When political actors find themselves in a crisis situation which they deem to require novel policy approaches, 'experts' of all shades are in high demand for their opinions and analyses. Recent examples for such crises in Europe are the 'refugee crisis', the Eurozone, the Global Financial Crisis, the Great Recession, a foreign policy crisis at the EU’s eastern flank, and now the EU integration crisis with ‘Brexit’ and other centrifugal tendencies in the Union.

This panel features papers which analyse the role of experts and expertise, i.e. those agents involved in producing policy (discourses) directed at political elites (and often co-produced with them) and at the electorate in crisis situations, with regards to the various crises that have engulfed Europe since 2008.

Themes that papers could address are wide-ranging, but may include analysis of if and how experts and their organisations contributed to crisis-related policy debates and decisions designed to ensure sustainability or transformation of certain arrangements, whether they played a role in shaping new or defending 'old' understandings of particular situations, the role of experts in pushing certain measures or fighting against them, whether crisis situations have contributed to a change in the 'civic epistemologies' in any of the affected polities, how experts and their expertise relate to other political actors transnationally, and how the relationship between expertise/knowledge and policy/politics may have changed during and because of crisis.