Decolonizing Technology
- NOTOC**
Decolonizing Technology
Decolonizing technology examines how colonial histories continue to influence computing, artificial intelligence, digital infrastructure, data collection, technological research, and design. It challenges the widespread assumption that technologies are politically neutral or universally beneficial. Instead, technologies are understood as products of particular histories, institutions, economic systems, knowledge traditions, and relationships of power.
Colonial patterns can appear in the extraction of data and natural resources, the outsourcing of poorly paid digital labor, the imposition of foreign technical standards, the exclusion of Indigenous and local knowledge, and the concentration of digital infrastructure in a small number of corporations and powerful states. Decolonizing technology therefore involves more than improving representation within existing systems. It requires changing who defines technological problems, who controls data and infrastructure, whose knowledge is recognized, who receives the benefits, and who bears the social and environmental costs.
Decolonial Computing and Human-Computer Interaction
Decolonial computing developed from postcolonial, Indigenous, feminist, critical race, and Global South critiques of technology. Researchers in human-computer interaction argue that computing frequently treats Western concepts of the individual, progress, rationality, development, and modernity as universal standards. Communities whose experiences do not fit these assumptions may be described as technologically deficient, culturally resistant, or in need of modernization.
A decolonial approach questions who is treated as the typical technology user and who is allowed to define the purpose of a system. It also examines the institutional conditions under which technology is researched, funded, designed, and evaluated. Universities, corporations, governments, development agencies, and international organizations may reproduce unequal relationships even when projects are described as participatory or humanitarian.
Decolonial HCI emphasizes situated knowledge, historical awareness, reflexivity, community accountability, and the redistribution of research authority. Researchers are encouraged to recognize communities as intellectual and political partners rather than merely users, research subjects, data sources, or testing populations. African philosophies such as Ubuntu, Indigenous relational ethics, local histories, religious traditions, and community-based knowledge can provide alternative foundations for technological design.
Decolonial Design and Pluriversal Futures
Conventional design often assumes that a successful technology can be developed in one setting and transferred to many others. Decolonial and pluriversal design reject the idea that a single technological future is appropriate for every society. The concept of the pluriverse recognizes that many worlds, knowledge systems, values, and ways of relating to humans and the natural environment coexist.
Pluriversal design begins with relationships, place, history, culture, and community-defined priorities. It may draw on Indigenous knowledge, Afrofuturism, ancestral memory, craft, ritual, oral tradition, cosmology, and more-than-human relationships. These approaches do not treat culture as a decorative feature added after a technology has been designed. Cultural protocols and community responsibilities become part of the foundation of the design process.
Digital heritage projects demonstrate the importance of this approach. Digitizing artifacts, stories, ceremonies, or historical records can expand access, but it can also reproduce colonial collection practices. Museums, universities, technology firms, and archives may claim authority over materials obtained from Indigenous or colonized peoples. Decolonial heritage design therefore considers consent, interpretation, ownership, access restrictions, cultural sensitivity, repatriation, and community control.
Speculative and participatory design can also support communities in imagining futures outside externally imposed narratives of development. Rather than asking communities to adapt to a predetermined technological solution, decolonial design allows them to decide which technologies are desirable, which should be rejected, and what kinds of futures they wish to pursue.
Artificial Intelligence and Algorithmic Colonialism
Artificial intelligence can reproduce colonial power through data extraction, automated classification, linguistic dominance, surveillance, labor exploitation, and dependence on foreign infrastructure. The term algorithmic colonialism describes situations in which AI systems developed by powerful corporations or states impose external categories, values, and decision-making processes on other societies.
AI models are commonly trained on data collected without meaningful consent or an equitable distribution of benefits. Indigenous knowledge, creative work, local languages, and cultural materials may be absorbed into commercial systems while the communities that produced them retain little control over their use. Automated systems can also repeat racial, gender, cultural, and geographic biases embedded in their training data.
The concentration of AI development in a small number of companies and wealthy countries gives these institutions substantial influence over global knowledge. Their models may determine which languages are supported, which histories are visible, which forms of expertise are considered credible, and which cultural assumptions appear normal. Countries that depend on imported models, cloud services, chips, and platforms can become technologically subordinate even when they formally control their own digital policies.
Decolonial AI calls for epistemic pluralism, local capacity, public accountability, community participation, and greater control over data and infrastructure. Affected communities should help determine the goals of AI systems, the data used to train them, the standards by which they are evaluated, and the conditions under which they are deployed. Some scholars also advocate algorithmic reparation, which focuses on repairing historical and continuing harms rather than simply making existing systems statistically fairer.
Digital Colonialism and Data Extraction
Digital colonialism refers to the extension of political, economic, and cultural power through digital technologies. Large technology companies control many of the operating systems, cloud platforms, search engines, social networks, advertising systems, app stores, data centers, and communication infrastructures used throughout the world. This control allows corporations based primarily in powerful countries to extract data and revenue from societies with limited influence over the rules governing those systems.
Data colonialism describes the conversion of everyday human activity into data that can be collected, analyzed, commercialized, and used to influence behavior. Personal relationships, movement, health, communication, work, education, and consumption become sources of economic value. The extraction may be presented as the unavoidable price of connectivity or participation in modern life.
Initiatives intended to close the digital divide can deepen dependency when they require communities to rely on foreign platforms, proprietary standards, or externally controlled infrastructure. Connectivity programs may expand access while simultaneously increasing corporate surveillance, market dominance, and data capture. Digital identity and digital-health projects can produce similar risks when technical standards and administrative categories are imposed without strong local governance.
Platform imperialism highlights the ability of dominant companies to shape culture, labor, public communication, and political debate across national borders. Decolonizing digital systems requires examining not only privacy and competition but also ownership, infrastructure, knowledge production, labor, and global economic inequality.
Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Governance
Indigenous data sovereignty is the right of Indigenous peoples and nations to govern data concerning their communities, lands, cultures, resources, and knowledge. It applies to how data is collected, stored, classified, interpreted, accessed, shared, and reused. It also recognizes that data can be collective, relational, spiritual, and connected to territorial or cultural responsibilities.
Conventional research and open-data practices often assume that information should be freely available once it has been collected. Indigenous data governance demonstrates that openness is not always neutral or beneficial. Public access can enable commercial exploitation, cultural appropriation, surveillance, environmental extraction, or the misuse of sacred and sensitive knowledge.
The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance emphasize Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics. These principles complement technical data-management standards by asking who benefits from data, who has decision-making power, what obligations researchers and institutions have, and whether data practices respect community values.
Indigenous data sovereignty is increasingly important in health care, genomics, biodiversity research, environmental monitoring, digital archives, and artificial intelligence. Effective governance requires more than consultation. Indigenous governments and communities need meaningful authority, appropriate infrastructure, long-term resources, and the ability to refuse uses that conflict with their laws or cultural protocols.
Language Technology and Knowledge Systems
Language technologies influence which communities can participate fully in digital life. Speech recognition, translation software, search engines, conversational agents, and large language models perform best in languages with extensive digitized datasets and commercial investment. Indigenous, African, minority, oral, and non-standard languages are often treated as low-resource problems rather than as living knowledge systems.
This imbalance can reinforce the dominance of standardized and colonial languages. Speakers may be required to change their vocabulary, pronunciation, or cultural expressions to interact with digital systems. Poorly designed language technologies can misrepresent meanings, erase dialect differences, or separate words from the histories and relationships that give them significance.
Community-led projects offer a different model. Initiatives such as African-language machine-translation networks and Indigenous-controlled speech-technology programs demonstrate that language tools can support revitalization when communities govern the data and development process. Important principles include informed consent, local ownership, fair compensation, cultural context, transparent licensing, and long-term community access.
Digital archives present related challenges. Recording endangered languages and cultural knowledge can help preserve them, but preservation should not become another form of extraction. Communities must be able to determine who can access materials, how knowledge is described, whether it may be used to train AI systems, and how benefits from future uses will be shared.
Labor, Infrastructure and Environmental Extraction
Digital technologies depend on extensive physical and human infrastructure. Artificial intelligence relies on miners, manufacturing workers, warehouse workers, content moderators, data annotators, translators, artists, writers, and other workers whose contributions are frequently hidden behind the language of automation.
Much AI training work is outsourced to workers in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and other lower-income regions. Workers may receive low wages, unstable contracts, intrusive surveillance, and little recognition for their expertise. Content moderators and data labelers can also experience psychological harm from reviewing violent or disturbing material. These labor arrangements reproduce colonial divisions in which value is captured by companies in wealthy countries while risks and difficult work are transferred elsewhere.
Data centers, semiconductor manufacturing, telecommunications networks, and electronic devices also require land, water, energy, and minerals. Mining and infrastructure projects may displace communities or damage ecosystems, while data centers can increase electricity prices, consume scarce water, and intensify fossil-fuel pollution. Historically marginalized communities are often more exposed to these environmental burdens.
Electronic waste represents another unequal global flow. Devices consumed in wealthier countries may be processed or discarded in regions where workers and communities face hazardous conditions. A decolonial analysis connects technological innovation to its entire material supply chain rather than considering only the finished device or digital service.
Digital Sovereignty and Alternative Futures
Digital sovereignty refers to the ability of communities, Indigenous nations, and states to exercise meaningful control over their digital environments. This can include control of data, telecommunications, cloud infrastructure, software, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, technical standards, and public digital services.
Sovereignty does not necessarily require isolation from global technology. It involves having the capacity to negotiate partnerships, establish enforceable rules, develop local expertise, and choose technologies that support public priorities. A country that depends entirely on foreign chips, cloud providers, platforms, and proprietary software may have limited practical sovereignty even when it adopts national technology policies.
Alternatives to digital colonialism include public digital infrastructure, community networks, cooperative platforms, open-source systems, Indigenous-controlled databases, regional cloud services, stronger worker protections, and locally governed AI. These alternatives must still be evaluated for environmental sustainability, accessibility, accountability, and the possibility that national governments may use sovereignty arguments to justify censorship or surveillance.
Decolonial technological futures emphasize reciprocity, co-creation, democratic governance, ecological responsibility, and the recognition of multiple knowledge traditions. They replace the assumption that technology should be transferred from advanced centers to developing peripheries with relationships based on shared authority and mutual learning.
Conclusion
Decolonizing technology is not simply an effort to make existing digital systems more diverse. It is a broader transformation of technological power. It asks who owns infrastructure, who governs data, whose knowledge shapes design, whose labor supports innovation, and which communities experience environmental and social harm.
A decolonial approach supports Indigenous sovereignty, Global South agency, community-led design, language justice, fair labor, environmental responsibility, and democratic control of technology. It recognizes that no technology is universal or inevitable and that communities must have the power to shape, modify, govern, or reject technological systems.
The goal is not to abandon technology but to create relationships with technology that are more equitable, plural, accountable, and sustainable. Decolonization becomes both a critique of existing systems and a practical process for building technological futures in which many communities, cultures, and forms of knowledge can flourish.
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Foundational Decolonial Computing and HCI
Towards Anti-Imperialist Security, Privacy, and Safety Research in HCI
| Miranda Wei and Matthias Fassl | ACM HCI | 2026
Calls for security and privacy research that confronts militarism, empire, sanctions, surveillance, borders, and unequal geopolitical power.
