Review Forum Bureaucratic fields and the Brussels machinery: Reading Merje Kuus' Geopolitics and Expertise Geopolitics and Expertise: Knowledge and Authority in European Diplomacy, Merje Kuus. Wiley-Blackwell (February 2014)., ISBN: 978-1-118-29175-7 Veit Bachmann a, * , Jason Dittmer b , Sallie A. Marston c , Anne-Laure Amilhat-Szary d , Alexander B. Murphy e , Merje Kuus f a Goethe-Universit€ at Frankfurt am Main, Germany b University College London, United Kingdom c University of Arizona, USA d Universit e Joseph Fourier de Grenoble, France e University of Oregon, USA f The University of British Columbia, Canada Introduction Veit Bachmann In Geopolitics and Expertise, Kuus investigates the hidden geog- raphies of knowledge and power in transnational decision- making processes. Illuminating the (often covert) imaginations, constellations and practices of authority in such settings, she exca- vates the social frame of bureaucratic processes and disentangles the internal workings of international organizations. Her empirical focus is on EU policy making in Brussels. Yet with Geopolitics and Expertise, Kuus provides a highly insightful, in-depth account of the generation of expert knowledge and authority in transnational settings more generally. Kuus does not pretend to lay out an all- encompassing account of how the EU makes policy; instead she nicely elucidates ‘the entanglements of the technical, the geograph- ical, and the social in the daily production of expertise in Brussels’ (Kuus, 2014, p. 7). She ‘recognizes the critical and intersubjective nature of knowledge generation’ (Friedrichs & Kratochwil, 2009, p. 713) by focusing on mundane details inside the Brussels political machinery. Geopolitics and Expertise highlights the ‘little things’ (Thrift, 2000) that, in their aggregation, are decisive factors for un- derstanding the functioning of EU institutions. Its focus on the ‘small and the circumstantial’, however, does not ‘ignore the big picture of inter-state power struggles’; it rather substantiates ‘the broad-brush explanations with a finer-grade analysis of daily work in the European Quarter’ (Kuus, 2014, p. 6). Through such careful, ‘grounded’ geopolitical analysis (  O Tuathail, 2010), Geopol- itics and Expertise insightfully excavates the ‘qualities of experience and meaning-making in everyday, in-between spaces, and the ways in which people make sense of the big world through the small’ (Bendiner-Viani, 2013, p. 708). In so doing, the book is an outstanding example for qualitative methodological rigor, illustrating the value of detailed, place- based research. Over a seven year period between 2007 and 2013, Kuus interviewed over 110 experts from various EU institutions, including the Commission, the Council, the Parliament and the Eu- ropean External Action Service (EEAS), but also representatives from Member States and non-governmental organizations, as well as other Brussels insiders. Through this broad coverage of different experts operating (in) Planet Brussels, Kuus avoids getting lost in a fixation on the agency of one particular institution. Instead she treats the Brussels' policy making machinery as one complex interwoven system and offers a thoroughly geographic account of the interplay of different agents and institutions, as well as the in- ternal dynamics within and between them. The introduction starts with a reference of an interviewee to the term “Crown Jewel” for describing the technical and administrative expertise of EU institutions e expertise on how to operate (in) the EU. It is, in my opinion, a brilliant metaphor. It captures nicely self- perceptions of EU institutions, in particular the Commission, as regards their (perceived) pivotal role as drivers and implementers of the historical processes of regional integration in Europe. The knowledge and expertise needed to manage the integration process e and the large integrated polity they created e is the crown jewel that justifies their existence and makes them indispensable. What follows in the seven chapters (plus Conclusion), is a very deep and rich analysis of how the crown jewel of knowledge and author- ity is being put to work in Planet Brussels. This review forum provides a critical engagement with the book. In the remainder of the introduction, I offer some thoughts on Geopolitics and Expertise as a start for such critical engagement. Despite my admiration for the book, I would like to point to two * Corresponding reviewer. E-mail address: veitb@uni-frankfurt.de (V. Bachmann). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Political Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo Political Geography 44 (2015) 19e28 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2014.07.009 0962-6298