Normative Choices Research Articles

Normative Challenges of Risk Regulation of Artificial Intelligence

Approaches aimed at regulating artificial intelligence (AI) include a particular form of risk regulation, i.e. a risk-based approach. The most prominent example is the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act). This article addresses the challenges for adequate risk regulation that arise primarily from the specific type of risks involved, i.e. risks to the protection of fundamental rights and fundamental societal values. This is mainly due to the normative ambiguity of such rights and societal values when attempts are made to select, interpret, specify or operationalise them for the purposes of risk assessments and risk mitigation. This is exemplified by (1) human dignity, (2) informational self-determination, data protection and privacy, (3) anti-discrimination, fairness and justice, and (4) the common good. Normative ambiguities require normative choices, which are assigned to different actors under the regime of the AI Act. Particularly critical normative choices include selecting normative concepts by which to operationalise and specify risks, aggregating and quantifying risks (including the use of metrics), balancing value conflicts, setting levels of acceptable risks, and standardisation. To ensure that these normative choices do not lack democratic legitimacy and to avoid legal uncertainty, further political processes and scientific debates are suggested.

Understanding the Normativity of Health Technology Assessment: Ontological, Moral, and Epistemological Commitments.

The inherent normativity of HTA can be conceptualized as a result of normative commitments, a concept that we further specify to encompass moral, epistemological and ontological commitments at play in the practice of HTA. Based on examples from literature, and an analysis of the example of assessing Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing (NIPT), we will show that inevitable normative decisions in conducting an assessment commits the HTA practitioner to moral (regarding what makes a health technology desirable), ontological (regarding which effects of health technology are conceivable), and epistemological (regarding how to obtain reliable information about health technology) norms. This highlights and supports the need for integrating normative analysis and stakeholder participation, providing guidance to HTA practitioners when making normative choices. This will foster a shared understanding between those who conduct, use, or are impacted by assessments regarding what are conceivable and desirable outcomes of using health technology, and how to collect reliable information to assess whether these outcomes are (going to be) realized. It also provides more insight into the implications of different normative choices.

Projecting a food insecure world: Equity implications of land-based mitigation in IPCC mitigation pathways

All modelled global mitigation pathways assessed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report (IPCC AR6) project rapid deployment of land-based mitigation measures for staying within the remaining carbon budget for 1.5°C or 2 °C. However, there is sparse literature on the burden-sharing and equity implications of the IPCC-assessed global mitigation pathways. This is a severe lacuna given the influential role of the IPCC assessments in shaping political deliberations about possible futures and in informing the sectoral guidance and strategy documents of multilateral climate funds and organisations. This paper addresses this gap by evaluating the distributional implications of IPCC AR6 global mitigation pathways for land-based mitigation, specifically focusing on the Global North and South and socio-economic and political implications for food security. Our findings reveal that the modelled pathways disproportionately distribute the burden of land-based mitigation onto the Global South with an adverse impact on food security, raising questions about the normative choices embedded in cost-optimizing Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs). Furthermore, we examine existing scenarios and policy recommendations for addressing food security concerns in stringent climate change mitigation pathways and find them both to be inequitable with attendant feasibility concerns. Our analysis underscores the need for equity-based scenarios in IPCC assessments and calls for transparency in communicating regional distributional assumptions and results of the global mitigation pathways.

Welfare justifications and responsibility in political decision making - The case of Nudging*

ABSTRACT Nudging, i.e. the framing of decision environments to exploit known behavioral biases in order to induce certain outcomes, has received considerable attention as a potential policy tool in recent years. Motivated as preserving freedom of choice while making people better off according to their own judgment, nudging seemingly comes at fairly little responsibility for the nudger, i.e. policy makers, regarding eventual behavior. We argue that this is misleading, that nudging is normatively charged as other welfare-based policy interventions and, hence, does not free policy makes from normative choices. Sidestepping discussions about welfare measurement, we presume there is an entity which comprehensively captures individual well-being as intended, referred to as Welfare*, and highlight four aspects of it which we argue require normative/subjective decisions: (a) the inference from the empirical to what is desirable, (b) the choice of perspective necessary to empirically capture Welfare*, (c) the forecast about the evolution of future behavior, and (d) external factors affecting the agent devising the nudge. Thus, while nudging may well be good and helpful as a policy tool, we argue that there is little reason to think of it as being normatively more innocuous for policy makers than other welfare-based policy instruments.

