Lecture
SAILS Lunch Time Seminar: Barrie Sander
- Date
- Monday 23 February 2026
- Time
- Location
- Online only
Constructing Security for the Twin Transitions: The Tragedy of EU Law at the Intersection of Climate and AI Governance
Abstract
As the European Union (EU) advances a strategy of twinning the green and digital transitions, heightened expectations have been invested in the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to combat climate change. Importantly, relying on AI to tackle the climate crisis generates a variety of security concerns. Yet, only rarely have such concerns been the focus of critical attention. Adopting a narrative theoretical lens, this paper critically examines how security is constructed and contested across three EU regulatory frameworks that sit at the intersection of climate and AI governance – the Critical Raw Materials Act, the AI Act, and the Digital Services Act.
The paper argues that these regulations fall within a genre of tragic governance. Each regulation romantically portrays the EU as a heroic values-driven actor, inspired by green, rights-based and democratic ambitions. In practice, however, these aspirations are compromised by the fatal flaw of restricted vision – security threats at the intersection of climate and AI governance are framed and addressed in ways that end up legitimating harmful patterns of exploitation affecting local communities impacted by resource mining, people on the move, and digital activists, whilst overlooking logics of overconsumption, border externalisation, and data extractive informational capitalism that expose such actors to control and domination rather than protection and empowerment.
At the same time, the paper also identifies several footholds within each regulation that could serve as pathways for dominant understandings of security to be resisted. While such footholds are unlikely to completely dismantle the prevailing security narratives underpinning these regulations, they create opportunities to construct counter-narratives that resist their inevitability – potentially paving the way for future reimaginings of EU law beyond its tragic present.
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