CCPL Seminar: Cryptostatecraft – Recoding Value/s in the Digital Economy
27 February 2025 (Thursday)
12:00pm – 1:00pm
Room 723, Cheng Yu Tung Tower, Centennial Campus, The University of Hong Kong
Crypto is back. With the re-election of Donald Trump to the White House in 2024, the role of the crypto industry in shaping US politics and its government apparatus has moved center stage. This talk explores blockchain technology as a technology of statecraft, pointing to the idea that the technology enables some of the most far-reaching governance experiments – a phenomenon best understood as cryptostatecraft. The talk locates state-centric thinking as a historical phenomenon that emerged under particular conditions as a screen for projecting demands of equal participation in the distribution of wealth. Does the state still hold as the scaler of collective futures? It is precisely here that cryptostatecraft can reveal a lot about the Zeitgeist. So what to make of cryptostatecraft? How to dis/engage it? And how to keep up with its acceleration in accumulating power, capital and territory?
Bio:
Andrea Leiter is the Acting Director of Research at the Amsterdam Center for International Law. She focuses on global inequality and transnational law making through private actors in the digital economy. Her current research project ‘(Re)coding Values: Decentralised Autonomous Organisations as Pathways toward Sustainable Societies?’ is funded by a VENI grant of the Dutch Research Council (2024-2027). Her manuscript called ‘Making the World Safe for Investment: The Protection of Property 1922-1959’ was published with Cambridge University Press in 2023. Andrea also co-developed ecological and social justice projects at the intersection of technology, economics and governance like Sovereign Nature Initiative and A Thousand Breaths.
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