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.

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 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.