Short Abstract

Behind Artificial intelligence lie profound inequalities shaping a complex dynamics of extraction, dependency, and resistance. This panel explores how the governance of AI is reconfiguring state roles, labour relations, and socioecological frontiers across the Global South.

Description

Artificial intelligence is transforming development agendas, industrial policy, and global value chains. Yet beneath the rhetoric of “AI for good” lie profound inequalities in the developing world and complex dynamics of extraction, dependency, and resistance. This panel explores how the governance of AI — through regulation, innovation policy, and infrastructural expansion — is reconfiguring state roles, labour relations, and socioecological frontiers across the Global South.

We invite contributions that examine how Global South governments deal pressures for digital innovation with pressures to protect workers, data, and the environment. How do emerging AI policies in developing contexts mediate between global standards (OECD, EU, UN) and local realities? What forms of dependency and contestation arise around the construction of resource-hungry data centres, energy consumption, rare earth extraction, and the labour that sustains AI systems? How do communities, unions, and civil society actors articulate socioecological and labour rights in the face of new digital enclosures?

By tracing the material and political economies of AI — from resource extraction and data annotation to policy experimentation and regulatory innovation — this panel seeks to connect debates on digital inequality, environmental justice, and postcolonial political economy. It welcomes empirical and theoretical papers that bridge labour, ecological, and governance perspectives to rethink what “responsible” or “just” AI might mean in development contexts.

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