This article develops Registration Regime Theory (RRT) by treating inscription and registration not as passive containers of memory but as infrastructures for governing social time. It distinguishes inscriptionâthe external fixation of an event, claim, relation, or sign on a material or computational supportâfrom registration, the institutional authorization that allows such a trace to produce rights, identities, debts, obligations, classifications, and decisions. The central thesis is that inscription objectifies time, whereas registration authorizes objectified time. On this basis, the article reconstructs a series of overlapping registrational thresholds: durable inscription and archival accumulation; portable documents and rule at a distance; canonical and typographic replication; standardized, transferable financial claims; bureaucratic classification and synchronized administration; digital capture and interoperability; cryptographic ordering; and predictive registration. These thresholds did not singly cause the state, empire, universal religion, capitalism, or the nation-state. They expanded the durability, scale, reproducibility, and temporal reach through which those formations could be institutionalized. The digital transformation intensifies rather than abolishes this history. Blockchain redistributes technical verification and hardens chronological claims about the past, while predictive artificial intelligence converts probabilistic futures into present grounds for intervention. Their convergence places the registrable person between an increasingly persistent past and an increasingly anticipated future. The article consequently redefines sovereignty as the capacity to orchestrate the layers of a registration architectureâproduction, storage, verification, recognition, interpretation, prediction, enforcement, and contestationârather than as simple ownership of records. It also theorizes the negative space of registration: imposed non-registration, strategic opacity, erasure, and counter-registration. The concluding framework of temporal justice combines a right to recognition with rights to correction, expiry, opacity, reinvention, and an unpredicted future. RRT thereby offers a non-determinist, historically comparative framework for analyzing how power endures by organizing what may count as socially real across time.
This working paper is an output of the Community Privacy Residency held in Taipei in 2025. https://community-privacy.github.io/ Keywords: Image-based abuse; non-consensual intimate imagery; evidentiary privacy; protected identity; sexual autonomy; Global South; digital evidence; hash evidence; zero-knowledge proofs; privacy-enhancing cryptography; survivor-auditable governance.
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed critical gaps in regional health security mechanisms, prompting ASEAN to establish the ASEAN Centre for Public Health Emergencies and Emerging Diseases (ACPHEED), with functions distributed across Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. This policy analysis examines strategic development approaches for ACPHEED through comprehensive benchmarking of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), and Gulf CDC, supported by consultations in Indonesia (2024) and Sweden (2025) involving ASEAN member states and international partners. A comparative analysis reveals distinct organizational models: the ECDC operates within European Union (EU) institutional frameworks emphasizing functional specialization; the Africa CDC employs decentralized Regional Coordination Centers; and the Gulf CDC implements hybrid governance via Permanent Communication Networks. Each model offers valuable lessons for ACPHEED's development, particularly concerning governance structures that balance regional coordination with national sovereignty. ACPHEED faces unique challenges due to ASEAN's consensus-based, nonlegislative institutional nature and its tri-country operational structure. Critical success factors include phased surveillance emphasizing a defined scope and capacity building; inclusive governance mechanisms ensuring equitable member-state ownership; and operational frameworks applying subsidiarity principles to complement existing ASEAN mechanisms. Sustainable financing remains paramount given ASEAN's limited budgetary authority. Japan's strategic partnership should capitalize on its technical expertise in laboratory systems, digital surveillance, and disaster preparedness through comprehensive institutional support. ACPHEED's success depends on sustained political commitment, realistic financial arrangements, and effective integration into global health security architectures. This analysis provides a strategic roadmap for ACPHEED's preparatory phase so that it can serve as a regional health security leader while addressing ASEAN-specific institutional constraints.