The Colonial Legacy of the Human in Human-Computer Interaction
| J. Raihan et al. | ACM LIMITS | 2025
Investigates how HCI’s idea of the universal human inherits colonial hierarchies and excludes many bodies, cultures, and modes of being.
Navigating Afrocentric Human-Computer Interaction
| Multiple authors | ACM CHI | 2024
Examines how Afrocentric philosophies and lived experience can reshape HCI methods, values, evaluation criteria, and relationships with African communities.
Decolonization through Technology and Technology through Decolonization
| Dipto Das et al. | ACM CSCW Companion | 2023
Frames decolonization as both a goal for technological work and a process that must transform research relationships, institutions, and design practices.
“Remembering” as a Decolonial Praxis in African HCI and Design
| M. Sadi Adamu et al. | ACM AfriCHI | 2023
Uses remembering as a method for recovering suppressed histories and building African HCI practices from local intellectual and cultural traditions.
Putting Fourth-Wave HCI/IxD Into Practice
| Manuhuia Barcham et al. | ACM OzCHI | 2023
Develops a relational approach to interaction design attentive to Indigenous sovereignty, more-than-human relationships, place, and multiple knowledge systems.
Decolonial and Postcolonial Computing Research: A Scientometric Exploration
| Dipto Das and Bryan Semaan | ACM CSCW Companion | 2022
Maps the growth, themes, venues, and intellectual lineages of decolonial and postcolonial computing research across the HCI literature.
From Treatment to Healing: Envisioning a Decolonial Digital Mental Health
| Sachin R. Pendse et al. | ACM CHI | 2022
Reimagines digital mental health around community, structural harm, cultural knowledge, and healing rather than universalized clinical models and individual treatment.
Challenges and Paradoxes in Decolonising HCI: A Critical Discussion
| Shaimaa Lazem et al. | Computer Supported Cooperative Work | 2021
Examines practical contradictions researchers face when attempting decolonial HCI within institutions, funding systems, and publication structures shaped by coloniality.
Decolonial Pathways: Our Manifesto for a Decolonizing Agenda in HCI Research and Design
| Adriana Alvarado Garcia et al. | ACM CHI Extended Abstracts | 2021
Presents commitments for redistributing power, valuing situated knowledge, and transforming how HCI defines expertise, participation, and research impact.
Decolonizing HCI Across Borders
| V. K. Cannanure et al. | ACM CHI Extended Abstracts | 2021
Explores cross-border strategies for challenging colonial assumptions in HCI education, research partnerships, professional networks, and technology design.
Rethinking Technology Design and Deployment in Africa
| M. Sadi Adamu | ACM AfriCHI | 2021
Critiques technology projects that treat Africa as a testing ground and argues for design led by local priorities, knowledge, and accountability.
Gospels of Modernity: Digital Cattle Markets, Urban Religiosity, and Secular Computing in the Global South
| Nusrat Jahan Mim | ACM CHI | 2021
Examines how digital cattle markets collide with religious practice, exposing the limits of secular and modernization-centered technology design.
HCI Education of Choice: On Becoming Critical and Growing Inclusivity
Reflects on teaching HCI in Egypt and proposes curricula that value local problems, critical thought, plural histories, and students’ agency.
Others’ Images: Online Social Media, Architectural Improvisations, and Spatial Marginalization in Bangladesh
| Nusrat Jahan Mim and Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed | ACM CHI | 2020
Connects social-media imagery to architectural change and marginalization, showing how digital platforms reshape space through unequal aspirations and power.
Decolonizing Learning Spaces for Sociotechnical Research and Design
| Marisol Wong-Villacres et al. | ACM CSCW Companion | 2020
Proposes learning spaces that challenge inherited hierarchies, support reflexivity, and redistribute authority among researchers, students, and communities.
Witchcraft and HCI: Morality, Modernity, and Postcolonial Computing in Rural Bangladesh
| Sharifa Sultana and Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed | ACM CHI | 2019
Explores how rural communities negotiate technology through religious and moral worlds that do not fit secular Western assumptions in HCI.
A Brief Introduction to Decolonial Computing
| Syed Mustafa Ali | XRDS | 2016
Offers a concise foundation for understanding how colonial power persists in computing and why technical practice must engage decolonial thought.
Decolonising Technology Design
| Kagonya Awori et al. | ACM AfriCHI | 2016
Questions imported design methods and advocates technology development grounded in African histories, communities, values, and local forms of expertise.
Decolonising Technology Design: A Panel Discussion
| Nicola J. Bidwell et al. | ACM AfriCHI | 2016
Brings together African technology researchers to debate power, representation, participation, and the institutional conditions required for decolonial design.
Residual Mobilities: Infrastructural Displacement and Post-Colonial Computing in Bangladesh
| Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, Nusrat Jahan Mim and Steven J. Jackson | ACM CHI | 2015
Shows how infrastructure projects displace poor communities and challenges computing narratives that assume mobility, connectivity, and development are inherently liberating.
Towards a Decolonial Computing
| Syed Mustafa Ali | Ambiguous Technologies | 2014
Calls for computing to confront coloniality at the level of knowledge, ontology, institutions, and the categories through which technology is imagined.
Postcolonial Computing: A Tactical Survey
| Kavita Philip, Lilly Irani and Paul Dourish | Science, Technology, & Human Values | 2012
Surveys postcolonial approaches to computing and proposes tactical methods for exposing how technical systems are shaped by empire, modernity, and resistance.
UbiComp’s Colonial Impulse
| Paul Dourish and Scott D. Mainwaring | ACM UbiComp | 2012
Argues that ubiquitous computing often carries colonial assumptions about territory, progress, universality, and the authority to redesign other people’s worlds.
