Anti-Solutionism and Anti-Formalism in Global Algorithmic Governance Studies

Abstract

Abstract Digital and non-digital modes of governing the international legal order co-exist. This imbrication brings with it a particular constellation of actors, new sites and processes of governance and new modalities of law-making. Claudia Aradau and Tobias Blanke, in Algorithmic Reason, guide us through the complex cartographies of global governance. They eloquently map the networks and infrastructures of algorithmic governance and show how they affect the relations between the governing and the governed. Thereby, they help us visualize the imbrication of the local and the global, of private and public infrastructural logics beyond the static binaries that shape our traditional understanding of the international legal order. Throughout multiple case studies, two major transversal claims emerge in the book that are relevant to international lawyers. The book, in my view, argues for (i) an anti-solutionist and (ii) an anti-formalist analysis of global algorithmic governance. As these two transversal claims are not always fully unpacked and explicitly embraced, this review essay aims to draw the contours of these claims, unpack them and show how valuable they can be to think about global algorithmic governance and the functions of international law in the equation.