Ethical governance of artificial intelligence for defence: normative tradeoffs for principle to practice guidance

AbstractThe rapid diffusion of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in the defence domain raises challenges for the ethical governance of these systems. A recent shift from the what to the how of AI ethics sees a nascent body of literature published by defence organisations focussed on guidance to implement AI ethics principles. These efforts have neglected a crucial intermediate step between principles and guidance concerning the elicitation of ethical requirements for specifying the guidance. In this article, we outline the key normative choices and corresponding tradeoffs that are involved in specifying guidance for the implementation of AI ethics principles in the defence domain. These correspond to: the AI lifecycle model used; the scope of stakeholder involvement; the accountability goals chosen; the choice of auditing requirements; and the choice of mechanisms for transparency and traceability. We provide initial recommendations for navigating these tradeoffs and highlight the importance of a pro-ethical institutional culture.

Social Decision-Making Analysis: A General Approach to Inform Decisions on Resources in the Public Sector

ObjectivesPublic expenditure aims to achieve social objectives by improving a range of socially valuable attributes of benefit (arguments in a social welfare function). Public expenditure is typically allocated to public sector budgets, where budget holders are tasked with meeting a subset of social objectives. MethodsDecision makers require an evidence-based assessment of whether a proposed investment is likely to be worthwhile given existing levels of public expenditure. However, others also require some assessment of whether the overall level and allocation of public expenditure are appropriate. This article proposes a more general theoretical framework for economic evaluation that addresses both these questions. ResultsUsing a stylized example of the economic evaluation of a new intervention in a simplified UK context, we show that this more general framework can support decisions beyond the approval or rejection of single projects. It shows that broader considerations about the level and allocation of public expenditure are possible and necessary when evaluating specific investments, which requires evidence of the range of benefits offered by marginal changes in different types of public expenditure and normative choices of how the attributes of benefit gained and forgone are valued. ConclusionsThe proposed framework shows how to assess the value of a proposed investment and whether and how the overall level of public expenditure and its allocation across public sector budgets might be changed. It highlights that cost-benefit analysis and cost-effectiveness analysis can be viewed as special cases of this framework, identifying the weakness with each.

Individual differences in inaccurate versus accurate economic judgment and decision making. Metacognitive approach

We investigate the existence of a universal psychological construct capable of predicting inaccuracies in economic judgment and decision-making. We propose that metacognitive-self (meaning self-awareness of biases) can serve as this general predictor. Our hypothesis posits that the high self-awareness of biases will reduce the probability of making an inaccurate judgment or decision in a cognitive bias task. Our study involved 293 participants who completed 14 cognitive bias tasks, each assessing a different bias. We used a novel multilevel methodology that enables the simultaneous examination of the effect of self-awareness on various biases, including fixed and random effect. Our findings indicate that while metacognitive self did not directly influence the accuracy of economic decisions (fixed effect), it did exhibit a significant random effect, suggesting a variation in the effect size depended on the specific cognitive bias task. We observed that high metacognitive-self improves accurate judgment and decision-making in certain bias task (type of bias) but reduces normative choice in others. We found that the effect of individual differences emerged as robust. We conclude that the presence of biased judgments and decisions is likely driven by an array of psychological mechanisms, diverging across different problems and contexts.

Policymaking in a plural society: the case of human experiments in medicine in Israel

AbstractVarious processes in recent years have brought about trends of polarization within democratic societies, challenging political stability. Against this backdrop, policy patterns that are being adopted regarding controversial issues are significantly affected by these countries’ aspiration to create and maintain a consensus, which may have implications not favoring the public. One such issue is human experiments in medicine (clinical trials), which has been regulated by most countries through primary legislation. As a deeply divided society, Israel has been addressing this issue through regulation and secondary legislation, despite several attempts to have it regulated through primary legislation. This article employs the consociational model alongside Public Choice Theory to explain the adoption of this policy pattern on the issue of human experiments. Based on thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews and existing sources, it sheds light on the normative choice that weighs the merits of primary legislation against the virtues of accommodation and consensus.