Postcolonial Computing: A Lens on Design and Development
| Lilly Irani et al. | ACM CHI | 2010
Introduces postcolonial theory as a way to examine how technology design and development reproduce unequal histories, identities, and power relations.
Decolonial Design, Heritage and Pluriversal Futures
Entwining Technology with Indigenous Knowledges
| Multiple authors | ACM CHI | 2026
Considers technology as intertwined with land, community, ceremony, and Indigenous knowledge rather than as an autonomous universal tool.
Making the Sacred: Craft, Ritual, and Computational Practice
| Multiple authors | ACM CHI | 2026
Studies how craft and ritual complicate conventional computing categories and create culturally grounded computational imaginaries.
A Pluriversal Approach to Co-designing Delivery Robots with Local Communities
| Multiple authors | ACM HRI | 2026
Challenges universal assumptions about urban robots by involving communities in defining appropriate behaviors, values, and social relationships.
Re-Discovering Relational Fragments towards Pluriversal Design Practice
| O. Rønnest et al. | ACM Designing Interactive Systems | 2026
Develops design practice from fragments, relations, and situated encounters rather than totalizing methods or claims of universal applicability.
Pluriversal Pathways for Reworlding More-than-Human HCI
| S. Janicki et al. | ACM CHI | 2026
Links pluriversal design with more-than-human HCI to imagine technologies accountable to ecological relationships and multiple forms of life.
Postcolonial Tensions and Meta-Research Agendas about Intangible Cultural Heritage
| A. P. Zhu et al. | ACM CHI | 2026
Reviews tensions in digital heritage research, including institutional authority, representation, access, ownership, and the persistence of colonial categories.
Ethical Co-Development of AI Applications with Indigenous Communities
| Multiple authors | ACM CHI | 2025
Develops principles for Indigenous-led AI projects emphasizing consent, reciprocity, long-term relationships, community benefit, and control of data.
Weaving Indigeneity and Culture into the Fabric of HCI
| Multiple authors | ACM CHI | 2025
Explores how Indigenous values, cultural protocols, and relational accountability can become foundational rather than peripheral in HCI.
Fostering Ubuntu-Inspired Participatory Design Practices
| J. Farao et al. | ACM Participatory Design Conference | 2024
Applies Ubuntu’s relational ethics to participatory design, emphasizing mutual responsibility, collective flourishing, dialogue, and respectful community engagement.
Ancestral and Cultural Futuring: Speculative Design in an Indigenous ovaHimba Context
| Chris Muashekele et al. | ACM Communities and Technologies | 2023
Grounds speculative design in ovaHimba ancestral knowledge, cultural continuity, and community-defined trajectories rather than Western futurist assumptions.
Infusing Futuring into Community-Based Co-design
| Multiple authors | ACM AfriCHI | 2023
Combines community co-design with future-making so participants can define aspirations beyond externally imposed development narratives.
Decolonizing Design with Technology in Cultural Heritage Contexts
| Siiri Paananen, Mari Suoheimo and Jonna Häkkilä | Springer | 2022
Reviews how digital heritage projects can resist colonial representation by centering cultural sensitivity, participation, ownership, and plural knowledge systems.
Radical Futures: Supporting Community-Led Design Engagements through an Afrofuturist Speculative Design Toolkit
| Kirsten E. Bray et al. | ACM CHI | 2022
Offers an Afrofuturist toolkit that supports Black communities in imagining technologies and futures outside narratives of deficit, surveillance, and exclusion.
Decolonizing Design Practices: Towards Pluriversality
| Rachel Charlotte Smith et al. | ACM CHI Extended Abstracts | 2021
Outlines design practices that move beyond universal solutions toward many worlds, situated relationships, and community-defined futures.
Participatory Memory Making: Creating Postcolonial Dialogic Engagements with Namibian Youth
| Asnath Paula Kambunga, Heike Winschiers-Theophilus and Rachel Charlotte Smith | ACM DIS | 2020
Shows how digital memory-making can help Namibian youth engage contested colonial histories and create dialogue around identity and political futures.
Decolonizing Participatory Design: Memory Making in Namibia
| Rachel Charlotte Smith et al. | ACM Participatory Design Conference | 2020
Reflects on the limits of imported participatory methods and develops safer, locally grounded approaches to knowledge production in Namibia.
Designing a Digital Archive for Indigenous People: Understanding the Double Sensitivity of Design
| F. Moradi et al. | ACM NordiCHI | 2020
Examines the cultural and political sensitivities involved in digitizing Indigenous heritage, including access, interpretation, ownership, and community control.
Design Sensibilities—Designing for Cultural Sensitivity
| Jonna Häkkilä et al. | ACM NordiCHI | 2020
Identifies practical design considerations for technologies that engage culturally sensitive materials, histories, rituals, and community relationships.
Fashion and the Phantasmagoria of Modernity: An Introduction to Decolonial Fashion Discourse
| M. Angela Jansen | Fashion Theory | 2020
Connects fashion technology and modernity to colonial power while outlining a decolonial approach to dress, production, knowledge, and representation.
Decolonizing Design Through the Perspectives of Cosmological Others
Argues that design must engage genuinely different cosmologies rather than treating Western ontology as the neutral basis of technological life.
Bridging Cultural Heritage and Communities through Digital Technologies
| Danilo Giglitto et al. | ACM Communities and Technologies | 2019
Investigates how digital tools can connect communities with heritage while avoiding extractive representation and one-directional institutional authority.
Embodied Engagement with Narrative: A Design Framework for Presenting Cultural Heritage Artifacts
| J. H. Chu and A. Mazalek | Multimodal Technologies and Interaction | 2019
Presents an embodied framework for cultural-heritage interaction that moves beyond detached viewing toward narrative, materiality, and situated experience.
