Infrastructure and InfraReg: on rousing the international law ‘Wizards of Is’

Benedict Kingsbury

doi:10.4337/cilj.2019.02.01

Abstract

Physical, informational and now digital infrastructure features throughout Nation-State consolidation and imperial extension, in war preparedness and war logistics, in resource extraction and energy capture and transit, in each quantum step in economic globalisation, in mass migrations and religious missions, in the global scaling of finance and financialisation, in the global digital economy, in artificial intelligence (AI) and robots, in economic development strategies and in China's vast Belt and Road Initiative. International law has largely aligned with these enterprises, but has seemed not effectively to address massive anthropocenic degradation, AI, new biotech, and the human and planetary consequences of extractive capitalism. Science and technology studies, and work extending from Bruno Latour and Susan Leigh Star to governance-by-prototype and ‘new materialism’, have generated rich insights about infrastructure. These are being extended to ‘infrastructure as regulation’ (the infra-reg project). This paper explores implications for reinvigorating deliberative forward-planning international law projects to address technologically driven transformation, which follow from ‘thinking infrastructurally’.

Highlights

Be ‘the Wizards of Is’ was the Cambridge international law scholar Philip Allott’s memorable exhortation to what he described as academics of the thinking sort.[1]
Rather, that the world is of our own making, the human capacity to think defines the bounds of the possible, and the things we can push ourselves to construct in our consciousness become – by that act of construction – the world which is
172 Cambridge International Law Journal, Vol 8 No 2 in the United States of America (US)), the separation of knowledge inquiry into separated faculties each moated and defended by its own territorial sea, the overbearing tyranny of metrics of publications and performance, and the obsessions of form represented by phenomena such as ‘foot-and-note disease’

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Be ‘the Wizards of Is’ was the Cambridge international law scholar Philip Allott’s memorable exhortation to what he described as academics of the thinking sort.[1]. An illustration can be adapted from the work of Bourdieusian sociologist Grégoire Mallard tracing a succession of such regulatory approaches in relation to ‘counter-proliferation’ controls on the acquisition and development of nuclear weapons This layered from ‘safeguards’ on the use of traded nuclear technology and fissile materials in Euratom and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and its distinctions between different classes of States, to special regimes for particular internationally targeted countries, to controls on private conduct in transfers after the AQ Khan network became generally known, to targeted sanctions and fierce US nationally driven, globally reaching controls on payments, finance and trade in unrelated products.[26] Law presented in this Bourdieusian through the speculation that technology plays the role of rendering unstable social relations durable (and stabilised relations are usually forms of domination). I focus here on things international lawyers have to learn from infrastructure studies and thinking infrastructurally, but as a precursor to the responsibility in later work to consider what international law might in turn contribute to these fields

INFRA-REG

CONCLUSION