Maja Van Der Velden

• Velden, Maja van der (2026). Where is Justice in Big Tech? Looking for human rights due diligence in the military-digital complex. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In the military-digital complex, justice means protecting Big Tech and zero accountability to the global majority. We see this played out in painful detail in the current situation in the Palestinian Occupied Territories. Since the International Court of Justice released its opinions on plausible genocide in Gaza (January 2024) and accused Israel of the crime of apartheid (July 2024), US-based technology companies have signed new contracts with the US and Israeli military, strengthening the alliance between Washington, Silicon Valley, and Tel Aviv, and Chief Officers of Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI joined a US military unit as high-ranking officers. In 2025, a group of historians examined the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund's (the Fund's) investments in Israeli companies. This resulted in a public debate, the Fund’s divestment from some Israeli companies, and, finally, the suspension of the Fund’s ethical committee and guidelines. Applying the Fund’s ethical guidelines, the Norwegian government argued, would result in the Fund's divestment from US-based technology companies that provide the most value to the Fund. The ICJ's 2024 opinions triggered a responsibility for heightened human rights due diligence (hHRDD) for states and companies alike. This paper examined the responses of five technology companies representing some of the Fund's most significant equity holdings, which are accused of contributing to Palestinian human rights abuses: Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidia. All five companies adhere to the UN Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) and have due diligence systems in place to address human rights risks, including Human Rights Policies, Codes of Conduct/Ethics, and ESG reporting. A document analysis of the companies' policies and websites, UN and human rights organisations' reports, and media reports confirms that all five companies are at risk of contributing to Palestinian human rights abuses, but none of the companies applied their HRDD systems after the ICJ opinions of 2024. The Fund, which expects the companies it invests in to adhere to the UNGPs, didn’t follow up on this. It even voted against a proposal by other shareholders to demand that one of these companies investigates how it applies its HRDD in its collaboration with the Israeli military. While the Fund can be accused of “cosmetic compliance” with HRDD, some companies moved away from HRDD, changing their human rights policies to pursue their new agendas as part of the military-digital complex. A just world is a world in which human rights are protected. The Palestinian case shows how, in this new global order, human rights are distributed, or not, along the lines of military interests and shareholder primacy. Even for the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world, doing justice to human rights is no longer a criteria for its investments.

• Velden, Maja van der (2026). Ansvarlig forvaltning. doi: https:/www.facebook.com/events/899861029550210. Full text in Research Archive
• Velden, Maja van der (2026). Amerikansk tek-monopol bekymrer. [Journal]. Universitas. doi: https:/www.universitas.no/maja-van-der-velden-microsoft-overvakning/amerikansk-tek-monopol-bekymrer/399894. Full text in Research Archive
• Velden, Maja van der (2026). Kunnskapsdepartementet overkjører UiO med nytt IT-system. [Journal]. Universitas. doi: https:/www.universitas.no/kunnskapsdepartementet-overkjorer-uio-med-nytt-it-system/406916. Full text in Research Archive
• Velden, Maja van der & Gasparini, Andrea Alessandro (2026). Materials Library of Stones. doi: https:/kuenstlerhaus.de/inhalt/materialkompetenz-und-eine-bibliothek-aus-steinen/. Full text in Research Archive
• Velden, Maja van der & Gasparini, Andrea Alessandro (2026). Listening to Stones. Full text in Research Archive
• Velden, Maja van der (2026). Becoming with Stones. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In 2025, the Norwegian government introduced a new law on mineral activities and the management of mineral resources. The new law seeks to establish “a more sustainable and efficient management and utilisation of mineral resources in Norway”. The law supports the Norwegian Mineral Strategy, a white paper promoting mineral mining on land and in the sea. Even though there is a temporary moratorium on deep-sea mining, the 2026 state budget has set aside 16 million Euros to prepare for future deep-sea mining activities. Norway has a long mining tradition, and the mining industry has gained renewed importance in securing access to so-called critical minerals for the energy transitions. New mining sites are proposed and planned, while some closed mines are in the process of reopening. These mining activities have resulted in protests by local communities. Knowledge about minerals is the domain of geology and chemistry. To promote public mineral literacy, we designed a Materials Library of Stones as an interdisciplinary and “thinkivist” intervention. It consists of a collection of more than 40 stones containing minerals for the digital and energy transitions. The library enables ways of knowing minerals through tangible interaction and storytelling. Based on the work by Donna Haraway, this paper explores how humans are “becoming-with, “living-with”, and “dying-with” stones and their minerals. It will present some experiences with the Materials Library of Stones as a “thinkivist” project, as well as reflections by visitors engaging with the library.

