Suspicion and expertise
Following the Money in an Offshore Investigation
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2253814 |
|---|---|
| Authors | T Fedirko (0000-0002-9597-550X, Department of Social Anthropology University of St Andrews 71 North Street, St Andrews KY16 9AL UK, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 70-89 |
| Publication date | 2021-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1359-0987 • E-ISSN: 1467-9655 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9655.13427 |
| OpenAlex | W3111695505 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 41 |
This article explores the relation between suspicion and expertise in the context of activist investigations of offshore corruption. I reconstruct one investigation of alleged corruption in the Azerbaijani oil sector, conducted by a British organization called Global Witness, to explore how suspicion is learned and practised in the face of impenetrable offshore secrecy. For these detectives of global capital, suspicion is both a tool for arriving at an understanding of offshore corporate networks and an orientation that helps them overcome the limits of this understanding, allowing them to make political claims that go beyond what is strictly afforded by evidence and libel law. Extending recent anthropological scholarship that revises the disciplinary emphasis on truth and certainty as the mainstays of expert knowledge, I argue that investigative expertise provides imprecise and suspicious understandings of its objects that are useful despite, or even because of, the ambivalence and suspicion it entails
Ambivalence · Capital (architecture · Context (archaeology · Discipline · Epistemology · Face (sociological concept · Language change · Law and economics · Political science · Politics · Public relations · Scholarship · Secrecy · Social science · Sociology · Witness · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance · Global Security and Public Health · History · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology · Wildlife Conservation and Criminology Analyses
Science in action
The Politics of Possibility
Ways of Knowing
Four. Policing Uncertainty
Speculative Security
Capital without Borders
The Limits of Critique
The Hidden Wealth of Nations
The Life Informatic
Keepers of the Flame
Introduction
Speculative Security
Security and Suspicion
The Gray Zone
Investigative Journalism
Witches and Neighbours
Ethnographies of Austerity
We Have Never Been Modern
The corporeality of expertise
Transparency and Conspiracy
Thinking through the Anthropology of Experts
Essays on the Anthropology of Reason
Epistemic Cultures
Cutting the Network
Due Diligence and "Reasonable Man," Offshore
The Method of Hope
Enactments of Expertise
Accidents of equity and the aesthetics of Chinese offshore incorporation
I fell in love with Carlos the meerkat
Sympathy and suspicion
For a Sociology of Expertise
Creating and dissolving social groups from New Guinea to New York
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,5 |
| Citation span | 2024 - 2026 (3) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |