Nœuds ou champs?: Analyse de l'expertise internationale sur la criminalité transnationale organisée et le terrorisme

In the particular context of the post-Cold War era, when military threat reconstructed itself in discourses around more diffuse phenomena like organised transnational crime and terrorism, civil servants from state administrations were called upon to participate in more or less formal meetings within the framework of regional and/or international institutions. These meetings intensified during the 1990s, which helped reinforce or create networks of actors at an international level. Analysis of these work groups, also called "expert groups", presents a certain number of empirical and epistemological difficulties that are explored in this article. The objective is to shed light on one of these expert groups in particular and, using empirical data that are often difficult to collect, assess the pertinence of two theoretical approaches developed in the social sciences: field theory and nodal governance.