ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the work of human rights officers deployed in other intergovernmental organization (IGO) field missions in projects of international intervention. Human rights officers hold and wield forms of decision-making power; however, they are relative newcomers in the legal field with uncertain professional status. Human rights officers are often trained in law, and they are called upon in their everyday work to fulfill many roles, grounded in particular forms of expertise. The professional expertise takes on additional significance in fieldwork, where location becomes partially constitutive of expertise. The expert becomes the 'international expert', and the international expert in law is tasked with translating purportedly universal international human rights law to the particular local context of the mission. As experts in the field, human rights officers reflect triangular law through practices of international expertise, translation, and written knowledge production. This knowledge provides the foundation for the work of monitoring, reporting, advocating, and capacity building.
