Lunch seminar with Gavin Sullivan

Watchlisting the World: Terrorism Watchlists as Global Security Infrastructure

For the last two decades, US terrorist watchlists have been challenged in the US courts and critiqued by civil liberties and human rights NGOs. This litigation and advocacy has focused on the plight of affected Americans and the (in)adequacies of US legal procedures. But it has failed to meaningfully challenge or alter this digital bordering technology and it misses its transnational power relations and racialised violence. Drawing on leaked materials, this paper takes a different critical approach. I argue that the US terrorist watchlist can be better understood as a global security infrastructure.

Analysing the terrorist watchlist as infrastructure draws attention to the sociotechnical relations and distinctive forms of material agency that are allowing this bordering technology to globally scale and grow. It also shifts political and legal focus towards the ways this infrastructure and its data flows works to assemble global populations of ‘risky’ people, redraw racialised boundaries anew and fabricate through data patchy jurisdictional zones where those listed have no legal accountability or redress. This critical mapping suggests potential sites of friction and legal contestation that have been inadequately explored to date.

Speaker bio

Gavin Sullivan is a Reader at Edinburgh Law School and leads the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship project, Infra-Legalities: Global Security Infrastructures, AI and International Law. This sociolegal research examines how AI and automated decision-making is reconfiguring global security law and governance, focusing on digital bordering infrastructures, terrorist watchlisting, and the countering of terrorism and violent extremism online. His first book, The Law of the List  (CUP, 2020), won the 2021 ISA International Law and STAIR-ISA Book Awards for research bringing STS into dialogue with global politics. Gavin has provided pro bono legal representation to people targeted by security lists worldwide since 2010, including before the UN Office of the Ombudsperson. He is on the Independent Advisory Committee of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, he co-directs the Scottish Council on Global Affairs and he is on the Editorial Board of the journal, Transnational Legal Theory.

Participate via Zoom
Meeting ID: 639 5383 9865
Passcode: 731238