KDEC 9040 - The Legal Architectures of Global Digital Governance

This course explores continuities and change in global governance by examining how authority is produced, dispersed, and contested across evolving legal, political, and socio-technical arrangements. It treats the digital age as one important dimension of the contemporary governance landscape, alongside older and continuing dynamics such as delegated authority, private ordering, informal norm-making, expert rule, surveillance, and entrenched structures of domination. Moving beyond state-centric and formalist frames, the course traces how authority emerges through hybrid constellations of actors—including international organizations, cities, corporations, platforms, and quasi-judicial bodies; through heterogeneous sources such as informal norms, standards, expert manuals, and technical forms; and through practices of outsourcing, procurement, classification, moderation, and evidence production.

Grounded in the view that narratives of novelty often risk obscuring deeper continuities, the course asks how contemporary transformations should be understood in relation to longer histories of global ordering. At the same time, it takes seriously the possibility that new infrastructures—including digital ones—reshape the scale, intensity, and visibility of governance. Students are thus invited to consider what is genuinely shifting in global governance, what remains strikingly familiar, and how older and newer forms of power become entangled.

None

The course is delivered through interactive seminars where all students are expected to participate based on their reading of the materials prescribed for each seminar. Participation is expected from everyone and will be taken into account in the evaluation (see below). Seminars are held every Wednesday from 2:45pm to 4:45 pm CET unless notified otherwise.

• Take-home midterm examination: essay introduction and outline 30%

Students will complete a take-home midterm assignment designed to support the development of their final written work. The midterm will require students to prepare an introduction and a detailed outline for an essay responding to a question related to the themes of the course.

• In-class final examination: essay 70%

The final assessment will consist of an in-class written examination in the form of an essay. Students will be asked to respond to a prompt drawing on the themes, concepts, and materials studied throughout the course.

Additional assessment consideration

Participation will be taken into account and may contribute to the award of one extra point (+1) or the loss of one point (-1).

Reading is compulsory. For each seminar, students will be expected to read 1 or 2 pieces of scholarship on average.