Recalcitrant maize: Conserving agrobiodiversity in the era of genetically modified organisms

Societal Impact StatementThe problem of genetically modified maize contamination in Mexico is the result of both planned and unplanned consequences of scientific and political choices. We show how a risk management strategy based on the modernist dichotomy between “modern” and “native” has failed to protect Mexican landraces and has marginalized other forms of knowledge that are urgently needed to understand and support the fluidity of Mexican biocultural landscapes. Farmers' seed systems are a fundamental source of crop resilience and evolution. They can constitute safe pathways for creating new maize varieties able to withstand climate and societal changes.Summary In 2001, an alert on the contamination of Mexican maize landraces by genetically modified (GM) maize spurred new actions to conserve the world's biggest reservoir of maize genetic diversity. We analyze how the largest maize collection effort in Mexican history, and the definition of the conservation procedures employed in it, either involved or marginalized different approaches to this environmental problem. The article is grounded in the sociohistorical analysis of the controversy of GM maize contamination and brings together new historiographical perspectives on Mexican scientific and political interest in native maize. It also draws on ethnographic approaches, extended fieldwork, and analysis of data from Mexican government agencies. We show how different epistemological traditions have made the risk of GM maize contamination (in)visible and thereby generated normative choices. We illustrate how the GMO controversy brought the theme of native maize back onto the Mexican political and scientific agenda. The normativity that shaped the controversy in the 2000s influenced current knowledge and how the problem of GM maize introgression is still addressed today. The entanglements between biotechnology, native landraces, and farmers' practices are too dense to be “scientized” and kept separate to be made manageable as areas of purely technical “risk.” The result is a geography of maize infused with all sorts of temporalities and materiality, which escapes the bounds of technoscientific framings. This intricate environment‐making process calls for new collaborations among epistemic cultures to tackle the possible consequences of GMOs for agrobiodiversity, seed systems, and their resilience.

The clocks run at slightly different speeds. Clashing timeframes in COVID-19 health risk governance

Decision-making processes in times of crisis are rarely scrutinised. In this study we open up the ‘black box’ of regional COVID-19 decision-making. From March 2020 to June 2021, we had the unique opportunity to do (mostly) on-site ethnographic research and watch the unfolding of COVID-19 decision-making, as this took place in meetings. This enabled us to examine how timeframes played a key role within an important decision-making forum in the Netherlands: the ‘regional safety authority’, responsible for regional crisis and disaster management. Our study highlights how timeframes structure the ways in which normative choices and dilemmas are considered and political decisions are made. We identify three timeframes that ‘perform’ a specific temporality: the ‘no time to waste’ frame, the ‘taking the time’ frame and the ‘future time’ frame. These timeframes form a specific composition of (1) patterns of action, (2) objects at risk, and (3) values that feature in decision-making. We reveal how the ‘no time to waste’ frame dominated decision-making, producing a solitary focus on a rather narrow concept of safety, while other timeframes and other voices, measures and values were marginalised. We argue that timeframes can and should be negotiated and made explicit in a balanced approach to governing a pandemic or other types of long-term crisis.

Lutherische "Orthodoxie" als historisches Problem. Leitidee, Konstruktion und Gegenbegriff von Gottfried Arnold bis Ernst Troeltsch by Christian Volkmar Witt

