Expert exceptionalism: embrace, resistance, and denial by U.S. public health experts during COVID-19

Abstract Critical security scholarship has explored how different actors—including experts—make, practice, and legitimate security, often employing theories of exceptionalism to point to how experts are emboldened by the state of exception and can aid to enact it. But how do experts themselves understand and respond to exceptionalism? Do they recognize the political rupture of the exception? How do they understand the impact of exceptionalism on their advice, their behavior, and their role in emergency policymaking? Using data from interviews with public health experts in the United States during COVID-19, this paper argues that, like other security actors, experts conceptualize and respond to an emergency context in different—and occasionally competing—ways. Specifically, experts can adopt three distinct positions vis-à-vis exceptionalism: embrace, or the acceptance of exceptionalism and its changes to sovereign power; resistance, or an effort to push back against key ruptures to the norm; or denial, or the refusal to acknowledge any alterations or responsibility for exceptional measures. Connecting this to experts' understandings and practices, this paper details how experts are not a monolithic or uncritical security actor, but can be willing participants in exceptionalist politics, actively push back against perceived excesses, or obscure their responsibility altogether.