Rapid expansion in the use of advanced digital technologies – including systems employing AI and machine learning techniques for data analysis and enacting automated decision-making (ADM) processes – is reconfiguring the practice of international law and global governance, altering how power and rights are exercised and posing novel conceptual, methodological, ethical and political challenges. This introductory chapter explores these problems by foregrounding the generative work of data infrastructures and the distinctive forms of power, agency, and ordering they are putting into effect. It suggests grappling with the emergent dynamics of algorithmic governance by engaging with how it is reworking scale, reshaping subjectivities, and creating new forms of governmentality and data-driven violence. We make an urgent call for more heterodox law and technology scholarship to bring interdisciplinary insights into current debates about the transformative effects of AI and ADM.

Algorithmic governmentality at the border has gained attention in recent years on debates around migration. Within these debates, algorithmic risks and limitations have triggered contestations and mobilised campaigns given the harmful consequences they generate at the racialised border, such as automated bias and discrimination, privacy or surveillance. Yet this chapter invites us to critically interrogate how algorithmic governmentality at the border invisibilises, fosters and recrafts these racialised mechanisms. By theoretically building on Foucault’s repressive hypothesis about power relations, we analyse two case studies that show how algorithmic governmentality has transformed the ways in which power is exercised and resistance is enacted at the border. This chapter concludes that in order to truly engage with a critical perspective on algorithmic governmentality, we should start from the consideration that the border still enacts racialised mechanisms.

Drawing upon Foucauldian ideas this chapter explores how the ‘datafication’ of modern life shifts the modes of power acting upon the individual and social body. Through a brief exploration of three banal everyday social practices (driving, health, gambling) it argues that the construction of the data-self marks an emergent algorithmic govermentality centred simultaneously upon intimate knowledge of the individual (subjectivities) and the population. The intersection of technology, data and subjectivation, reproduces a ‘neoliberal subject’ – one closely monitored and policed to freely perform ‘correct’ forms of action or behaviour, and one increasingly governed by the imperatives of private capital. This chapter explores how this nexus between power and knowledge is central to debates about the relocation (or appropriation) of personal and population data from state to non-state institutions, with private corporations increasingly managing the health and wellbeing of individuals and society. It makes an argument for critical engagement with the complex interactions, intersections, effects and unintended consequences of multiple technologies that, through the use of data, make the simultaneous government of individuals and populations their targets of action.