Reviewed by: Lutherische "Orthodoxie" als historisches Problem. Leitidee, Konstruktion und Gegenbegriff von Gottfried Arnold bis Ernst Troeltsch by Christian Volkmar Witt Joar Haga Lutherische "Orthodoxie" als historisches Problem. Leitidee, Konstruktion und Gegenbegriff von Gottfried Arnold bis Ernst Troeltsch. By Christian Volkmar Witt. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021. 300 pp. Most books present familiar material in new ways, fewer break new territory. Rarer still are those which change the way we think about a given period. This is such a rare book. The German church historian Christian Witt has written a book about the framing of the period that many until recently have referred to as Lutheran Orthodoxy. After this, it will be difficult or impossible to use the term "Orthodoxy" as a neutral category, suited to designate a period of church history. Packed with analytical tools from the theory of [End Page 230] institutional symbolic orders by sociologist Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, Witt deconstructs the function of a central term in history. A term that postulates a correct faith, ortho-doxa, "orthodoxy" does not merely function as a formula of identification of certain concrete features, it is also an instrument of demarcation and marginalisation (18). Witt uses the three concepts in the title (Leitidee, Konstruktion, Gegenbegriff) as perspectives on his material, stretching from Arnold to Troeltsch. Witt traces how the idea of truth is at work among central European church historians not merely in how they treat historical facts; he also uncovers how it is built into the very theories the interpretations rely on. These theories are in some ways connected through their truth-claims, or their resistance to making truth claims. To highlight this aspect of the conceptual framework, Witt draws on the historian Reinhard Koselleck, a scholar close to Carl Schmitt, who viewed politics through the categories of friend and foe. Indeed, one could read the whole German Begriffsgeschichte as an attempt to utilise Schmitt´s understanding of the political as a battle ground. Witt's twelve pages about "Gegenbegriff" (oppositional concept) could serve as a fruitful theoretical reflection on a wider range of materials, due to its unpacking of an almost silent pejorative potential in the analytical tools. In the conclusion, Witt in a more direct manner comes to the fore and fleshes out his understanding of heterodoxy, the opposite of orthodoxy. Witt underlines that the so-called heterodox theologian does not become heterodox by framing himself in the image of a different doctrinal conception. It is much more likely that the heterodox would construe his own identity as orthodox (40). Witt's deconstruction of the (in)famous Gottfried Arnold´s (1666–1714) supposedly Impartial History of the Church and of Heresy (1699)—the most unwillingly ironic title of all time—is perhaps the most fruitful part of this work. One could claim that Witt's presentation of Arnold offers nothing new. Arnold´s revisionist claims and radical pietist assumptions have been previously noted. For Arnold, to be orthodox meant to be a hard-headed persecutor of true believers. The strength of Witt´s text lies in showing how far the implications [End Page 231] and consequences of Arnold's fundamental distinction reverberated among church historians. By Witt's thorough step-by-step analysis of how Arnold unleashed his pejorative power, Arnold's method and its results become clear. In one sense, Witt's book is a portrayal of the rhetorical power of historians. Witt's nuanced tracing of how the normative choices of a man at the close of the seventeenth century dominated successive research is simply mindboggling. Witt traces the categories of interpretation influenced by Arnold through several church historians from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. For example, the analysis of the normative positions of supposedly neutral Enlightenment theologians such as Johann Semler (1725–1791) is rewarding. The search for an "inner attitude" (102) corresponded to Semler's lamenting how the Catholic church attempted to create a monopoly of the truth by allegedly suppressing an original plurality (109). The chapter on August Tholuck (1799–1877) and his book Der Geist der lutherischen Theologen Wittenbergs (1852) is a gem. Witt shows how Tholuck fought on two fronts, against the rationalism of yore and the confessionalism of...

Georges Canguilhem on sex determination and the normativity of life

Our goal in this paper is to reassess the relationship between norms and life by drawing on the philosophy of Georges Canguilhem, particularly some of his unpublished lectures about teratology and sexual determination. First, we discuss the difficulties Canguilhem identified in the introduction of life and sexuality as objects of philosophical reflection. Second, we reassess Canguilhem's understanding of normativity as rooted in life and the axiological activity of the living. Third, we analyze how Canguilhem drew from past and contemporary teratology to conceive of the notions of anomaly and abnormality. Finally, we reconstruct Canguilhem's analysis of a case of hermaphroditism, highlighting how he presented it as evidence that sexual determination is the result of a normative choice. One of the key contributions of the paper to scholarly literature on Canguilhem is a better understanding of his notion of choice, which was considered not the conscious and intentional act of a subject but rather an axiological activity of the living. We conclude by positioning Canguilhem's concept of normativity and his belief that norms are produced by the living in relation to the naturalist/normativist divide in medicine.

Food System Resilience: Concepts, Issues, and Challenges

Food system resilience has multiple dimensions. We draw on food system and resilience concepts and review resilience framings of different communities. We present four questions to frame food system resilience (Resilience of what? Resilience to what? Resilience from whose perspective? Resilience for how long?) and three approaches to enhancing resilience (robustness, recovery, and reorientation—the three “Rs”). We focus on enhancing resilience of food system outcomes and argue this will require food system actors adapting their activities, noting that activities do not change spontaneously but in response to a change in drivers: an opportunity or a threat. However, operationalizing resilience enhancement involves normative choices and will result in decisions having to be negotiated about trade-offs among food system outcomes for different stakeholders. New approaches to including different food system actors’ perceptions and goals are needed to build food systems that are better positioned to address challenges of the future.

Evidence accumulation, not ‘self-control’, explains dorsolateral prefrontal activation during normative choice

What role do regions like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) play in normative behavior (e.g., generosity, healthy eating)? Some models suggest that dlPFC activation during normative choice reflects controlled inhibition or modulation of default hedonistic preferences. Here, we develop an alternative account, showing that evidence accumulation models predict trial-by-trial variation in dlPFC response across three fMRI paradigms and two self-control contexts (altruistic sacrifice and healthy eating). Using these models to simulate a variety of self-control dilemmas generated a novel prediction: although dlPFC activity might typically increase for norm-consistent choices, deliberate self-regulation focused on normative goals should decrease or even reverse this pattern (i.e., greater dlPFC response for hedonistic, self-interested choices). We confirmed these predictions in both altruistic and dietary choice contexts. Our results suggest that dlPFC response during normative choice may depend more on value-based evidence accumulation than inhibition of our baser instincts.

