Scholarship concerned with international law, technology, and computation has been burgeoning since the mid-to-late twentieth century. Over the past decade, it has taken shape as a discernible sub-field of international legal scholarship. An International Law and Technology Interest Group was created within the American Society of International Law in 2013, for instance. By 2021, international law and technology was already considered ripe for “rethinking.” Some of this work has been solutionist, aimed at generating order-restoring answers to the “upset[s]” caused by technological change. Some of it has been constitutionalizing, canvassing prospects for “a transformative constitutionalism for the digital human condition.” Much of the scholarship has sought to give humanist (or post-humanist) pause to the ever-increasing pace of technological change.

The making of legal subjects has long been a crucial terrain for critical theory, also in relation to international law, where both emancipatory promises and expressions of power or discipline are tied to how subjects are recognized and enacted. International law's modes of subject-making have therefore been an important site of aspiration, struggle, and critique. While some have celebrated the rise of the individual on the stage of international law, the liberal ideal of legal and political subjectivity lingering in these celebratory accounts has been confronted by different strands of feminist, post-colonial, and Marxist critique. With proliferating use of digital technologies in practices of (global) governance, the making of legal subjects has taken novel forms. Big data manufacture subjects in ways that spark new legal anxieties and destabilize or problematize established patterns of critical engagement. In data-driven practices that we will describe, subjects are no longer exclusively enacted as abstract autonomous entities or classified along stable criteria (of difference or enmity). Sustained by tools of pattern recognition and technologies for the “unsupervised uncovering of correlations,” nascent forms of global governance by data produce subjects as transient clusters of attributes and data points within transient clusters of attributes and data points—bundles of vectors within vectors, only tentatively and temporarily tied together. In this essay, we map out how this mode of subject-making has become prevalent in different domains of international legal practice. We trace these dynamics to changes in the exercise of state sovereignty and the technoscopic regimes—assemblages for information flow, processing, retention, and surveillance—that states rely on.

In a global context where political campaigning, social movements, and public discourse increasingly take place online, questions regarding the regulation of speech by social media platforms become ever more relevant. Companies like Facebook moderate content posted by users on their platforms through a mixture of automated decision making and human moderators. In this content moderation process, human rights play an ambiguous role: those who struggle with marginalization may find a space for expression and empowerment, or face exacerbation of pre-existing bias. Focusing on the role of human rights in Meta's content management, this essay explores how the protection of speech on social media platforms disadvantages the cultural, social, and economic rights of marginalized communities. This is not to say that speech on social media platforms is devoid of emancipatory potential, but that this potential is not uniformly or equally accessible. We see the incorporation of human rights considerations into decision-making processes as an avenue for alleviating this challenge. This approach faces obstacles from the platforms’ business models, which decenters human rights concerns, and from the limitations of liberal accounts of human rights. From within and against these constraints, human rights can be mobilized as emancipatory power in an effort to decrease marginalization.

The adoption of the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and the steady development of international environmental law in the twentieth century shaped the marine environment as an object of legal protection. However, the exponential growth of substantive obligations to protect the marine environment, conserve marine biodiversity, and prevent marine pollution, has been largely ineffective due to lack of enforcement. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) deployed for marine environmental protection are seen, in scholarship and policy, as a means to close the enforcement gap, thereby revolutionizing the field by significantly increasing states’ maritime awareness. In contrast, our tentative analysis shows that while UAVs can translate complex environmental concerns into data readily available for analysis and action, such datafication of marine environments comes with high risks. More specifically, datafication enables multiple uses of gathered data, including for surveillance, military, and commercial purposes. These concerns tend to fall outside current debates on the international regulation of the use of UAVs in marine environments. In our essay, we explore whether international law recognizes the possibilities and risks involved in deploying UAVs into the marine environment. We draw on doctrinal and posthuman feminist legal approaches to analyze how UAVs interact with the wider context of “marine ecosystem bodies” in terms of international law, as well as how those terms may need to be reconfigured to accommodate the complexity of the many actors, agents, and materials of marine ecosystems.

Databases are increasingly used in international law settings. This requires new strategies for those who want to critique international legal practices and their effects. In this essay, we claim that legal scholarship tends to conceptualize the database in ways that leave older and inadequate ideas of legal method(s) and sovereignty in the context of international law largely unquestioned or even serve to reinforce them. Further, we argue that these tendencies obstruct proper understandings of international legal practices and prevent adequate critique. To illustrate the extent of these tendencies, we provide examples from our own research areas: migration law and international corporate income tax law. We contend that empirical studies of how databases are used in these and other legal settings, can help demystify and rework well-established assumptions through which international law, and the database, are seen.

From the continuation of colonial power structures in global economic development institutions, to immigration policies that favor applicants from white-majority European countries, to the use of counter-terrorism law to target primarily Muslim people, international law and its domestic analogues reflect and further inscribe racial distinctions and hierarchies. Racialization in international law occurs in the more visible areas of public decision making but also in mundane, administrative practices. In this essay, I argue that digital technologies are at the heart of automating processes of racialization in international law. Digital technological instruments effectively divide the global population, decision by decision, in adherence to the logics of racial hierarchy: they distribute social and material rights and privileges through financial, welfare, and immigration decisions while simultaneously deepening and entrenching state surveillance, policing, and violence.