Short Abstract

The promise of prosperity through AI has become entangled with power politics across Africa. This panel explores how different political actors in Africa use the discourse of AI to legitimize power domestically and internationally, and how these performances are contested and negotiated.

Long Abstract

AI has entered the contested vocabulary of statecraft and politics in Africa. Governments have launched national AI strategies, while leaders proclaim that AI will catapult their countries into a future of prosperity for all, and call for digital, data and AI sovereignty to reduce digital dependencies. At the same time, critical debates on AI in Africa often frame Africa either as a passive recipients of technologies developed elsewhere, lagging behind in AI development and infrastructure, or as sites of data extraction, algorithmic harm and epistemic erasure. AI is easily swept up in foreign political and economic agendas: focused on the dominance of actors outside of Africa in driving economic, financial and political uses of AI, from mineral extraction through to use in public services and surveillance.

Our panel begins from the assumption that both of these framings risk sidestepping the political agency of actors in Africa, who often negotiate, and pragmatically appropriate, global AI discourses for their own purposes (Kebede and Pohjonen 2026). We therefore invite papers that empirically explore how AI is narrated and performed by different political actors in Africa, and how the discourse of AI itself is used as a political resource across diverse contexts and languages. How do narratives of AI shape politics, and how are they shaped, in turn, by political power within Africa? Refracting the global discourse of AI through an African prism, the panel asks what can these cases tell us about the future politics of AI in Africa and, more broadly, globally.

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