The promise of digitalisation in achieving Universal Health Coverage in postcolonial contexts is undermined by the realities of insufficiently resourced public healthcare systems. In response, private health insurance is often seen as essential to healthcare delivery. The provision of this private health insurance is increasingly mediated through digital infrastructures, with providers leaning into the promise of data-driven behavioural economics to provide better and more efficient services. While an increasing number of studies focus on digital health, in this paper, we particularly focus on the less-explored question of how datafication – under the veil of shared value, and enabled by forms of legal access – reproduces inequalities. Using the case study of Discovery, a financial services company in South Africa providing health insurance, we analyse how a social value and data-driven behavioural economic model of health insurance commodifies health and wellness. We argue that legal infrastructures are central to this commodification. Through a socio-legal critique of digital health, our article makes an original contribution to broader debates on enduring postcolonial social inequalities by illustrating how infrastructural injustice manifest through datafication.

We investigate the role of domestic legal infrastructures on Member State behavior at the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in Article 234 cases from 1961 to 2006. The ECJ issues preliminary rulings on the interpretation of European Union (EU) law when requested to do so by national judges, which promotes consistent application of EU law within national legal orders as well as a larger legal discourse about the scope and boundaries of integration. Scholarly interest in Article 234 observations arises from the consequences of these cases for both Member State compliance and European integration. Using a new data set of Member State observations, we demonstrate that the number of observations submitted by non-party Member States is affected by the strength and weaknesses of domestic legal infrastructures that facilitate cases being brought before the Court.

The notion of infrastructure has recently featured prominently in international legal scholarship. The ambition behind the turn to infrastructure in international legal theory is comparable to other large attempts to conceptualize the discipline. Yet, against the backdrop of work in the humanities and social sciences, theoretical engagement with infrastructure is still nascent in the legal discipline. In this Article, we build on another recent development in international legal scholarship—the turn to “materiality”—to articulate a systematic theory of infrastructure in international law. At the center of our study is the case study of the cruise ship. Studying cruise ships and their legal and political environment in detail, we introduce three conceptual building blocks through which we develop a more comprehensive theory of infrastructure: Platform, object and rupture. Although we focus on cruise ships, the theory of legal infrastructure that we offer is applicable to a wide array of industries and issues.

Whenever a person intends to cross a border, citizenship de facto determines—more than any other status—whether that person can enter the territory of another state. Yet, despite its ubiquity and centrality within global mobility infrastructures, the exact mechanisms through which citizenship shapes human movement on the planetary scale remain surprisingly ambiguous. This Article examines the multifaceted ways in which citizenship operates as an organizing principle within the complex of rules and norms governing transnational human mobility, including how the increasing acceptance of dual nationality status and the emergence of citizenship-by-investment schemes reverberate throughout the legal infrastructure and create new pathways for elite mobility. Using citizenship as an exploratory lens, the Article thereby seeks to theoretically complement and nuance existing scholarship in migration and mobility studies, arguing that physical space remains the dominant structure for human mobility. As we show, legal infrastructures reconfigure access to human mobility in ways that simultaneously fragment and compress physical space as it pertains to transnational movement.

The Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA) is a multilateral, multisectoral partnership comprised of more than 70 countries, international organizations, foundations, and businesses to strengthen global health security.