Abstract

Examining the long history of expert engagement with Africa and the Global South, critical scholarship has explored how “international experts” made realities commensurable with rationalities of government and contributed to design programs and policy that willingly or unwillingly reinforced regimes of authoritarian politics through the neutral language of technocracy. While providing a powerful critique of the politics of expertise, this scholarship tends to reproduce the image of international experts as competent, knowledgeable, and effective. This article goes beyond such portrayals to examine the contradictions in the work of international urban experts, or urbanists. I discuss how and why their limited empirical knowledge of local urban realities did not undermine their status as experts, as they engaged with and narrated the development of Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa. By exploring how urban experts could still claim their work to be “impactful,” no matter whether their formulas for urban development proposed in reports and meetings with government stakeholders were ever actualized and implemented, I examine why expertise validates itself through an entanglement of rhetoric, optics, and coloniality.

Keywords

expertise; urban; cities; Addis Ababa; knowledge

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2026 Marco Di Nunzio

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