Marie Thøgersen

• Presentation

Primary fields of research

Current research

I am currently working on my PhD dissertation, in which I take a materialist perspective in exploring the development of international legal norms in the digital realm.

(Preliminary) abstract:
In response to societies’ increasing deployment of information technologies, a wealth of scholarship has examined ‘how international law applies in cyberspace’. Amidst this debate, this dissertation examines the more fundamental question: Why is international law developing as it does in cyberspace? Information technologies have led to a myriad of socio-economic changes. Above all, they have been vital tools in the global expansion of capitalism, improving the accumulation of wealth within the hands of a high-tech bourgeoisie, with fatal consequences for democracy and the climate. The dissertation takes inspiration from New-Stream–scholarship in arguing that international law is structurally indeterminate and that the occurrence of regularities in what we come to think of as ‘law’ is not a reflection of an inherent, legal logic. At the backdrop of this insight, the dissertation draws on historical materialism to make two propositions: First, it suggests that the regardless (re)production of the ideas of the field of international cyber law is an ideological process of reification, through which products of the human brain are transformed into objective things that come to regulate us as ‘law’. Second, it suggests that a materialist analysis can explain why particular ideas come to be dominant regularities. Based on these theoretical propositions, the dissertation offers a critical (re)reading of the production of ideas within the field of international cyber law and roots these ideas in the material basis, that is, the social relations of production in the current era of global capitalism. The analysis demonstrates how international cyber law, with all its ambiguities and uncertainties, relies on three assumptions that are not questioned: A), a technophile assumption that all technological progress are a universal good that should be promoted and protected. B), an assumption that externally caused disruptions of information technologies’ functioning are a matter of international security. C), an assumption that the international legal order provides the relevant framework to address this security risk. Because of these basic assumptions, the development of international cyber law is centered on the protection of the interests of those in control of information technology, that is, the assurance of stability and reliability from externally caused disturbances in information technologies’ functioning. Meanwhile, those in control of information technology are free to control and design the information technological landscape in their interests. In conclusion, the dissertation situates the findings within the broader context of Marxist theories of imperialism, illustrating the role of international law in sustaining capitalism. It contends that the development of international cyber law illustrates how states shape and deploy international law to secure the conditions necessary for the continuous expansion of capitalism.