Expertise as contingency-reduction: evidence from interviews concerning Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine on German TV news

Abstract

This article analyses interviews with experts on German television news concerning the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine in the context of debates about the public contribution of the social sciences and humanities. Considering the first 13 months of the war, we find that the questions put to experts are mostly not about Eastern Europe or Ukraine. Rather they concern the present and the future with reference to implications for a “we” conceived as the viewing public in Germany. In their answers, academic experts do not draw on research, but they draw on academic knowledge to produce statements, which reduce the range of possible interpretations and outcomes using exclusion, scenarios, and probabilities. Experts work to reduce contingency, a mode of "doing expertise" that cannot be fairly characterized merely as a governance strategy and is not fully captured by debates between scientistic approaches to the social sciences and humanities and their critics.