This thematic issue examines how artificial intelligence, metaverse imaginaries, and decentralized Web3 systems have become arenas for states to build infrastructures, set technical standards, and project geopolitical power. It reconceptualizes technology not merely as an object of regulation but as a medium of statecraft through which sovereignty, security, and leadership are contested and remade in a multipolar digital order. This issue analyzes three interconnected dimensions: (a) the impact of global AI competition on state-making processes, enhancing coercive, extractive, delivery, and informational capacities similar to earlier state formation phases; (b) the nature of technological leadership as a relational and dynamic process influenced by interactions between leading and following states; and (c) the role of security logics in transforming external rivalry and internal governance through securitization. Through comparative analysis of the US, China, the EU, and emerging economies, this issue explores how diverse political systems encode openness, sovereignty, and accountability into their technological regimes, demonstrating that technological governance is inseparable from state-making. The contributions map competing logicsâsovereign, liberal, entrepreneurialâshowing that digital governance emerges not as convergence toward a singular model but as recursive entanglements of imagination and infrastructure.
When aid professionals adopt high tech pilot projects, ignorance, blind faith, misplaced trust, and authentic expertise all come into play. Based on ethnographic research in Jordan, I examine how a refugee aid organisation produces and applies a blockchain pilot. Innovative pilots help international aid organisations attract and maintain their funding sources and reputations. I argue that The Blockchain Pilot is âconjuredâ as a product to be promoted to a marketplace of aid donors. âConjuringsâ are the spectacles and magical appearances that draw an audience of investors. Ethnographic research suggests that conjurings drive capitalist markets. Rather than just requiring knowledge and expertise, I argue that conjurings entail key forms of ignorance: (i) confusion, (ii) illusion, (iii) disappearance, and (iv) misdirection. This ignorance is both strategic and inadvertent. Ignorance, just like knowledge, is shaped by hierarchical power relations. The organisationâs experimental adoption of a blockchain database system benefits some stakeholders (innovators, private partners) more than others (local aid workers and refugees). The conjuring of the pilot is what justifies the adoption of blockchain, even though a simple database would have sufficed.
BACKGROUND: The shift in the global burden of disease from communicable to noncommunicable was a factor in mobilizing support for a broader post-Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) health agenda. To curb these and other global health problems, 193 Member States of the United Nations (UN) became signatories of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and committed to achieving universal health coverage (UHC) by 2030. In the context of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, the importance of health systems governance (HSG) is felt now more than ever for addressing the pandemic and continuing to provide essential health services. However, little is known about the successes and challenges of HSG with respect to UHC and health security. This study, therefore, aims to synthesize the evidence and identify successes and challenges of HSG towards UHC and health security. METHODS: We conducted a structured narrative review of studies published through 28 July 2021. We searched the existing literature using three databases: PubMed, Scopus and Web of Science. Search terms included three themes: HSG, UHC and health security. We synthesized the findings using the five core functions of HSG: policy formulation and strategic plans; intelligence; regulation; collaboration and coalition; and accountability. RESULTS: A total of 58 articles were included in the final review. We identified that context-specific health policy and health financing modalities helped to speed up the progress towards UHC and health security. Robust health intelligence, intersectoral collaboration and coalition were also essential to combat the pandemic and ensure the delivery of essential health services. On the contrary, execution of a one-size-fits-all HSG approach, lack of healthcare funding, corruption, inadequate health workforce, and weak regulatory and health government policies were major challenges to achieving UHC and health security. CONCLUSIONS: Countries, individually and collectively, need strong HSG to speed up the progress towards UHC and health security. Decentralization of health services to grass root levels, support of stakeholders, fair contribution and distribution of resources are essential to support the implementation of programmes towards UHC and health security. It is also vital to ensure independent regulatory accreditation of organizations in the health system and to integrate quality- and equity-related health service indicators into the national social protection monitoring and evaluation system; these will speed up the progress towards UHC and health security.
This article analyzes the process through which WHO was established on the basis of the experience of the League of Nations Health Organization (LNHO). The article particularly focuses on the LNHO technocrats. Through their prewar experiences, technocrats realized that international health governance could promote international cooperation, while it could be utilized by various national representatives as one of their diplomatic strategies. Technocrats tried to alleviate this vulnerability by balancing big powers with smaller powers, national representatives with specialists, and centralization with decentralization. Their efforts and the development of international security in which economic and social cooperation were evaluated as a means towards international security resulted in the international health governance's autonomous establishment under the UN system, which can be termed as the origin of âhuman security.â The development of social cooperation in the postwar period can be considered to be an extension of their efforts in the League of Nations.