Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>International organization and expertise have so often been discussed in tandem that the two may seem to belong together; it has even been claimed that supranational governance simply needs an apolitical knowledge base. This chapter challenges this view by revealing the politics inscribed in expertise. This becomes visible over longer periods of turbulence when experts were mobilized to solve more than one problem, and what counted as expertise and what polity this demanded changed over time. Focusing on scientific expertise, the chapter first reviews how its alleged universality has been construed geopolitically in the course of the twentieth century. It then analyses the episode of early UNESCO, an international organization that was to be heavily science-based. But what that meant was widely contested between the two main contenders for its first presidency: the classicist and IR scholar Alfred Zimmern and the biologist Julian Huxley.</jats:p>