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deductive expectations for behavior. Developments in UN peacemaking built on the administrative changes at the League, where an international technical identity by a professional staff had been developed based on the British Civil Service model, and further distanced the UN Secretariat from national civil servants. A culture of professionalism in the international space of the UN meant that they enjoyed technical expertise and an ethos of independence and impartiality, as they were responsible for mediating between state parties. Expertise and authority for directing peacebuilding was driven by two sets of competitions and cleavages: between the Secretariat and member states, and between professional groups within the Secretariat. Thus, the Secretariat tried to promote liberalism and universal principles, such as the responsibility to protect (R2P), in the face of sovereign claims by member states. But expertise within the Secretariat was riven by competition between political affairs and civil affairs, each with different kinds of knowledge and political capital within the UN, where political affairs was more closely tied into the Office of the Secretary General and civil affairs was more attuned to the specifics of conditions on the ground. The study of transnational population governance is the author’s strongest case, and builds from intellectual histories of demography combined with policy studies. The population case is one of contending tribes of demographers, with demographic transition theory adherents prevailing. The authority dynamics were largely subject to the interests of funding foundations, most notably the Rockefeller Foundation. Transnational expert groups were established in new transnational international institutions, particularly the Population Council. In the face of multiple contending groups seeking to attenuate population growth, the group now widely associated with demographic transition theory prevailed as the dominant population doctrine. Family planning and socioeconomic development (including education and public information) were at the core of the doctrine, with women’s empowerment added later, and were widely embraced as ways to accelerate the demographic transition in developing countries. Expert guidance was provided to developing states by the Population Council, most notably India and Pakistan. They trained cadres of local experts worldwide. Ultimately, when the UN and specialized agencies became interested in population, the existing expertise had already been institutionalized throughout these networks of nongovernmental organization. The Politics of Expertise provides a tantalizing framework for understanding how expert groups gain and consolidate authority. It helps reveal the strategies deployed by aspiring experts for acquiring authority. It reveals some forgotten facts and provides interesting interpretations. Because we take these things for granted, it is mindbending to see how they were created. The civil service reforms introduced in the League are not widely treated in the international public administration literature. That “power” in the UN can be measured in distance from the 28th floor (where the UN secretary general’s offices are situated) is a worthy ethnographic touch. That the Cairo Programme of Action for the UNFPA is a continuation of the same authority structure in population policy is an interesting interpretation that follows from Sending’s framework, and it is not consistent with standard understandings of the new policy directions introduced by the Programme of Action. The framework is not systematically applied across the cases studied: The three components of the field theory are not addressed explicitly in each case. Ultimately, Sending provides a toolkit for understanding the phenomenology of expertise. Still, the analysis is short on dynamics and how prior decisions and assignments of authority shaped subsequent periods, other than the ways in which administrative reforms in the League shaped the design of the UN Secretariat. Sending problematizes the question of the sources of expert authority. He offers a valuable antidote to unreflective approaches to expertise, and provides a nuanced and granular resolution to the process of authority creation. His book should yield further interesting studies of the origins of authority in world politics.