Episode 33: Owning the Future? International Law and Technology as a Critical Project

International law operates in a world of rapid technological
transformation. From the battlefield to the border, from online
content moderation to open-source investigation, from
humanitarianism to development, from counterterrorism to
migration management, practices of central concern to
international lawyers are progressively altered by the
introduction of new technological tools. Many of these
developments are troubling. The use of advanced algorithmic
targeting tools used by Israel in Gaza instantiates both the
tremendous civilian harm that data-driven technologies amplify
and inflict, as well as the limitations of our existing legal
repertoire in registering the nature, depth and scale of such
harms. These injustices are layered onto the entrenched
hierarchies, inequalities and sanctioned forms of violence in
international law, but they also take on novel shapes as power
and authority are routed along digital paths. 


In this episode, Dimitri Van Den Meerssche (Queen Mary University
of London) is joined by Angelina Fisher (Guarini Global Law and
Tech initiative, NYU) and André Dao (Laureate Program in Global
Corporations, Melbourne Law School). Their conversation, drawing
on a recent EJIL book review symposium, spans the co-constitutive
relations between international law and technology, the limits of
human rights, and new avenues for legal critique and resistance
that reclaim a shared, collective future against its algorithmic
appropriation.





Other scholarship mentioned in the course of the episode
includes: Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (translated by B.
Wing) (1997); Sally Engle Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence
– Translating International Law into Local Justice (2005); Fleur
Johns, Non-Legality in International Law: Unruly Law (2013);
Ratna Kapur, Gender, Alterity and Human Rights – Freedom in a
Fishbowl (2020); Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in
China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (2021); Henning Lahmann,
‘Self-Determination in the Age of Algorithmic Warfare’ (2025)
European Journal of Legal Studies 161–214.