Resist the technocrats

Through international organisations, they wield power under the pretence of simply following the experts. Don’t believe them

UN secretary general António Guterres and his entourage, New York City. Photo by Mark Henley/Panos

is a researcher in international relations working on expertise, empire, and capitalism in the history and theory of international organisations. He is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. He is the author of The Technocratic International: Experts and the Making of a World from Nowhere (2026).

In 1865, delegates from 20 countries – at the time, a category so broad it included both the Ottoman Empire and the Free City of Hamburg – gathered in Paris to establish what would become the International Telegraph Union. The task before them was as technical as it was consequential: to standardise signalling systems so that messages could cross borders without delay or distortion. Regional agreements had already brought some uniformity to European overland telegraph lines. Now, this infrastructure was to be unified at the scale of the world.

Delegates to the 1865 conference in Paris that formed the International Telegraph Union

Politics, the participants insisted, had no place at their gathering. Telegraphy was a matter of wires, codes and efficiency: of electrical, not political, power. As the French senator and conference president Édouard Drouyn de Lhuys put it in a speech to the delegates, if ‘war often arises from misunderstandings’, then ‘to facilitate the exchange of ideas between peoples’ along ‘this electrical current on which thought flies through space’ was to remove one of its causes. The work of the ‘elite men’ gathered in Paris, he suggested, might render political strife itself obsolete.

Yet the telegraph lines to be harmonised had already proven their immense worth as instruments of empire, military command and commercial domination. And so, in Paris, decisions about standards favoured certain firms, certain states and certain routes of transit. Claims to technical neutrality did not suspend existing power imbalances. They rearticulated them on regulatory terms.

This logic has become a staple of international relations since. From lending bodies to public health agencies, international organisations continue to use technical experts – whether economists or medical scientists – not just to understand and solve problems, but also to present themselves as havens above the fray of strife and rivalry, residing in a sphere where evidence makes policy. Based on this, they tend to insist on their innocence. When funding pressures arise, geopolitical gridlock looms or populists push back, these forces are almost always referred to as external. Thus, when the former diplomatic chief of the European Union, Josep Borrell, in 2022 referred to non-Europe as a ‘jungle’, he invoked colonial imagery – but also a flattering view of the EU as a shelter from the storm. The price to pay for this kind of denialism is painfully clear today, as the EU is forced to redefine its role in world politics.

The English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in 1782 wrote of international law that it would ‘soar above the mists of prejudice’. The same vision underpins international organisations, and claiming this position is a key source of their legitimacy. For some, like the International Committee of the Red Cross, it can be a necessary condition for doing their work. For others, like the International Monetary Fund, the claim is easily discredited once, say, the political side-taking involved in imposing austerity comes into view. Yet in either case, international civil servants do not in fact escape power. They rearticulate it with the help of technical experts.

By framing this rearticulation as real impartiality, however, they conflate technocracy and expertise. This conflation lies at the heart of the legitimacy crisis that international organisations face today. To deal with that crisis, we thus need to disentangle the two. Only then will we be able to focus on the core problem: not expertise, but the technocratic use of expert advice. To save expertise, we need to resist technocracy. In the case of international organisations, this requires that we demythologise their origins, that we acknowledge they have never been independent from politics, and that we refrain from technocratic wishful thinking.

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International organisations are often described as spaces where diplomatic exchange enables agreement on how to tackle shared problems. To best understand and solve a given problem – an emerging public health hazard, the potential risks of a new technology, the acceptable threshold for military intervention – the staff of international organisations recruit experts, whether virologists, economists or lawyers. This is where the trouble begins: who counts as a recognised expert? Which areas of specialisation are considered relevant for which problem? And based on what criteria do they get selected: their university degrees? Citation count? Media engagements? Prior contributions in a similar capacity?

When the COVID-19 epidemic hit, for example, the World Health Organization assembled an Emergency Committee, chaired by the French government’s former director general for health, Didier Houssin. Members of this committee were representatives of 13 WHO member states. All of them had doctorates; some of them were delegates of their public health ministries; others were university professors. An additional advisory board included representatives of other organisations, such as the International Maritime Organization and the International Civil Aviation Organization. In short, at every stage, mobilising these experts involved choices to prioritise some selection criteria over others. Expert selection is always imperfect.

But focusing on the experts alone is not enough: generally speaking, it is their mobilisers who make policy. These technocratic mobilisers, usually international civil servants, use experts to develop policy that is impartial, evidence-based, expert-approved. Even if occasionally, some of the latter speak in the name of the former, there is a real difference: technocrats and experts are not the same. Despite that, both organisations and their critics rarely distinguish expertise as such from the technocratic logic that assigns its place in politics. The facile........

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