• Velden, Maja van der (2026). Unpacking the unsustainability of AI and why you should never say ‘Thank you’ to AI. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In Norway, the discussion of the sustainability of AI often focuses on energy use and its climate impacts. Since Norway produces mainly non-fossil energy, which is used for the training and use of AI in computers and data centres in Norway, we may think that we don’t need to worry about the environmental impacts of AI. Making AI work for us in Norway relies on a complex global supply chain that includes hardware, data centres, training data, foundation models, and AI applications. This supply chain requires not only energy but also water, minerals, and workers who mine the minerals, do the dangerous and polluting work in the factories that produce the hardware, and do the traumatising work of cleaning data sets of disturbing images and videos. The burden of the unsustainability of our AI use often falls upon communities, workers, and ecosystems in other countries, raising serious environmental justice and human rights concerns. Big tech companies, such as Microsoft, Google, Meta, Nvidia, and Amazon, control large parts of the AI supply chain. This has made them also important players in the military-digital complex. These five companies are also among the many tech companies accused of enabling human rights abuses, such as in Palestine and the US. My presentation will address some of the ways AI and its global supply chain affect people's lives and the planet. My aim is to situate the discussion of AI in Norway in a larger and global context. AI is not a neutral technology. We need a critical discussion of AI in Norway that includes human rights, environmental sustainability, and digital sovereignty.

• Velden, Maja van der (2026). Digital suverenitet. Full text in Research Archive
• Velden, Maja van der; Taylor, Mark Beaumont; Issa, Hamze & Jensen, R. (2026). Responsible Investment? Technology companies, Palestine, and Norway’s Oil Fund. Lysverket. doi: https:/www.lysverket.org/spu-en. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  A new study finds that the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global (the Fund) has investments in 17 technology companies with business ties to the Israeli military or other actors in the Israeli security and defence sector. Several of these companies have contributed products and services for surveillance systems and AI-based tools to the Israeli military. The UN and international courts link the Israeli military and Israeli security forces to war crimes, illegal occupation, apartheid and genocide against Palestinians. Investments in these companies expose the Fund to legal and reputational risks and link Norway to possible international crimes committed by Israel. The new study shows that the Fund could have managed these risks by adopting the UN Guiding Principles and the OECD Guidelines for Responsible Business. However, Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM) and the Ethical Council that used to conduct screening have failed to implement these international standards. The result is that the Fund is ill-equipped to address its exposure to the risk its investee companies are linked to human rights abuses. The investigation, conducted by a small group of experts over just a few weeks, identified Israeli and foreign companies – including Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Palantir – that have supplied, among other things, cameras, biometrics, facial recognition, cloud services or AI systems to the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and other Israeli authorities and businesses. These products and services are linked to targeted attacks against Palestinians through systems such as Lavender, which allegedly generates lists of people to be killed by the Israeli military, and Where’s Daddy, which allegedly tracks targets to their homes. “It took our volunteer team a short time to apply these standards and identify 17 high-risk companies in the oil fund’s portfolio,” says Maja van der Velden, professor of computer science at the University of Oslo. “We call on the Fund to do its job and ensure that our pensions do not support Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians. A risk-based approach would make this possible.” In contrast to the Ethical Council’s “high threshold” for engagement, the UN Guiding Principles and the OECD Guidelines require companies to be aware of the risks of adverse human rights impacts associated with their operations, products, and services, and to demonstrate how they address these. This risk-based approach shifts responsibility from the oil fund to portfolio companies and facilitates rapid divestment of companies that do not comply with the regulations. These are the same standards enshrined in Norway’s Transparency Act (2022) and EU directives (2025). By suspending the ethical guidelines in November 2025, the government explicitly gave NBIM the authority to divest from irresponsible companies, while also giving NBIM the mandate to reinvest in companies that were previously excluded. The government nevertheless maintained the legal limitations on the overall scope of permitted divestments. NBIM has, not unexpectedly, chosen to interpret its new mandate in a way that prevents divestments. The committee appointed by the government to review the ethics framework of the Fund will not report until October 2026, and changes to the framework will then have to be approved by the government, which will do so at the earliest when it considers the committee’s report in spring 2027. This is far too late. Although violence against Palestinians has decreased in intensity, killings and ethnic cleansing continue in Gaza and the West Bank. Recommendations NBIM should immediately withdraw the Fund from companies that do not exercise due diligence to respect human rights in Palestine. Priority should be given to companies that clearly do not avoid, prevent, limit or remedy the ongoing risk of their link to illegal occupation, war crimes, crimes against humanity (including apartheid) or genocide. The Minister of Finance should immediately instruct NBIM to use its mandate for divestment in line with the risk-based standard for due diligence, as set out in the UNGP and OECD guidance for investors. The government should lift restrictions on NBIM's divestment mandate. As a minimum requirement, the Ministry of Finance should expand the overall scope for sell-offs relative to the benchmark index.

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