EJIL: The Podcast! 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 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.

The recent EJIL book review symposium on which the episode draws, edited and introduced by Dimitri Van Den Meersche, featured review essays by:

• Abhimanyu George Jain on Rebecca Mignot-Mahdavi’s Drones and International Law: A Techno-Legal Machinery (2023);
• Marie Petersmann on Ramon Amaro’s The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being (2022);
• Christine Schwöbel-Patel on Karen Levy’s Data Driven: Truckers, Technology and the New Workplace Surveillance (2023);
• André Dao on Elizabeth M. Renieris’ Beyond Data: Reclaiming Human Rights at the Dawn of the Metaverse (2023);
• Angelina Fisher on Joshua Bowsher’s The Informational Logic of Human Rights: Network Imaginaries in the Cybernetic Age (2022).

Other scholarship mentioned 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.