ABSTRACT
Professor Thomas Biersteker;Director for Policy Research, The Graduate Institute, Geneva
This chapter describes how expertise can be contained in, reproduced by, and disseminated through a material object: SanctionsApp. After exploring literature on the agency of material objects and their role in assembling expertise, the chapter describes in detail the operations of the App, why it was developed, its effects (both intended and unintended), its inherent lacunae, and its normative implications. All expertise has blind spots, and SanctionsApp both embodies and attempts to transcend some of them. The SanctionsApp is one of the outputs of a multi-year project to analyze UN Security Council targeted sanctions. It contains and draws upon two separate data bases, one qualitative, and one quantitative, to provide policy practitioners with alternative language, short histories of UN sanctions use, a search function for identifying appropriate analogies for current conflicts, a checklist of things to consider when designing new measures, and quick facts about UN sanctions. The App was developed to influence policy practice, and there is evidence that it is having effects, both intended and unintended. The authority of its expertise is enacted through its usage, but like all expertise, it contains lacunae. It reflects the orientation and blind spots of the previous literature, but alsoattempts to transcend some of those lacunae by introducing new analytical distinctions and warnings about the scope and unintended consequences of targeted sanctions. The chapter concludes by arguing for normative reflection about the potential uses and abuses of our expertise when it is embodied in material objects.
