foregrounds long-term historical perspective and interlinkages; and to introduce the new lens of ‘issue insulation’, which highlights how the expert point of view separates issues from particular temporal horizons, governance levels, or actor types. The introduction situates this intervention in the literature, discusses its limitations, and provides an overview of subsequent chapters.

Authors: Eijking, J

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Host title: Experts in a Turbulent World
• Pages: 1–22
• Place of publication: Oxford / New York
• Publication date: 2026-06-15
• Edition: 1
• DOI: 10.1093/9780198991694.003.0001
• EISBN: 9780198991694
• ISBN: 9780198991670
• Language: English
• Keywords: expertise; international organizations; global governance; issue insulation; crisis; turbulence; functionalism; interpretivism; constructivism
• Subtype: Chapter