International Law and Technology as a Critical Project: A Collective Reading

Abstract This introductory essay traces key themes that run through the five contributions collected in this book review symposium. Distilling common threads and intersecting interventions, the essay aims to draw the contours of an emerging and distinct critical project in the interdisciplinary sphere of international law and technology. It insists on grounding these reflections in the here and now – in relation to the deployment of advanced algorithmic technologies in the ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing, starvation and civilian targeting in Gaza. A prevailing legal response to harms inflicted or amplified by new technological tools – including military targeting tools such as those deployed in Gaza – has been to extend the reach of existing rights or propose new legal entitlements adapted to the digital domain. In contrast to such attempts at throwing out the ‘normative net’ of international law over a digital domain presumed to be devoid or deficient of norms, critical readings – as illustrated by the essays in this symposium – foreground the co-constitutive relations between the legal and the socio-technical. International legal labour today, as these contributions show, is always already dependent on, constitutive of and routed through digital infrastructures. In tracing these relations and emergent compositions, the critical approaches canvassed here provide both a politically energized exploration of emergent governance formations – extending from the spheres of security and surveillance to the logistical networks that sustain the circulation of capital – and an opening towards new practices of regulation, resistance or refusal orientated towards the material, socio-technical and infrastructural.