Colonial Media Ecologies
| L. A. Frederiksen | Nordisk Tidsskrift for Informationsvidenskab og Kulturformidling | 2019
Examines how colonial histories remain embedded in media infrastructures, archives, classification systems, and the circulation of cultural materials.
Breaking the Cycle of Macondo: Design and Decolonial Futures
| Luiza Prado de O. Martins and Pedro J. S. Vieira de Oliveira | XRDS | 2016
Uses Latin American history and magical realism to challenge colonial timelines of progress and open space for non-hegemonic design futures.
Speculative Design and Heterogeneity in Indigenous Nation Building
| Yoko Akama, Seth Keen and Peter West | ACM DIS | 2016
Explores speculative design with Indigenous communities as a way to discuss governance, cultural integrity, plurality, and knowledge ownership without forcing consensus.
Decolonial AI and Algorithmic Justice
Robots Behaving Badly: Algorithmic Colonialism and the Consequences of AI
| Bronwyn Carlson and Tamika Worrell | Journal of Sociology | 2026
Analyzes AI harms to Indigenous peoples and shows how automated systems can extend colonial stereotypes, dispossession, and institutional violence.
Towards a Decolonial AI Sovereignty Model for Indigenous Educational Settings
| M. F. Mbah | University of Manchester | 2026
Proposes an education-centered sovereignty model in which Indigenous communities determine AI goals, data rules, pedagogy, and measures of benefit.
Algorithmic Colonialism
| M. Hssaini | Politikon | 2025
Examines how algorithmic systems reproduce colonial hierarchies through data extraction, categorization, surveillance, and unequal technological dependence.
Decolonial AI: A Perspective on the Imperialist States’ Approach to Artificial Intelligence
| J. C. de Melo | Brazilian Journal of Political Economy | 2025
Critiques the concentration of AI power in imperial states and argues for alternatives shaped by Global South sovereignty and social priorities.
Decolonising AI: What, Why and How?
| David Eke | Responsible AI UK | 2025
Explains why AI systems carry colonial histories and outlines practical shifts in data, governance, participation, research, and institutional power.
Decolonizing Artificial Intelligence: Indigenous Knowledge Systems, Epistemic Pluralism, and the Ethics of Technology
| S. Khurana | Journal of Critical AI | 2025
Argues for AI ethics built on epistemic pluralism and meaningful engagement with Indigenous knowledge rather than token inclusion.
Artificial Intelligence Colonialism: Environmental Damage, Labor Exploitation, and Human Rights Crises in the Global South
| Multiple authors | ResearchGate | 2025
Connects AI expansion to extractive mining, data-center impacts, outsourced labor, human-rights risks, and unequal benefits across the Global South.
Cognitive Imperialism in Artificial Intelligence: Counteracting It through Indigenous Knowledge Systems
| Y. Ofosu-Asare | AI & Society | 2025
Shows how AI can privilege Western reasoning and proposes Indigenous knowledge systems as resources for challenging cognitive and epistemic domination.
AI and Indigenous Data Sovereignty: Knowing, Engaging and Imagining
| Multiple authors | Somatechnics | 2025
Explores how Indigenous data sovereignty can guide AI relationships, community authority, cultural protocols, and the governance of future technological possibilities.
Decolonizing Algorithms: Artificial Intelligence Bias and Digital Colonialism in Global South AI Governance
| Multiple authors | ResearchGate | 2025
Connects algorithmic bias with global power asymmetries and argues for governance led by affected societies rather than imported regulatory templates.
Data Colonialism, Algorithmic Justice, and the Law: A Global South Perspective
| Multiple authors | ResearchGate | 2025
Examines legal responses to data extraction and algorithmic injustice from the standpoint of Global South rights, institutions, and sovereignty.
“Business on WhatsApp Is Tough Now—but Am I Really a Businesswoman?”
| Ankolika De et al. | ACM CHI | 2025
Studies women’s platform labor in India and shows how AI-mediated commerce intersects with gender, class, informality, and colonial development narratives.
The Other AI Race: An Export Promotion Strategy for the Global South
| Multiple authors | Carnegie Endowment for International Peace | 2025
Examines how Global South countries might build AI capacity without remaining dependent markets for foreign platforms and infrastructure.
Beware America’s AI Colonialism
| Parmy Olson | Financial Times | 2025
Warns that exporting American AI models, norms, and infrastructure can create new dependencies and marginalize local cultures and institutions.
What Will the AI Revolution Mean for the Global South?
| Krystal Maughan | The Guardian | 2025
Explores how AI’s benefits and harms are distributed globally, emphasizing labor, language, infrastructure, environmental cost, and political agency.
Decolonial AI as Disenclosure
| W. J. T. Mollema | arXiv | 2024
Reframes decolonial AI as a struggle against technological enclosure and for shared worlds, political agency, and epistemic freedom.
AI Feeds Off the Work of Human Beings
| Zoë Corbyn | The Guardian | 2024
Discusses the hidden labor supply chains behind AI and the unequal distribution of risk, income, recognition, and technological power.
Transnational AI and Corporate Imperialism
| Chinmayi Arun | Carnegie Endowment for International Peace | 2024
Explains how multinational technology companies shape AI rules across borders and can weaken democratic control in less powerful states.
Advancing a More Global Agenda for Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence
| Multiple authors | Carnegie Endowment for International Peace | 2024
Calls for AI governance that includes Global South priorities, institutional realities, cultural differences, and meaningful participation in rulemaking.
Artificial Intelligence in the Colonial Matrix of Power
| James Muldoon and Boxi A. Wu | Philosophy & Technology | 2023
Places AI within colonial structures of labor, knowledge, race, extraction, and geopolitical power rather than treating it as a neutral innovation.
