CJS Seminar: Gavin Sullivan and Dimitri Van Den Meerssche
Location:
Teaching Room 06,
Old College
Date/time
Wed 12 March 2025
16:00-17:30
The Crime, Justice & Society Seminar Series presents
UK Border Control and Algorithmic Risk Governance: Mapping the Cerberus Digital Bordering Infrastructure
Gavin Sullivan and Dimitri Van Den Meerssche
About this event
The 2025 UK Border Strategy seeks to ‘revolutionise’ UK border control through use of ‘advanced risk analytics’ and ‘AI-driven decision-making’. A key component of this regulatory shift is Cerberus – an advanced digital bordering system developed by the Home Office and British Aerospace Engineering (BAE) that fuses together diverse forms of data for analysis by machine learning algorithms to identify and preventatively govern ‘risky’ people and things. This presentation critically analyses Cerberus as a distinctive governance infrastructure, highlighting how it materially assembles risk and suspicion, and reconfigures both power and accountability in UK border governance and legal practices. It draws on a forthcoming paper in the German Law Journal and detailed interviews with Home Office policy experts and data engineers designing this massively consequential AI-enabled critical national infrastructure.
About the speakers
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. His research focuses on the politics of global security law and governance, using socio-legal methods to examine data-driven security practices. His first book, The Law of the List (CUP, 2020), won the 2021 ISA International Law and STAIR-ISA Book Awards. Gavin is on the Independent Advisory Committee of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), the editorial board of the journal, Transnational Legal Theory and is a co-director of the Scottish Council on Global Affairs (SCGA).
Dimitri Van Den Meerssche is a Senior Lecturer in Law and Fellow of the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (IHSS) at Queen Mary University of London. His current research studies the impact of new digital technologies on global security governance, with a focus on counterterrorism and border control. He is interested in the inequality and exclusion enacted by algorithmic governance, and how it impacts political subjectivity and prospects of collective action. Recent writing focuses the inequalities of the virtual border, the phantom publics and value systems of algorithmic governance, and the subject of critique in international law and technology.
This is a hybrid event.