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Short abstract:

The EU’s AI Act had provoked strong resistance by civil society actors concerned with digital rights, migrant rights, and racial discrimination. We analyze NGO’s accounts of acting as spokespersons and political representatives for people on the move and contesting hegemonic scripts of alterity.

Long abstract:

The Council of the European Union and the European Parliament’s negotiators reached a provisional agreement on the AI Act on 9 December 2023. The AI Act had provoked strong resistance by civil society actors concerned with digital rights, migrant rights and racial discrimination since the regulatory process had started in 2021. NGOs joined forces in the alliance “Protect Not Surveil” and aimed at influencing the political negotiations getting enrolled as spokespersons for people-on-the-move contesting fundamentally the assumptions about “the other”.

In this paper, we explore controversies about the AI Act regulation that is closely entangled with superimposed technopolitical networks of migration and border control regimes and that provoked political engagement of civil society actors. Drawing on Akrich (1992) and Lee and Brown (1994), we conduct an analysis through the lens of scripts and scripting and study both hegemonic scripts of alterity and counter-attempts of “re-description” by civil society engagement. Based on the analysis of document and interviews, we first study the dominant scripts of alterity in AI Act regulatory documents that define the relations between AI, security, and marginalized populations. Second, we examine NGOs’ attempts and claims to dismantle, diversify and ‘re-describe’ these scripts of alterity and analyze how NGO staff understand their relationship and responsibility to advocate for people on the move. Third, we analyze the ambiguous role of NGOs as representatives of othered non-EU-citizens who not necessarily aspire to be represented or to lend their voice. Finally, we discuss careful approaches of enrollment and spokespersonship.