De‐prosecution and death: A synthetic control analysis of the impact of de‐prosecution on homicides

AbstractResearch SummaryDe‐prosecution is a policy not to prosecute certain criminal offenses, regardless of whether the crimes were committed. The research question here is whether the application of a de‐prosecution policy has an effect on the number of homicides for large cities in the United States. Philadelphia presents a natural experiment to examine this question. During 2010–2014, the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office maintained a consistent and robust number of prosecutions and sentencings. During 2015–2019, the office engaged in a systematic policy of de‐prosecution for both felony and misdemeanor cases. The city recorded the fewest number of criminal prosecutions in modern history, with a 70% reduction in the number of criminal sentencings. Philadelphia experienced a concurrent and historically large increase in homicides. This article employs a difference‐in‐differences analysis using a synthetic control method to estimate the effects of de‐prosecution on the number of homicides in Philadelphia. The potential donor pool is composed of the prosecutors’ offices for the 100 largest cities in the United States over a 10‐year period, with a quantitative categorization of the prosecutors’ offices used both as a variable and to exclude cities that may have been subject to a similar de‐prosecution treatment. The synthetic control model estimates that de‐prosecution has been associated with a statistically significant increase of 74.79 homicides per year in Philadelphia during 2015–2019.Policy ImplicationsAs various prosecution policies such as de‐prosecution are being implemented across the United States, such policies should be tested for downstream results. The broadscale de‐prosecution policy of Philadelphia—particularly for firearm and drug trafficking offenses—appears to have a causal association with a large increase in homicides. The public in Philadelphia will have to make a normative choice between a reduction in the number of prosecutions and an increase in homicides. The government of Philadelphia may consider whether significantly decreased prosecutions by the district attorney's office should result in a decrease in the budget for those services. The overall relationship between de‐prosecution and homicides should be reviewed by prosecutors across the nation for consideration in exercising their prosecutorial discretion, given unique local considerations in each jurisdiction.

The influence of energy output and substitution on the environmental impact of waste-to-energy operation: quantification by means of a case study

A life cycle assessment (LCA) was conducted to evaluate the total environmental impact of state-of-the-art waste-to-energy (WtE) in Belgium with respect to recovered energy utilization and addition of carbon capture and storage (CCS). Four energy output scenarios were modeled on Umberto LCA software using primary data of mass and energy flows surrounding the six incinerators at the considered WtE plant and predefined processes from the Ecoinvent 3.6 database. The normalized LCA results suggest that by utilizing all the recovered energy as high-pressure steam, the WtE plant can avoid an equivalent annual environmental impact value of approximately 21200, 36800, 6700, 15800, 37000, and 6900 average European citizens in the impact categories ‘climate change,’ ‘freshwater and terrestrial acidification,’ ‘freshwater eutrophication,’ ‘photochemical ozone creation,’ ‘respiratory effects, inorganics,’ and ‘terrestrial eutrophication,’ respectively. The ‘Electricity and Steam with CCS’ scenario resulted in the most avoided environmental impact in the impact category ‘climate change.’ However, in all other impact categories, it resulted in less avoided environmental impact compared to the ‘Steam’ scenario. The comparative analysis showed that 19 out of the 24 LCA results varied by more than 50% between a region-specific and a region- and fuel-specific model, thus quantifying the influence of scenario uncertainty, introduced by the normative choice of substituted processes in LCA modeling. This study exemplifies the environmental benefit WtE technology can realize by substituting conventional energy production processes that are reliant on fossil resources, while performing its primary function that is reducing the volume of non-recyclable waste, destroying hazardous organic components it contains, and recovering useful materials from it.

The Institutional Tragedy of Pandemic Triage Regulation in Italy and Germany.

This article adopts a comparative approach exploring the reactions to the scarcity of resources resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic in Italy and Germany. Both countries showed a fragmented structure including individual hospitals, medical associations and recommendatory interdisciplinary bodies, such as ethics councils. Against this background, the authors use the different constitutional frameworks in which the healthcare systems are embedded to assess the legitimacy of the intervention by non-legislative bodies. It is demonstrated that, in both jurisdictions, a certain level of parliamentary involvement in establishing triage criteria or procedures is constitutionally required, as in situations of extreme scarcity the prioritisation decision cannot be determined by a mere clinical analysis but rather demands a normative choice.

