Digitalization and contestation in international law

This project seeks to inquire into how international law has dealt with the challenge of digitalization (and how this challenge has questioned some fundamental assumptions in international law.) The project will therefore investigate how states have argued in various discussions related to digitization.

Many debates that had been settled in the "tangible" world have been torn up again.

This has been due to the fact that digital phenomena (data/code, electronic transmission and "cyberspace") could not be self-evidently fitted into established categories and/or because digitization made certain previous controversies (e.g. whether espionage is legal) so much more important.

Since the geopolitical climate has not made it possible to agree on important issues for a long time, the discussions have largely been about the interpretation of existing legal rules (and their terms).

By tracing the reasoning from the superficial legal arguments down to the more fundamental assumptions that underlie the arguments – assumptions about both digital ontologies and fundamental legal concepts and principles – the project aims to illuminate how states (and selected commentators) have understood these issues.

I will look at five debates: territorial sovereignty (espionage, police hacking etc), the border between war and peace, information gathering through "intermediaries" (cloud providers etc), protection of civilian data in war and trade in data.