The Research Unit Science examines how contestations of scientific knowledge, expertise, and epistemic authority intersect with broader contestations of the liberal script. First-phase research showed that disputes over science—such as climate denial, mistrust in expertise, and attacks on academic freedom—play a central role in challenges to democratic inclusion, decision-making, and institutional legitimacy. Yet, knowledge and science are not only objects of contestation; they may also serve as sources of resilience. Strengthening liberalism’s epistemic foundations requires reimagining the relationships between experts, publics, and states—renewing trust, fostering reflexivity, and ensuring that scientific authority remains accountable and pluralistic. In the second phase, the RU investigates the forms, drivers, and consequences of these contestations.

Drawing on insights from sociology, political science, philosophy, history, and law, the RU engages epistemic contestation at three interrelated levels of analysis:

1. Science attitudes, agents and actors (micro-level): This level focuses on individual scientists, experts, epistemic entrepreneurs and institutions. It explores how scientific authority is constructed, maintained, or undermined through professional norms, incentives, and communication practices, and what attitudes towards science this entails.
2. Science and society (meso-level): At this level, the analysis turns to how publics engage with, contest, or appropriate scientific claims with trust, participation, and legitimacy as key mediating concepts. It addresses new fault lines in the social contract between knowledge and democracy.
3. Science and the state (macro-level): This level examines how state institutions and international regimes organize, fund, and politicize knowledge production, expertise, and epistemic authority. Liberal and authoritarian states alike are increasingly using epistemic authority as a political battleground, with consequences for the contestation and also resilience of liberal scripts.