Decolonial AI Alignment: Openness, Viśeṣa-Dharma, and Including Excluded Knowledges
| Kush R. Varshney | arXiv | 2023
Argues that AI alignment must include excluded knowledge traditions and context-specific ethical obligations rather than a single universal value system.
Decoding the Digital Fuku: Deciphering Colonial Legacies to Critically Assess ChatGPT in Dominican Education
| Anaelia Ovalle | arXiv | 2023
Uses Dominican history and decolonial thought to question ChatGPT’s authority, language, assumptions, and educational consequences.
A Move for “Algorithmic Reparation” Calls for Racial Justice in AI
| Khari Johnson | WIRED | 2021
Introduces algorithmic reparation as a framework for repairing racial harms rather than merely optimizing systems for abstract fairness.
Algorithmic Colonization of Africa
| Abeba Birhane | SCRIPTed | 2020
Warns that imported AI systems can impose foreign values, deepen dependency, and transform African societies without meaningful local consent or control.
Decolonial AI: Decolonial Theory as Sociotechnical Foresight in Artificial Intelligence
| Shakir Mohamed, Marie-Therese Png and William Isaac | Philosophy & Technology | 2020
Uses decolonial theory to analyze AI’s harms and propose sociotechnical foresight grounded in critical histories, solidarity, and plural ways of knowing.
Digital Colonialism, Platforms and Data Extraction
Data Colonialism in the Algorithmic Age
| Multiple authors | Eurasia Review | 2026
Argues that the Global South risks becoming a supplier of raw data, labor, and resources for AI systems controlled elsewhere.
India’s Tech Sovereignty Is Built on Digital Dependence
| Dwaipayan Banerjee | Rest of World | 2026
Explores the contradiction between India’s sovereignty ambitions and its continuing reliance on foreign chips, clouds, platforms, and technical standards.
An Intellectual History of Digital Colonialism
| Toussaint Nothias | Journal of Communication | 2025
Traces the concept’s intellectual development and clarifies how digital colonialism connects communication technology with older imperial structures and debates.
Digital Sovereignty and Data Colonialism: Shaping a Just Digital Order for the Global South
| Marcus Vinícius de Freitas | Policy Center for the New South | 2025
Proposes digital sovereignty strategies for reducing dependency, strengthening local capacity, and creating fairer governance of data and infrastructure.
“Data Colonialism” and the Political Economy of Big Tech
| Chinmayi Arun | Lawfare | 2025
Explains how platform business models extract value globally and why competition, privacy, and national-security frameworks often miss colonial power.
Digital Platforms and the Global South
| J. Guo | Critical Arts | 2025
Examines platform power through Global South experiences, including labor, dependency, cultural influence, governance, and unequal participation.
Platform Imperialism Theory from Asian Perspectives
| Dal Yong Jin | Social Media + Society | 2025
Updates platform-imperialism theory through Asian cases and challenges Western-centered accounts of global platform power.
Countering Digital Colonialism
| Carlos Delclós | CCCB Lab | 2025
Surveys efforts to resist data extractivism and build public, cooperative, and sovereign alternatives to dominant technology infrastructures.
At What Cost Are We Bridging Africa’s Digital Divide?
| Global Voices | Global Voices | 2025
Examines the social, environmental, labor, and sovereignty costs hidden within efforts to expand digital connectivity across Africa.
India’s Fraught Push for Digital Decolonization
| Foreign Policy | Foreign Policy | 2025
Analyzes India’s campaign for technological self-reliance and the tensions between nationalist rhetoric, global dependency, regulation, and domestic inequality.
Digital Coloniality: An Ubuntu Perspective
| Jan Hendrik Kroeze | Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems | 2024
Uses Ubuntu to critique individualist and extractive digital systems and to imagine relational, community-centered technological alternatives.
Critiques of Data Colonialism
| Benedetta Brevini et al. | Bristol University Press | 2024
Assesses the strengths and limits of data-colonialism theory and its relationship to capitalism, surveillance, extraction, and political resistance.
Re-Imagining Digital Colonialism in Africa, Silicon Valley, and Beyond
Examines how technology firms extract African data and markets while shaping development agendas, labor conditions, and political possibilities.
Addressing Digital Colonialism: A Path to Equitable Data Governance
| Bitange Ndemo | UNESCO Inclusive Policy Lab | 2024
Calls for African data governance, infrastructure investment, skills, and institutional capacity that preserve autonomy and distribute digital benefits fairly.
Colonialism in the New Digital Health Agenda
| Sharifah Sekalala et al. | BMJ Global Health | 2024
Shows how global digital-health policy can reproduce colonial relationships through data extraction, imported systems, unequal partnerships, and donor priorities.
Digital Colonialism Beyond Surveillance Capitalism: Coloniality of Knowledge in Nigeria’s Emerging Digital Identity Programme
| S. Singler and B. Babalola | University of Essex Repository | 2024
Analyzes Nigeria’s digital identity program as a site where technical standards and administrative knowledge can reproduce colonial authority.
The Decolonial Turn in Data and Technology Research
| Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias | Information, Communication & Society | 2023
Reviews growing decolonial research on data and technology and argues for confronting extraction, colonial knowledge, and universalist assumptions.
Digital Coloniality and “Next Billion Users”: The Political Economy of Google Station in Nigeria
| T. D. Oyedemi | Information, Communication & Society | 2021
Uses Google Station to show how connectivity initiatives can produce dependency, data capture, and corporate authority under the language of inclusion.
Appropriation, Coloniality, and Digital Technologies: Observations from within an African Place
| Gertjan van Stam | arXiv | 2021
Reflects from African settings on how imported technologies and research frameworks appropriate local realities while claiming universality and development.
