André is a research fellow with the ARC Laureate Program on Global Corporations and International Law at the Melbourne Law School. He was previously a PhD candidate at the Institute for International Law and the Humanities, also at the Melbourne Law School. His PhD research focused on the intersections between international human rights law and digital data technologies.
IBM, the icc and the birth of the multinational
On 24 October 1949 Thomas J Watson, President of the International Business Machines corporation (IBM) gave a speech broadcast via telephone to IBM employees in 49 different countries around the world. Watson’s purpose in calling what he termed an ‘IBM family meeting’ was to announce the creation of a new, wholly owned subsidiary of IBM, the World Trade Corporation (WTC) to handle all IBM activities outside the US. The speech ostensibly marked a milestone in the development of a new kind of corporation, the multinational, which set up local manufacturing and distributing capacities to circumvent import restrictions and tariffs. It also marked the return by business leaders to an institutionalised internationalism after the national war effort years of World War II. Watson, who had been the pre-war president of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), had had his motto emblazoned on the IBM headquarters in New York in 1938: ‘World Peace Through World Trade’. Now, in 1949, he linked the creation of the WTC to the rebuilding of post-war Europe. He also linked the WTC to the United Nations, that ‘great hope of the world’ in which ‘we have taken an active interest from the beginning to help promote its aims.’ That interest, noted Watson, was largely channeled through the ICC, which had been the only accredited private sector organization at the negotiations over the UN Charter.
This research project will explore the twinned histories of IBM and the ICC, linking from the outset the multinational corporation to international institutions.
Human rights for the data society
André’s PhD thesis is concerned on the UN’s engagement with digital data technologies in its human rights work in the 2010s. During that decade, the UN has both embraced new technologies and attempted to regulate them. The thesis focuses on how the UN’s work on digital data technologies and human rights might make and shape a particular world, in the sense of a normative and imaginative universe in which there is a shared common sense about what it is possible to do, and what ought to be done, and the material environment underpinning that common understanding.
The thesis argues that the UN’s attempts to embrace and respond to digital data technologies are producing a world in which the biggest technology corporations and their data technologies are widely accepted as indispensable to the international human rights project: the data society. The UN does so through a series of technical projects during the 2010s that produce what one might call ‘datafied’ forms of human rights. In these emerging forms of human rights, core concepts and practices are understood by reference to or performed through digital data technologies.
The central implication of this argument is that when human rights practitioners – at the UN and beyond – use datafied forms of human rights, they play a significant role in making the data society possible. By the same token, they also play a significant role in foreclosing alternative possibilities – of worlds in which human rights and digital data technologies might be imagined differently.
‘No Voice Left Behind’ was commissioned for the Machine Listening curriculum as part of Unsound 2020: Intermission.
selected research
2023
2022
2021
2020
2020
2023
Contact
andred@unimelb.edu.au