Serendipities

Social sciences’ place is as much in academics as it is with government. Social sciences, such as political sciences, sociology and economics, always aim both at charting and disenchanting the world as well as at projecting desired future societal states and reflexively optimizing governance. In this double role – as academic disciplines and as professions of government – social sciences not only shape prac-tices of governing but are being shaped in this interaction themselves (Abbott 1988; Miller/Rose 2008). While this Janus-faced character isn’t exactly a novelty and has played out differently in specific national contexts (Weber 1988 [1916]; Steinmetz 2016; Chen 2017; Cossu & Bartollini 2017; Moebius 2021; Consolim 2023), recent developments have changed the social sciences’ position at the centre of an increasingly transnational “knowledge warfare” (Kauppi 2018): On the one hand, the output-oriented quantification and projectification of academic meritocracy introduced new ways in which societal and especially governmental requirements have to be taken into account by autonomous so-cial scientific distinctions (Bérard/Crespin 2010; Boulet/Harari-Kermadec 2014; Münch 2014; Anger-mueller/van Leeuwen 2018; Gengnagel et al. 2019; Hamann 2020). On the other hand, new modes of governance increasingly rely on scientific legitimacy and represent an increasing demand for social scientific expertise (Power 2003; Desrosières 2011; Dezalay/Garth 2011; Heilbron et al. 2017, 2018) in national contexts (Bühlmann & Rossier 2018; Connell et all. 2018; Heredia 2018) as well as in transna-tional contexts such as the European Union (Georgakakis/de Lasalle 2012; Cohen 2013; Boncourt/Cal-ligaro 2017; Gengnagel et al. 2022; for the social scientific marginalization of non-Western Area Stud-ies in the globally dominant US, see Stanton 2002; Lie 2012).