Security Implications of Digitalization: Dangers of Data Colonialism and Sustainable Sovereign Environmental Data Management
| Matthias Stürmer, Jasmin Nussbaumer and Pascal Stöckli | arXiv | 2021
Links data sovereignty with security and sustainability, emphasizing risks created by foreign control of environmental information and digital infrastructure.
Is Big Tech Setting Africa Back?
| Nima Elmi | Foreign Policy | 2020
Questions whether technology investment promotes African development or entrenches dependency, market concentration, weak regulation, and external control.
Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data’s Relation to the Contemporary Subject
| Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias | Television & New Media | 2019
Defines data colonialism as the appropriation of human life through data extraction and links contemporary platforms to colonial accumulation.
Digital Colonialism: US Empire and the New Imperialism in the Global South
| Michael Kwet | Race & Class | 2019
Shows how dominant U.S. firms control software, hardware, networks, platforms, and knowledge infrastructures across the Global South.
Making Data Colonialism Liveable: How Might Data’s Social Order Be Regulated?
| Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias | Internet Policy Review | 2019
Considers regulatory responses to data colonialism while arguing that reform must address the broader social order of continuous extraction.
The Construction of Platform Imperialism in the Globalization Era
| Dal Yong Jin | tripleC | 2013
Develops platform imperialism as a framework for understanding how dominant digital companies extend cultural, economic, and technological power.
Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Governance
Sovereignty in the Digital Age: Indigenous Perspectives on Health Data and Emerging Technologies
| Samantha Hurst et al. | SSM - Qualitative Research in Health | 2026
Explores Indigenous perspectives on AI, blockchain, and emerging data systems through sovereignty, relational accountability, and self-determination.
Health Technology Design Considerations Specific to Indigenous Data Sovereignty
| A. J. Calac et al. | Frontiers in Health Services | 2026
Provides design considerations for health technologies that respect tribal governance, cultural values, consent, data access, and community priorities.
A Framework for Kara-Kichwa Data Sovereignty in Latin America and the Caribbean
| WariNkwi K. Flores et al. | arXiv | 2026
Develops a community-specific framework for governing cultural and digital data through Kara-Kichwa law, values, relationships, and authority.
War, Climate Change and AI: What’s at Stake at This Year’s UN Indigenous Forum
| Associated Press | AP News | 2026
Covers Indigenous concerns about AI extraction, health, land, climate, conflict, and the international recognition of data sovereignty.
Selected Readings on Indigenous Data Governance: 2026
| Open Data Policy Lab | Open Data Policy Lab | 2026
Curates current scholarship and policy resources on Indigenous control, stewardship, sovereignty, ethics, and governance of data.
A Global Biodiversity Use Data Infrastructure Acknowledging Indigenous Data Sovereignty
| C. J. Pankararu et al. | npj Biodiversity | 2026
Proposes biodiversity infrastructure that recognizes Indigenous authority over ecological knowledge and prevents open-data practices from enabling appropriation.
Governance of Indigenous Data in Open Earth Systems Science
| Lydia Jennings et al. | Nature Communications | 2025
Examines conflicts between open environmental data and Indigenous rights, proposing governance that respects sovereignty, context, and cultural protocols.
A Systematic Review of Responsible Stewardship of Research Data Involving Indigenous Communities
| A. J. Calac et al. | npj Digital Medicine | 2025
Synthesizes responsible data practices and identifies gaps between stated ethical commitments and actual community authority in research.
Indigenous Scientists Are Fighting to Protect Their Data—and Their Culture
| Justine Calma | The Verge | 2025
Reports on Indigenous researchers building governance and infrastructure to protect environmental, cultural, and scientific data from political and corporate threats.
Advancing Indigenous Data Governance through a Shared Learning Network
| A. K. Drake et al. | Frontiers in Environmental Science | 2025
Describes a network for sharing governance practices while respecting differences among Indigenous nations, institutions, and data contexts.
Right to Media: Breaking Indigenous Peoples’ Systemic Exclusion
| R. A. Morales | Frontiers in Communication | 2025
Connects media rights, communication infrastructure, cultural survival, and Indigenous self-representation in digital and broadcast systems.
Data Repurposing, Algorithmic Bias and Indigenous Privacy in the Age of AI
| IAPP | International Association of Privacy Professionals | 2025
Examines privacy risks when Indigenous data is reused for AI beyond its original context, consent, cultural protocols, or community expectations.
Overcoming Native American Data Challenges in the United States
| Robert Maxim, Manann Donoghoe and Anthony Barr Stephens | Brookings Institution | 2025
Explains gaps in Native data infrastructure and recommends federal and tribal reforms that strengthen sovereignty, capacity, access, and accountability.
Competing Interests: Digital Health and Indigenous Data Sovereignty
| Ashley Cordes et al. | npj Digital Medicine | 2024
Applies Indigenous data-sovereignty principles to digital health, emphasizing governance, consent, trust, cultural safety, and community control.
Indigenous Data Governance Approaches Applied in Research Using Routinely Collected Health Data: A Scoping Review
| T. Engstrom et al. | npj Digital Medicine | 2024
Reviews how health researchers implement Indigenous governance across access, linkage, analysis, interpretation, storage, and dissemination.
From Exploitation to Empowerment: How Researchers Can Protect Indigenous Peoples’ Rights to Own and Control Their Data
| Cassandra Sedran-Price | Nature | 2024
Describes practical reforms for shifting research data from extraction toward Indigenous ownership, authority, benefit, and long-term stewardship.
IDSov and the Silent Data Revolution: Indigenous Peoples and Decentralized Data/Web3
| D. Dobson | Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics | 2023
Assesses whether decentralized technologies can support Indigenous data sovereignty or reproduce extraction under new technical forms.
