Conversations in 'un-governance' - ECIGL Seminar
Location:
Virtual event
Date/time
Thu 29 April 2021
12:00 - 13:00
The Edinburgh Centre for International and Global Law presents
Conversations in 'un-governance'
This seminar continues our series of conversations around the theme of 'un-governance'. It puts into conversation two cutting edge papers on contemporary technologies of governance - algorithmic governmentality and performance management. The seminar will begin with a brief introduction to the below papers by the authors, but the bulk of the seminar will be dedicated to open discussion:
- Roele, Articulating Security - Introduction (.pdf)
- Roele, Articulating Security - Performance Review (.pdf)
- The contemporary values of operadiction regimes (.pdf)
Dr Isobel Roele (QMUL School of Law), 'Getting Stuck in Counter-Terrorism Governance'
Abstract: Dr Roele's forthcoming monograph, Articulating Security: The United Nations and Its Infra-Law, describes the UN’s attempt to join up counter-terrorism infrastructure and initiatives across national, conceptual, and temporal boundaries. From this emerges a vision of cooperative, comprehensive, and continuous collective security, which the organization pursues using technologies of managerial governance. In this talk, she focus on two of those technologies: strategic planning and performance management. After two decades of attempting to articulate counter-terrorism infrastructure and initiatives, the UN has met with a singular lack of success. Though there are exogenous reasons for this – scant funding, variable political commitment, high profile resistance, and so on – this talk focusses on the UN’s perseverance in the face of failure. Not only, indeed, does the organization persevere with an approach that is demonstrably not working; it tries to resolve the inefficacy by doubling down on the same failing technologies. This talk investigates is the disjuncture between the 'go-go-go' ethos of results-based management and the results that the UN manages to produce. Its organizational energy keeps getting diverted from its putative objects and turning back on the UN organization itself and on the objective of organization more generally. A potential avenue of further study is suggested by psychoanalytic work on the relationship of ordering and repetition to control and security.
Dr Geoff Gordon (Asser Institute, University of Amsterdam) and Dr Dimitri van den Meerssche(University of Edinburgh), 'The contemporary values of operadiction regimes'
Abstract: Invocations of ‘values’ in discussions on issues related to accelerating technological transformation and automated decision making tend to take one of two paired forms: as attempts at codification or decoding. In the former case, the aim is to attune new socio-technical forms of governance or market behavior with ‘values’ presumed to be at the core of liberal legal ordering. In the case of decoding, by contrast, the intention is not primarily to instill values already known and presumed present in liberal legal ordering but to reveal the – often pathological – value systems that are implicitly encoded in new, technologically mediated, decision-making tools or economic practices. Both registers of engagement or intervention are marked by a particular approach to the relationship between algorithmic instruments and the socio-political or ethicopolitical ‘values’ that should either guide their operations or be extricated from them. They both work through a separation between identifiable, pre-existing value-systems and the algorithmic regimes of governance under scrutiny. We take a different approach, to attempt a shift away from a representationalist frame (where technological regimes can be perceived as enacting or deviating from value systems already existing outside their operations), in favor of a language of performativity that seeks to register how new realities are technologically enacted. In doing so, we take inspiration from Louise Amoore, among others, who investigates the ways in which algorithmic instruments present discrete ‘ethicopolitical arrangement[s] of values, assumptions, and propositions about the world’. (2020, p.6) In contrast to Amoore, however, who portrays these enactments as forms of truth-telling (regimes of veridiction), this contribution seeks to foreground not the epistemological but the ontological tenets of algorithmic governmentality and the values they perform.