From dissident truth to market transparency: Global knowledge and the making of the 'governance intelligentsia' in Czech society

The dissertation examines the emergence of a global governance regime linked to the increasing embrace of new regulatory measures made in the name of good governance in the Czech Republic. The study asks what accounts for the appearance of this universalizing policy idea that aims at professionalizing relations of trust between the state and citizens against the backdrop of deep political-economic uncertainties. Resisting diffusionist and transfer models of knowledge production and dissemination from West to East, the dissertation adopts an embedded perspective by showing that good governance has taken root through a "translation" strategy by a new cosmopolitan cadre of Czech elites: the "governance intelligentsia." These actors, who occupy an intermediary position in the postsocialist power bloc, have aligned their interests with international regulatory institutions in order to take advantage of the current instabilities in Czech governance and move up the local political hierarchy. They have done so in order to promote a distinctive project of the social role of intellectuals and knowledge in governing Czech society that stretches back to intellectual responses to the Warsaw Pact invasion and suppression of the 1968 Prague Spring.; A significant strategy these governance specialists have deployed to authorize global good governance and empower themselves is through boundary-work. Their international coalition-building has subtly informed their construction of global/local hierarchies not only in the interests of outside actors, but also as a practical means of bolstering their own legitimacy. The chapters in the dissertation trace these practices of demarcations historically and spatially as well as in their constitution of self and the techniques of governance they have mobilized.