World of Struggle

David Kennedy is the Manley O. Hudson Professor of Law and Director of the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School. He is the author of The Rights of Spring: A Memoir of Innocence Abroad; Of War and Law; and The Dark Sides of Virtue: Reassessing International Humanitarianism, and the editor of The Canon of American Legal Thought (with William Fisher) (all Princeton).

Selected for The New York Times Book Review's "What's the Best Book, New or Old, You Read this Year?" 2016 "David Kennedy's A World of Struggle describes our world more accurately than any book I have read this year. Kennedy offers no clear prescriptions. Yet he clarifies that understanding how this world of injustice and inequality came about is the essential first step toward a democratic alternative."--Pankaj Mishra, New York Times Book Review "In his new book on how the world is ruled today through expert knowledge, Professor David Kennedy enters this continuing discussion in brilliant, pathbreaking, and trademark fashion... Presented without theoretical encumbrance or jargon, A World of Struggle is a straightforward but sophisticated account that capitalizes on prior insight to achieve a unique and powerful vantage point. The superlative book wins its distinction not only because it constructs a novel theory but also because it applies that theory to how the globe as a whole is ruled--something no one in the canon of social theory has really done."--Samuel Moyn, Harvard Law Review "Accounts of global politics are usually organized around time periods of settled order, during which powerful states laid down rules and established institutions. In this illuminating study, Kennedy tells a different story, in which contemporary international relations play out as a continuous struggle between technocratic elites around the world, in which nothing is ever settled and everything is negotiable."--G. John Ikenberry, Foreign Affairs

• Acknowledgments vii INTRODUCTION Could This Be 1648? 1 PART I Political Economy and Struggle 21 CHAPTER 1 Political Economy: World-Making Stories 23 CHAPTER 2 Struggle: Toward a Cartography of Engagement 54 PART II Expertise 87 CHAPTER 3 World-Making Ideas: Imagining a World to Govern and Resist 89 CHAPTER 4 Expertise: The Machinery of Global Reason 108 CHAPTER 5 Expertise in Action: Rule by Articulation 135 PART III Law 169 CHAPTER 6 Law and the Global Dynamics of Distribution 171 CHAPTER 7 International Legal Expertise: Innovation, Avoidance and Professional Faith 218 CHAPTER 8 Legal Expertise in War 256 EPILOGUE Let It Be So 277 Notes 281 Index 293