Machines of Neutrality: Liberalism, War, and the Algorithmic Erasure of Resistance

Abstract

This thesis examines how liberalism’s claim to neutrality operates as a political rationality that transforms historically specific relations of domination into apparently impartial forms of legality, moral regulation, and administrative governance. Rather than treating liberalism as a purely normative doctrine of rights, the thesis approaches it as a historically embedded mode of rule that stabilizes capitalist and colonial orders through abstraction, proceduralization, and the depoliticization of violence.

Building on this framework, the thesis analyzes algorithmic governance not as the universal or inevitable culmination of liberalism, but as a historically contingent intensification of its administrative logic. Computational systems of classification, prediction, and risk management are deployed across liberal and non-liberal contexts alike; their political effects depend on the formations in which they operate. Palestine, and particularly Gaza, provides the critical site for examining this convergence. There, settler-colonial domination, military occupation, siege, humanitarian administration, surveillance, and AI-assisted targeting are articulated within a shared field of classification and security. Drawing on recent analyses of AI-assisted targeting systems alongside legal, political, and anti-colonial theory, the thesis shows how algorithmic governance extends earlier forms of population management by converting political antagonism into technical administration.

At the level of legality, the thesis engages debates on whether liberal law can accommodate anti-colonial resistance. It argues that law should be understood neither as a neutral arbiter nor as entirely dismissible, but as a contradictory terrain shaped by political struggle. Law can make Palestinian claims visible, but only by translating them into juridical categories such as injury, violation, criminality, jurisdiction, and compliance. Algorithmic governance further narrows this field by converting legal and administrative categories into profiles, probabilities, risk indicators, and targetability.

The thesis thus argues that the relationship between liberalism, colonial domination, and algorithmic governance is neither linear nor universally determined, but historically mediated. Palestine reveals, in particularly stark form, how liberal claims to neutrality can be operationalized through computational systems that obscure domination while intensifying its effects. In this context, resistance persists as materially unavoidable, even as its political intelligibility is increasingly foreclosed within the frameworks that govern it.