The UN’s Knowledge Economy

This chapter spells out the various ways that the world organization’s intergovernmental machinery requires outside inputs as part of making UN policy sausages. A cottage industry of outside experts—think tankers, consultants, and university faculty members—greases the gears of the UN’s messy process with substantive inputs. The ways that ideas matter, and how they influence state decision-making, are essential. Among the cases are the International Peace Institute (IPI), the International Crisis Group (ICG), the DC-based Stimson Center, the Security Council Report, UN University, the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum (CPPF) at the US-based Social Science Research Council, the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, and the Small Arms Survey. These intellectual entry points—primarily based in the global North but increasingly with wider participation from individuals and institutions worldwide—have helped shape the UN’s framing of international peace and security, human rights and humanitarian action, and sustainable development

Expertise and Practice

The relationship between the study and practice of security has not only changed considerably over the last 20 years, but has also become more varied, where ever more actors perform ever more specialized tasks of both analyzing and providing security. Once dominated by a principle of segmentary (territorially delimited) differentiation, we argue that the relative strength of the national framing has declined and that functional differentiation has increased over the last three decades, resulting in transnationalization in what is increasingly a market for security expertise and a proliferation of types of actors engaged in knowledge production surrounding security (e.g. International Crisis Group) as well as the practice of security. Resulting from this proliferation, there will be category-defying practices of security, for example the move toward “hybrid warfare” and in the realm of cyber security.