State changes: Prototypical governance figured and prefigured

My 2019 article ‘From Planning to Prototypes: New Ways of Seeing Like a State’ (P2P) drew attention to some shortcomings of the kinds of critical, reformist impulses fostered in law and development work. I sought to show that persistent preoccupations with the destructive hubris of ‘top-down’ planning—especially state planning—bypassed the tendency for great power to be deployed in other stylistic modes: through the release and responsive tweaking of prototypes, for instance. This article engages with later developments—at one of P2P’s main field sites and scholarly literature in dialogue with P2P—to build upon the analysis therein. It elaborates on the kinds of power animated through prototyping, showing how prototyping is often combined with other governance styles and what it makes of the inputs on which law has typically been said to draw and of law’s claims to autonomy. It complicates the provenance of this style by reference to mid-to-late-twentieth century UN sanctions regimes, highlighting that governance prototyping is as much state-made as business-led and not restricted to the development field. With particular attention to the strangeness of the human user presupposed by prototyping, this article also aims to identify some modes of critical engagement to which this governance style might be answerable

Modeling Pandemic

An indispensable volume, Pandemic Exposures provides an illuminating analysis of this watershed moment and its possible aftermath

Why, when and how? 10 tips for academic book reviewers

Professor Fleur Johns offers 10 rules of thumb that have guided her own reviewing efforts and may prove helpful to others working on book reviews, or thinking of doing so, in the course of their academic lives

The Temporal Rivalries of Human Rights

Nation-states\u27 boundaries are produced in time: around official working hours and terms of office, for instance, and in the historicomythic life of the nation. Global human rights practices affirm and depend on nation-states\u27 temporal authority, while also calling that authority into question. In different ways, global markets do likewise. In recent decades, the ubiquity of both finance capital and international human rights law, among other factors, may have encouraged the fracturing of time into intervals of ever-decreasing length. Temporal authority premised on the long-term seems to have declining purchase, even as historicism and futurism abound, discouraging some modes of state-based politics associated with the long-term. In this context, international human rights law advocates seem increasingly preoccupied with the propagation of human rights concerns in real time. This orientation carries some peril, especially vis-&-vis its articulation with the temporalities of global finance capital. Even so, there is still time for political intervention in this uneven temporal terrain. Such intervention may be occasioned, this article argues, by reading international human rights law anachronistically, and reactivating the times and rhythms of the global economy, and of the nation-state, as political questions of the first order

Introduction to the Symposium on Critical International Law and Technology

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