This chapter summarises the argument of the book. Through a discussion of “Brexit”, it then explores the extent to which arguments about expert ignorance could travel beyond rule of law reform, for instance, to studies of governance more broadly. It also discusses the politics of the methods I have proposed to study expert ignorance.

The Introduction provides a summary of the central arguments and outlines the chapters of the book.

This chapter presents the field of rule of law reform as the context for the study of expert ignorance. It argues that, for some rule of law experts, the rule of law is underdetermined in a radical way. Analysing the scholarly and practitioner literature on rule of law reform, it shows that this position is meaningfully widespread in the field. It contrasts this view with that prevailing in the literature on rule of law reform, which imagines that rule of law experts seek to derive their authority from their knowledge about how to do rule of law reform, leading to effects like the poor transplantation of laws and institutions. I also introduce some of the stylistic and methodological problems this question raises and point to my responses: fictionalised and plurivocal reflections on my rule of law reform work. This entails a particular form of authorial presence that reflects who I understand a rule of law reformer to be – someone who can tell enough of a story to bring the reader along while fragmenting, shifting, and making fragile the story, the author, and her authority.

This chapter grapples with the possibility that a historical account of rule of law reform might provide both context and insight into reformers’ own attempts to radically critique rule of law reform. I make two arguments. The first is methodological: reformers’ ignorance about the rule of law makes it impossible to conduct an authoritative historical sociology, genealogy, or historicised immanent critique of reformers. The second is historical: I offer a historical account of rule of law reform but frame it as a specific and standalone political intervention. I argue that a standalone profession of ignorant rule of law reformers emerged in the late 1990s or early 2000s, when development ideas about the form and function of institutions shifted from a neoliberal understanding of institutions as a means of giving form to the sublime complexity of the world, to being a complex sublime themselves.

This chapter offers a novel theoretical and methodological apparatus to reinterpret rule of law reform. I draw on aesthetic theory to reimagine rule of law reform as an aesthetic practice, in which efforts to build the sublime ‘rule of law’ produce both shadows of the rule of law and the shadowy figure of the rule of law reformer. I go on to argue that this aesthetic remains irreducibly embodied in the body of the reformer and that rule of law reform is, thus, in a very real sense, performance. I turn to performance studies, as well as Stanislavski’s system of training actors, to analyse these performances, and discuss precisely how they complement the methods in the previous chapter. I then put this new method into practice, rewriting my cases as dramatic performances. In doing so, I show how expert ignorance might productively be understood through the dramatic structure of ignorant experts’ action.

This chapter focuses on efforts to socially organise and limit expert ignorance. It focuses on “problem-driven iterative adaptation”, a contemporary approach to rule of law reform, to show how experts might try to create their own social organisations (such as a network or social movement) to restrict legitimate types of ignorance and implementation work. This has two sets of effects. First, it shapes and limits the provisional forms of the rule of law that rule of law reforms produce. Second, it places these performances in relation to the broader expert apparatus of development – for example, enabling them to be mainstreamed into specific development projects. This, I suggest, could be depoliticising: rule of law performances might function as a repository for contentious political and legal issues that projects raise, enabling the rest of the project to continue without much fuss.

This chapter shows expert ignorance in action. I focus on three common methods: organisational sociologies, Foucauldian discourse analysis, and ethnographies of practices. I develop a case study of a fictionalised agricultural reform project in sub-Saharan Africa, in which I advised on the project’s rule of law component. I analyse the project using these three different methods to show their contributions and limitations to understanding expert ignorance. I argue that all three approaches have some methodological assumption that experts claim epistemic or practical authority to give form and content to the rule of law. The politics of a rule of law reform project is embedded in the form and substance of accounts of that project; this assumption thus inhibits these accounts from showing how expert ignorance works in practice. I then introduce what they cannot adequately capture – ‘ignorance work’ and its operations.

Returning to the cases in the previous chapters, this chapter shows that reformers conduct ‘ignorance work’, which destabilises the structures of space, time, and identity that might otherwise encase a rule of law reform. The chapter goes on to show that ignorance work has patterned relationships to ‘implementation work’. For example, experts might base a project on the claim that the very concept of the rule of law is incapable of being known or that the rule of law is too empirically complex to be understood, even while trying to develop global indicators about measuring the rule of law. Turning to their effects, the chapter argues that these patterns are ways by which a rule of law expert produces provisional forms of law and politics in the Global South – for example, through well-funded and continuing pilot projects to implement indicators in various contexts under a rubric of transparency. At the same time, key questions about those forms are repeatedly raised and never resolved – for example, the location of the law/politics divide.