Unambiguous Trends Combining Absolute and Relative Income Poverty: New Results and Global Application

AbstractOver the period 1990–2015, many countries experienced a reduction in extreme absolute poverty and an increase in relative poverty. As a result, the global trend of “overall” income poverty, which combines absolute and relative poverty, may depend on arbitrary normative choices such as the priority given to the absolutely poor over the relatively poor. This article proves that, if one assumes that an individual who is absolutely poor is poorer than an individual who is only relatively poor, the overall poverty trend is sometimes independent of the priority parameter, even for cases for which absolute and relative poverty follow opposite trends. A survey conducted for this study suggests that this normative assumption collects broad support. This article applies overall poverty measures satisfying this assumption to assess the evolution of global poverty from 1990 to 2015. Results show that global overall poverty has been (at least) halved, regardless of the value chosen for the priority parameter.

Internalising health-economic impacts of air pollution into climate policy: a global modelling study

Climate change and air pollution are two major societal problems. Their complex interplay calls for an advanced evaluation framework that can support decision making. Previous assessments have looked at the co-benefits of climate policies for air pollution, but few have optimised air pollution benefits. In our study, we lay out a modelling framework that internalises air pollution's economic impacts on human mortality, while considering climate constraints and aerosol feedback. We developed a modelling framework based on an integrated assessment model (World Induced Technical Change Hybrid [WITCH]) designed to assess optimal climate change mitigation policies. We included structural and end-of-pipe measures in a detailed process integrated assessment model, that is hard-linked to air pollution and climate models. We analysed a large set of baseline scenarios, including five shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs). SSP scenarios were also tested with three different levels of value per statistical life, and were combined with the Paris Agreement temperature targets (TTs), focusing on the 2°C and 1·5°C TTs by the end of the century. We found that, in the baseline scenarios, where no policies are applied, the number of annual premature deaths grew before declining slightly to 4·45 (range 3·86-6·11) million annual premature deaths by 2050. Reaching the Paris Agreement TT decreases mortality by approximately 0·47 million premature deaths by 2050 (up to 1·28 million premature deaths in SSP3 -1·5°C) with respect to the baseline. We showed that welfare-maximising policies accounting for air pollution benefits reduces premature mortality by 1·62 million deaths annually. This is three times greater than the co-benefits of climate policies. China is the region where most of the avoided mortality is possible, whereas the reforming economies (ie, non-EU eastern European countries, including Russia) region has the greatest welfare benefits. We find that global and regional welfare increases when air pollution impacts are internalised, with no negative repercussions on global inequality. Air pollution control strategies are found to be an important complement to structural emission reductions. Accounting for air pollution impacts reduces climate mitigation costs and inequality and increases global and regional welfare. Results are robust to a broad set of scenarios and assumptions, including debated normative choices on how to value improved health. EU Commission projects: INNOPATHS, NAVIGATE, ENGAGE, and COMMIT.

Drone-Cinema, Data Practices, and the Narrative of IHL

This article explores how advanced military technologies and data practices reshape and reassert a particular, Western-centric, narrative of International Humanitarian Law (IHL). Analysing the dissemination of this narrative through popular culture, with a focus on he 2015 British thriller Eye in the Sky, I explore how the representation of IHL data practices reaffirms a humanitarian narrative of IHL. As a popular culture product – and one that is embraced by senior IHL experts and professionals – Eye in the Sky reflects and participates in the ethical, legal, and political debates about advanced military technologies, and presents mundane data practices as a system of knowledge production through which IHL exercises its jurisdiction over facts, people, time, and space. In particular, the article analyses how Eye in the Sky’s representations of IHL’s data practices strengthen and reinforce a particular IHL narrative, which is consistent with Western countries’ narrative about their existing bureaucracies of killing. Based on Interdisciplinary analysis of socio-legal studies (SLS), Science and Technology Studies (STS), and culture and media literature, this article answers the following three questions: (i) who is given the power to speak IHL (and who is not)? (ii) to whom is IHL speaking? and (iii) how do data practices shape IHL’s jurisdiction? The article concludes that Eye in the Sky speaks international law through the voices of drone-owning nations, and is directed to their mass publics, legitimising data-centred violence. At the same time, it disguises normative choices as inevitable, and erases African decision-makers, communities, and perspectives.