Faculty Colloquium

Presenter:  Dr. Gavin Sullivan is a Reader in International Human Rights Law at Edinburgh Law School, The University of Edinburgh and leads the sociolegal UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship project, Infra-Legalities: Global Security Infrastructures, AI and International Law. His first book, "The Law of the List: UN Counterterrorism Sanctions and Politics of Global Security Law" (CUP, 2020) was awarded the 2021 International Studies Association International Law and STAIR book prizes. His recent research focuses on algorithmic security governance, digital borders, and platform moderation infrastructures and has been published in the Journal of Law and Society, German Law Journal and London Review of International Law.

Current debates on weaponised interdependence in global politics highlight the appropriation of economic and data infrastructures by powerful states for geopolitical advantage but tend to obscure how law enables and shapes these processes (Farrell and Newman, 2023; Fishman, 2025; cf: Heath, 2025). And recent legal research has examined infrastructures as forms of regulatory ordering in international law and global governance but hasn’t yet addressed how an infrastructural approach to law might help to unpack these shifts in global security and governance by data (Kingsbury, 2019; Johns, 2023; Sullivan and Van Den Meerssche, 2024). This paper engages with this problem and connects these debates through empirical analysis of the post-9/11 US terrorist watchlisting system. For two decades, watchlisting has been challenged in US courts and critiqued by advocacy groups for its secrecy and disregard for constitutional due process protections. This has foregrounded the legal plight of affected Americans but obscured the wider globalised and racialised effects of this system. I argue that the political and legal dynamics and exclusionary effects of US terrorist watchlisting can be better understood as interconnected elements of a data-driven global security infrastructure. Drawing from leaked data, this paper critiques this infrastructure along three intersecting axes - jurisdiction, digital bordering and risk governance – and shows how it is reconfiguring state-based systems of legal ordering through data practices for governing ‘known and suspected terrorists’. This reorientates critical focus toward the jurisdictional politics of global security infrastructures and the ways they enact and exclude global populations of ‘risky’ people to target.