Short Abstract

This panel explores how AI reshapes development through power, inequality and digital dependency. It highlights Big Tech’s role in recasting AI as a critical tool to address sustainability challenges, glossing over data colonialism, surveillance, and the environmental impact of data infrastructures.

Description

As artificial intelligence (AI) technologies increasingly shape economies, governance and development agendas, they raise urgent questions about power, inequality and sovereignty- particularly in the Global South. The key role of Big Tech in crafting hegemonic narratives of AI for sustainability and building data infrastructures brings development into a contested terrain, especially amid funding cuts and global uncertainty (Roberts, 2024; Nayak & Walton, 2024).

This panel interrogates the political economy of AI systems, calling for a reflection on how power relationships underpinnig AI systems reshape agency, notions of statecraft and often, reinforce historical patterns of dependency, exclusion and digital dispossession (Couldry & Mejias, 2019; Birhane, 2021; Heeks, 2022; Cieslik & Margócsy, 2022). Moving beyond techno-solutionist narratives, the panel foregrounds socio-technical, relational and context-specific dynamics (Avgerou, 2019; Noorman & Swierstra, 2023). It challenges depoliticised narratives of digital development (Iazzolino & Stremlau, 2024) by highlighting how AI, as a capitalist tool, supports corporate monopolies, reshapes labour markets (Teutloff et al., 2025), governance structures (Buhmann & Fieseler, 2023) and enables digital authoritarianism (Heeks et al., 2024).

We invite contributions that critically explore how AI is governed, resisted or repurposed in development contexts- particularly in postcolonial settings. Topics include, but are not limited to: AI geopolitics; role of Big Tech firms in shaping AI development trajectories and AI infrastructure in South-South or South-North partnerships/competition; national AI strategies; algorithmic injustice; agency shifts in power; surveillance; data colonialism; and bottom-up resistance. This panel aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogue on AI technologies, global inequality and development futures.

This Panel has 3 pending paper proposals.
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