Cable Empires: The Co-Production of Infrastructure, Technology, and International Law

With Roxana Vatanparast (Capital University Law School).

Undersea cables and the communications they enabled have been co-produced with international law from the mid-nineteenth century to the digital present. By linking distant territories together, submarine cables transformed conceptions of sovereignty, territoriality, and jurisdiction. Far from neutral technical systems, cables facilitated both imperial expansion and resistance, capitalist accumulation, and the standardization of international legal and technical norms.

Drawing on archival research and interdisciplinary insights from international law, science and technology studies, and infrastructure studies, this talk examines how communications infrastructure both shaped and was shaped by evolving international law and sociotechnical imaginaries. Undersea cables illustrate how technological developments shape knowledge about the world and, in doing so, reshape ideas about how it should be governed. From telegraphic empires to fiber-optic networks and the digital economy, communications infrastructure has been central to struggles over sovereignty, development, and international order. These dynamics remain visible today in conflicts over digital infrastructure and technological sovereignty, where control over communications networks continues to frame the possibilities and limits of the international legal order.

Roxana Vatanparast is a legal scholar interested in law and technology, digital economy, data governance, and infrastructures. Her work focuses on the normative, material, and distributive infrastructures of the digital economy. She uses an interdisciplinary approach to examine legal and governance implications of digital technologies and how they in turn reshape law and governance, with a particular interest in issues of democracy, inequality, and expertise.

She is currently an Assistant Professor of Law at Capital University Law School, where she teaches courses on Property, Business Associations, and Law & Technology. She is also a Summer Lecturer at Harvard University, and a Coordinator of the European Society of International Law’s Interest Group on International Law & Technology. 

Her publications have appeared or are forthcoming in the Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, Heidelberg Journal of International Law, Brooklyn Journal of International Law, Denver Journal of International Law and Policy, Harvard International Law Journal Online, and juridikum – Austria’s Critical Law Review. She is currently working on a monograph on undersea cables, empire, and international law titled Cable Empires: The Co-Production of Infrastructure, Technology, and International Law, which is under contract with Cambridge University Press.

This event was organised as part of the AI-NODES project (PostGenAI@Paris cluster), which benefits from support from the French National Research Agency (ANR) under the France 2030 programme, reference ANR-23-IACL-0007.

Venue: Room 402 (Sciences Po, 27 rue Saint-Guillaume, Paris 7ème).

In person.