International law is already otherwise : digital interfaces of relation and the politics of 'innovation' in humanitarian practice

Abstract

This lecture will examine the growing recourse by governments, international organizations, NGOs, and multinational corporations to digital technology in the humanitarian field – and its potential ramifications for international law and politics. It will survey some ways in which digital technology, data science, and artificial intelligence are being incorporated into international humanitarian work and argue that this incursion of the digital into the international humanitarian field is both expressive and productive of a break in the kinds of governance arrangements that international lawyers are accustomed to navigating. Recourse to digital technology in the humanitarian field is not just giving international legal and humanitarian professionals access to new data, new knowledge, and new analytic and surveillant capacities. It is reconfiguring what is and can be known, perceived, and claimed in the international humanitarian field, and international law is both facilitating this transformation and somewhat mangled by it. There are, of course, still many continuities apparent in international humanitarian work with what has come before and what has been done before, for good and for ill. But digital technology both combines with and calls into question certain analogue logics characteristic of law, legal practice, and legal institutions in this field. And with attention to, or insistence on, that break, it becomes possible to say that international law is and can be something other than a continuous evolution from, or inevitable reaction to, what has come before – and that its transformation is open to wide-ranging engagement, one might even say democratic engagement, notwithstanding all the ways in which it intersects with global hierarchy, domination, and violence.