The Postcolonial Attribution of Competence in IOs

While acknowledging that boundaries are a defining feature of International Organisations (IO), practice-oriented scholars rarely mention how access to a community is linked to racial attribution of competence. Skill (or recognition of skill) in practice is not a neutral qualifier; it flows from interpretation in a world infused with power relations. If many practice scholars have argued that the diplomatic skills of women are nurtured and perceived differently, few analyzed the representation of the skills of non-Western bureaucrats and experts (cf Huju 2023). Postcolonial scholars, Edward Said among others, have long studied how belonging to a community is a political project of separating ‘them’ (formerly colonised countries) from ‘us’ (Western countries), which could be useful in understanding how IO potentially recreate racial separations in epistemic relations of knowledge creation. In weaving in postcolonial and international practice scholarships, this paper answers the following question: how does epistemic power come to play in re-creating postcolonial boundaries in the attribution of competence? Methodologically, it reviews the communications on covid-19 and the pandemic from the World Health Organization (January 2020 to December 2023), including all publicly available speeches, press releases, as well as 15 to 20 media interviews per year by the director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.