Renske Vos, Review of Deval Desai. <i>Expert Ignorance: The Law and Politics of Rule of Law Reform</i>

This book is about experts performing the rule of law -whatever the rule of law is.The point of curiosity that the book sets out from is that we cannot be so sure about the basic premises of the rule of law.Indeed, this is what any rule of law expert taking themselves seriously will tell you.What is more, experts' own-stated expert ignorance is the surest way they will be taken seriously, at least by their peers.Or so we are told by the author, who should know since, in a former life, he was himself a rule of law expert presumably denying his knowledge of the rule of law, only then to turn around and write a book not about the rule of law but, rather, about its denial.True to form, this book does not define the rule of law or stipulate how it should be implemented.Instead, Deval Desai pursues a different track by asking: what does it do when rule of law experts say they do not know what the rule of law is?Strikingly, in running with this question, this former expert, now academic, turns to theatre, not theory, to explain his past experience.He does so, moreover, convincingly, first by showing in detail how the more beaten tracks of practice theory, discourse and organization sociology are inadequate for his analysis and, second, by showing how theatre and performance can elucidate expert ignorance.The book thus merges two both current but up to now largely disjointed debates: one on theories of expert rule and global governance and the other on art and the aesthetics of international law.Crucially, with this timely move to theatre, Desai indicates the direction for sharpening current critical theoretical tools by learning from the arts.