Global Governance by Data: Infrastructures of Algorithmic Rule

We are living through an era of unprecedented data-driven regulatory transformation. AI and algorithmic governance are rapidly altering how global problems are known and governed, and reconfiguring how people, places, and things are drawn into legal relation across diverse areas - from labour, media and communications, and global mobilities to environmental governance, security, and war. These changes are fostering new forms of power, inequality, and violence, and posing urgent conceptual and methodological challenges for law and technology research. Global Governance by Data: Infrastructures of Algorithmic Rule brings together leading interdisciplinary scholars working at the forefront of creative thinking and research practice in this area. The book offers fresh takes on the prospects for working collectively to critique and renew those legal and technological infrastructures that order, divide, empower and immiserate across our data-driven world. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Fleur Johns is Dean and Head of School of Sydney Law School at the University of Sydney. Her prior books include: Connection in a Divided World (2024); #Help: Digital Humanitarianism and the Remaking of International Order (2023); and Non-Legality in International Law: Unruly Law (2013).

Gavin Sullivan is a Reader at Edinburgh Law School and interdisciplinary law, technology and security scholar leading the UKRI-funded sociolegal research project, Infra-Legalities: Global Security Infrastructures, AI and International Law. His first book, The Law of the List (2020), won the 2021 ISA International Law and STAIR-ISA Book Awards.

Dimitri Van Den Meerssche is Senior Lecturer and IHSS Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. His current research focuses on the impact of algorithmic governance on political subjectivity. Dimitri co-founded and convenes the ESIL International Law & Technology IG. His first monograph is The World Bank's Lawyers (2022).