Annelise Riles

Collateral Expertise Legal Knowledge in the Global Financial Markets

This essay offers an ethnographically grounded critique of and an alternative to science-studies-inflected approaches to the social studies of finance. The focus on trading as the core of finance and the analysis of trading as an analog of technoscientific practice unwittingly substantiate one of the core ideological claims of finance, that it is a discrete world whose activities are protoscientific. A focus on the legal, regulatory, and documentary practices that instantiate the world of traders, in contrast, presents a very different conception of finance. Finance, in this view, is an explicit politics (not a hidden politics masked as epistemological practice), a purposeful and stated compulsion of self and others, a realm of must, shall, and will, albeit one always defined by certain temporal limits. Attention to the temporal politics of finance requires an analytical approach that does more than uncover the politics of expertise. The promise of such an approach is that it might help us to apprehend already thriving forms of political response to global capitalism: arrangements of human and nonhuman legal instruments beyond critiques of global capitalism on the one hand and alternatives to global capitalism on the other. One such arrangement is what I term the placeholder.

Rights Inside Out: The Case of the Women's Human Rights Campaign

This essay traces the relationship between activists and academics involved in the campaign for “women’s rights as human rights” as a case study of the relationship between different classes of what I call “knowledge professionals” self-consciously acting in a transnational domain. The puzzle that animates this essay is the following: how was it that at the very moment at which a critique of “rights” and a reimagination of rights as “rights talk” proved to be such fertile ground for academic scholarship did the same “rights” prove to be an equally fertile ground for activist networking and lobbying activities? The paper answers this question with respect to the work of self-reflexivity in creating a “virtual sociality of rights.”

Outputs: the promises and perils of ethnographic engagement after the loss of faith in transnational dialogue: Outputs

This essay investigates one important artefact of meeting knowledge production: outputs. It does so through the example of the activities of the members of Meridian 180, a community of Pacific Rim intellectuals collaborating on transnational legal and policy issues. For the members, the particular kind of knowledge production facilitated by Meridian 180 constitutes a response to the failures of international bureaucracy to generate and sustain a fabric of global relationality. The group’s various attempts to address the imperative for ‘output’ illuminate both aspects of the meeting as an organizational form, and the challenges and opportunities meetings present for ethnography. The wider underlying theme of the essay concerns the ethical purposes and promises of ethnographic styles of engagement after the loss of faith in transnational dialogue.

Afterword: A Method More Than a Subject

This fascinating collection addresses the topic of legal technicalities from a remarkable variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives. Some authors view a focus on legal technicalities as an extension of a long-standing socio-legal studies concern with the relationship between the social and the legal, a way to ‘draw on diverse ways of understanding … the legal’ (Cowan and Wincott, this volume, p. 2) while other authors embrace the concept of technicalities precisely as a place of respite from the explanatory power of the social (Tomlins). Some view technicalities as an important concern for legal reform projects; others view technicalities in precisely the opposite sense, as a site for legal critique projects. The editors propose that we make sense of the ‘meanings’ of legal technicalities — that we bring technicalities into the sphere of things that can be studied from a humanistic or culturalist point of view. The chapters respond to this call in a variety of registers. There are feminist, legal pluralist and Foucauldian chapters, as well as chapters inspired by science and technology studies.

Space, Time, and Historical Injustice: A Feminist Conflict-of-Laws Approach to the Comfort Women Agreement

After more than twenty years of worldwide feminist activism, transnational litigation, and diplomatic stalemate, on December 28, 2015, Japan and South Korea announced a historic agreement intended to provide closure to the so-called “Comfort Women issue” – the issue of what Japan must do to atone for the sexual enslavement of up to 200,000 women from throughout Asia in service to the Japanese troops before and during World War II. Reactions to this landmark agreement have been mixed, and the question for many is whether it will hold. One challenge is how to respect the scale and systematicity of the crimes without imposing a single narrative, or without projecting an overdetermined understanding of the gendered past onto the future. We offer an analysis of this question in a wider lens: how to address grave historical injustices when legal claims and advocacy goals spread and metamorphose not only over time, but also across jurisdictions.Focusing on one high profile and particularly contentious provision of the settlement, concerning the status of a privately erected statue honoring the Comfort Women outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul, we first show that the usual questions about settlements – whether they can or cannot achieve closure – can productively be traded for attention to where and when closure and reopening occurs. Borrowing our analytical lens from the field of conflict of laws, we then refine the problem as a manifestation of a pervasive issue for feminist justice in a globalized world that we call “spatio-temporal diffusion.”We argue that a novel response to this diffusion of historical injustices can be grounded in conflict-of-laws techniques. Using the hypothetical of a case brought by Korean Comfort Women in California, we re-describe the field’s techniques for dealing with time across space as a matter of what we term the “sequencing” of different spatio-temporal horizons. This approach resonates with, but also goes a step beyond the arguments of certain feminist social theorists that feminist politics must be polytemporal. In the mode of an interdisciplinary experiment, we deploy the conflicts technique of sequencing spatio-temporal horizons as a more specified and hopeful approach to a feminist future.

Introduction to Symposium on Cybersecurity and the Changing International Law of Data

The hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC)’s email system and its resulting impact on the U.S. presidential election of 2016 has brought the issue of cybersecurity to the forefront of public concern in the United States and, to varying degrees, elsewhere. For the public, cybersecurity is no longer just a fringe problem of strange email scams promising unclaimed winnings, or a subject for off-beat television hacker dramas.1 Now President Putin leaps to mind, as we are plunged into a newly perplexing version of Cold War intrigue. Even the most powerful of the world’s nation-states seem to be at a loss as to how to respond. The Obama administration’s struggles to craft a response to its finding that Russia hacked the DNC in an effort to influence the U.S. election, and the incoming Trump administration’s dismissal of the episode as unworthy of further state action, have demonstrated the challenge that cybersecurity poses to international law, also. The existing toolkit of norms, treaties, institutions, and sanctions has been exposed as woefully inadequate. As others have explained, cybersecurity is a term dating from the early 1990s that captures the imperative of countering a wide range of threats arising from the networked interpenetration of computer systems.2 As such, it is by its nature a transnational problemwith deep implications for interstate conflict and global economic order, as well as for individual and collective human rights. Yet as a discipline, international law is struggling to take account of technopolitical innovations that have a bearing on cybersecurity. First, cybersecurity stretches uneasily across existing international and national legal categories such as the laws of war, intellectual property law, criminal law, tort law, contract law, privacy law, the law and institutions governing the internet, and national security law. More importantly, the problems and possible solutions with which cybersecurity is concerned are not legal alone. They are also technical—framed by innovations in computer science hardware and software and in changing utilizations of these. And they are cultural too—determined by how technologies are deployed, and how norms are interpreted in diverse communities from hackers to email users, and from security professionals to product designers, around the world. Moreover the issues and problems look very different in different parts of theworld. The cybersecurity problems and solutions in themost well-resourced countries are quite distinct from those of the developing world. As is often noted, the cybersecurity commitments of countries such as the United States or Australia and of the European Union stand in contrast to the more sovereignty-oriented frameworks advocated by countries such as Russia and China. Any possible solutions will therefore depend on a rich international and interdisciplinary dialogue between lawyers, computer scientists, social scientists, economists, and humanists in different parts of the world. This is no