Short Abstract

This panel examines how artificial intelligence and data-driven technologies are reshaping criminal justice systems and security governance in the Global South and North. The panel interrogates whether AI can advance justice/merely deepen existing power asymmetries in criminalization and punishment.

Description

From predictive policing algorithms deployed in urban centers across the Global South to biometric surveillance systems managing migration and borders, AI technologies promise efficiency, objectivity, and enhanced security. Yet these same systems often encode and amplify existing inequalities, reproducing racial biases, criminalizing poverty, and expanding state surveillance capacities in ways that disproportionately affect marginalized communities.

This panel critically examines how AI and data science are reshaping security governance, asking whether these technologies can advance justice or merely digitize historical patterns of control and exclusion. Papers might explore the deployment of facial recognition in policing, algorithmic risk assessment tools in bail and sentencing decisions, the role of private tech corporations in shaping security policy, and the growing digital infrastructure of borders and migration control. We particularly welcome contributions examining grassroots resistance to surveillance technologies, community-led accountability mechanisms, and alternative visions of public safety that challenge techno-solutionist approaches.

The panel interrogates fundamental questions about power in the digital age: Who designs these systems and whose interests do they serve? How do AI technologies reconfigure relationships between states, corporations, and citizens? What forms of agency emerge in response to algorithmic governance? Can development frameworks adequately address the justice implications of predictive technologies, or do we need entirely new paradigms for understanding digital rights, bodily autonomy, and freedom in surveillance societies? This panel invites interdisciplinary dialogue between criminology, data science, development studies, and critical technology studies to reimagine security beyond punitive and extractive logics.

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