Dr Gavin Sullivan receives award from UKRI to further his Future Leaders Fellowship project
Mon 28 October 2024

Dr Gavin Sullivan, Reader in International Human Rights Law, has recently been awarded almost £600,000 by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) to deepen and further develop his Future Leaders Fellowship research project, Infra-Legalities: Global Security Infrastructures, Artificial Intelligence and International Law, from February 2025 until February 2028.
The UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship scheme seeks to develop the next wave of world-class research and innovation leaders by supporting the tackling of ambitious and challenging research. Dr Sullivan will be recruiting in 2024/early 2025 to grow the Infra-Legalities research team.
In receiving this prestigious funding award Dr Sullivan said: “My research examines how global security governance by data and algorithmic decision-making is reshaping law and regulation in digital border security and online counterterrorism. The rapid development of AI-driven governance in these areas is reconfiguring law, power and agency in significant ways and posing critical rights and accountability challenges, particularly for those targeted as ‘risky’. I am extremely grateful to UKRI for their continued support in funding this work, and excited to be soon growing the Infra-Legalities research team at Edinburgh Law School and working together with my global network of academic collaborators and policy-orientated project partners’.”
Dr Sullivan’s research focuses on the politics of global security law, technology and rights using socio-legal and ethnographic methods. He is a member of the International Advisory Committee of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), Co-Director of the Scottish Council on Global Affairs (SCGA), and Senior Research Affiliate at Edinburgh Future Institute’s Centre for Technomoral Futures.
View Dr Sullivan’s profile to learn more about his work