Measuring and Governing the World: The Quiet Power of Indicators

Referentin

Sally Engle Merry,  New York University

Abstract

How do issues become visible in the global arena? Numbers are essential.   In order to create an issue and subject it to global governance, it seems necessary to gather data on its incidence and spread.  The current effort to develop indicators for the Sustainable Development Goals demonstrates this process dramatically. But many facets of social life are difficult to measure and may be simplified or forgotten. The demands of commensuration and quantification mean that complex social phenomena are presented in narrow ways without context. My ethnographic research on the development of global indicators for human rights, gender violence and sex trafficking shows that this is a deeply interpretive and political process rather than a straightforward, objective one and that its claims to truth are seductive. 

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