Indicators are rapidly multiplying as tools for assessing and promoting a variety of social justice and reform strategies around the world. There are rule of law indicators, indicators of violence against women, and indicators of economic development, among many others. Indicators are widely used at the national level and are increasingly important in global governance. Indicators introduce into the field of global human rights law a form of knowledge production in which numerical measures make visible forms of violation and inequality that are otherwise obscured. However, indicators typically conceal their political and theoretical origins. They rely on practices of measurement and counting that are themselves opaque. In this talk, I explore the capacity of numerical representations of information such as indicators to produce knowledge though an ethnographic examination of the production of indicators and considerations about their use in a variety of global settings. Sponsored by ICAR and the Center for Justice, Law, and Society

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