Speaker: Dr Gavin Sullivan, University of Edinburgh
Date: Tuesday 24 November 2026
Time: 16.00–17.30
Venue: Venue to be confirmed
Abstract
This paper follows how counterterrorism sanctions are translated and put into action through platform content moderation infrastructures. I argue that this translation is a powerful global governance process that produces key effects. It transforms the scope and coercive power of sanctions in far-reaching ways, expanding the field of pre-emptive security they enable and range of people they can target. And it reconfigures state-platform power and opens opportunities for powerful state and Big Tech platforms to work together to shift the terrain of global politics that are important in the current geopolitical context. The paper develops these claims by empirically focusing on Meta’s Dangerous Organisations and Individuals (DOI) policy and enforcement infrastructure. It draws on several years of engagement with Meta’s DOI team – both as a stakeholder in various DOI policy reform processes, and as a researcher following how Meta’s DOI infrastructure governs terrorism and violent extremism online.
About the speaker
Dr Gavin Sullivan is Reader in International Human Rights Law at Edinburgh Law School, which he joined in 2021 following a post at Kent Law School and a PhD (cum laude) from the University of Amsterdam. His research uses socio-legal and ethnographic methods to examine law and technology, AI and algorithmic governance, infrastructural geopolitics, and global security and human rights, and he leads the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship project Infra-Legalities: Global Security Infrastructures, Artificial Intelligence and International Law, which explores how AI and automated decision-making are transforming global security governance across online counter-extremism, digital borders and terrorist watchlisting. His first book, The Law of the List: UN Counterterrorism Sanctions and the Politics of Global Security Law (Cambridge University Press, 2020), won the International Studies Association’s STAIR and ILAW Book Awards, and his second, Global Governance by Data: Infrastructures of Algorithmic Rule (co-edited with Fleur Johns and Dimitri Van Den Meerssche), is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. A solicitor admitted in England and Wales, he has provided pro bono representation since 2010 to people targeted by security lists worldwide, including before the UN Office of the Ombudsperson and the US Office of Foreign Assets Control, and has consulted for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and a range of civil society organisations. He is co-Vice-Chair of the International Advisory Committee of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, a member of the management team of the Scottish Council on Global Affairs, Co-Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Law in Context and Co-Editor of Critical Studies on Security.