In Consideration of Indigenous Data Sovereignty: Data Mining as a Colonial Practice
| Jennafer Shae Roberts and Laura N. Montoya | arXiv | 2023
Frames data mining as a potential continuation of colonial appropriation and advocates legal and technical protections for Indigenous knowledge.
Māori Algorithmic Sovereignty: Idea, Principles, and Use
| Paul T. Brown et al. | arXiv | 2023
Defines Māori algorithmic sovereignty and proposes principles for ensuring automated systems uphold tikanga, collective rights, and Māori aspirations.
Trust in Scholarly Communications and Infrastructure: Indigenous Data Sovereignty
| K. Ruckstuhl et al. | Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics | 2022
Examines how scholarly infrastructure can earn trust by respecting Indigenous governance, attribution, access rules, and culturally specific responsibilities.
Decolonisation, Global Data Law, and Indigenous Data Sovereignty
| Jennafer Shae Roberts and Laura N. Montoya | arXiv | 2022
Connects global data law, environmental protection, and Indigenous rights while proposing governance that serves communities and the earth.
Balancing Openness with Indigenous Data Sovereignty: An Opportunity to Leave No One Behind in the Journey to Sequence All of Life
| A. M. McCartney et al. | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences | 2022
Argues that global genomics initiatives must balance open science with Indigenous consent, governance, cultural values, and equitable benefit.
Operationalizing the CARE and FAIR Principles for Indigenous Data Futures
| Stephanie Russo Carroll et al. | Scientific Data | 2021
Explains how open-science practices can combine FAIR technical standards with CARE’s emphasis on Indigenous rights, authority, and community benefit.
The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance
| Stephanie Russo Carroll et al. | Data Science Journal | 2020
Establishes Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics as principles for data systems involving Indigenous peoples.
Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Governance
| Native Nations Institute | Native Nations Institute | Undated
Introduces the movement for Native nations to govern the collection, ownership, use, storage, and interpretation of their data.
Language Technology, Knowledge Systems and Digital Archives
Data Colonialism and Indigenous Languages in AI: A Critical Perspective
| J. C. Y. Kwok | AI & Society | 2026
Warns that Indigenous language data can be absorbed into proprietary AI systems without consent, control, compensation, or cultural context.
Designing Explainable Conversational Agentic Systems for Oral Indigenous Languages: Guaraní
| S. Adorno et al. | arXiv | 2026
Proposes explainable conversational systems for Guaraní that account for oral traditions, community needs, linguistic structure, and transparent decision-making.
Versteasch du mi? Computational and Socio-Linguistic Perspectives on GenAI, LLMs, and Non-Standard Language
| Verena Platzgummer, John McCrae and Sina Ahmadi | arXiv | 2026
Explores how generative AI handles dialects and non-standard language, revealing biases produced by standardized and dominant-language data.
The Value of Inclusion of African Languages in AI
Explains why African-language inclusion matters for access and fairness while emphasizing community-building, datasets, and locally led research.
Could AI Drive Indigenous Knowledge Out of Fashion?
Examines how Western-centered AI may erase Indigenous textile knowledge and why consent, governance, attribution, and benefit-sharing are essential.
Redefining Technology for Indigenous Languages
| Silvia Fernandez-Sabido and Laura Peniche-Sabido | arXiv | 2025
Reviews language-revitalization technologies and argues that tools succeed when communities lead their design, governance, and cultural integration.
Quechua Speech Datasets in Common Voice: The Case of Puno Quechua
| Elwin Huaman et al. | arXiv | 2025
Examines community speech-data creation for Puno Quechua and the challenges of representation, quality, access, and linguistic diversity.
Evaluating LLMs for Career Guidance Across Ten African Countries
| Precious Eze, Stephanie Lunn and Bruk Berhane | arXiv | 2025
Tests whether language models provide culturally and economically appropriate career advice across diverse African national contexts.
Decolonizing African NLP: A Survey on Power, Data and Knowledge
Surveys how power, data colonialism, institutional inequality, and Western research norms shape African natural-language processing.
Masakhane—“We Build Together”
| S. Misra | Virginia Tech | 2025
Presents Masakhane as a case study in collaborative, open, and culturally grounded development of African-language NLP.
AI Threatens Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Digital Self-Determination
| Multiple authors | Policy Options | 2025
Explains how AI can misrepresent Indigenous cultures and languages when communities lack control over training data, models, and deployment.
Using Indigenous Methods in the Study of NLP
| M. Gasparotto | Journal of Language and Social Psychology | 2025
Shows how Indigenous research methods can reshape ethics, relationships, interpretation, and accountability in NLP for minoritized languages.
“It’s How You Do Things That Matters”: Attending to Process to Better Serve Indigenous Communities with Language Technologies
| Ned Cooper, Courtney Heldreth and Ben Hutchinson | arXiv | 2024
Centers relationship-building, governance, and process when developing language technologies with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.
Indigenous Language Technology in the Age of Machine Learning
| S. N. Moshagen | Nordic Journal of Linguistics | 2024
Analyzes language data, tool development, distribution, and community authority in machine-learning projects for Indigenous languages.
Harnessing the Power of AI to Vitalize Endangered Indigenous Languages
| Multiple authors | arXiv | 2024
Surveys opportunities and risks in using AI for endangered languages, emphasizing community participation, cultural protection, and responsible data use.
How African NLP Experts Are Navigating the Challenges of Copyright, Innovation, and Access
| Multiple authors | Carnegie Endowment for International Peace | 2024
Examines how African-language researchers balance open access, copyright, commercial pressure, dataset scarcity, and community interests.
Peter-Lucas Jones Is Using AI to Preserve Te Reo Māori
Profiles Te Hiku Media’s community-owned Māori speech technology and its insistence that Indigenous language data remain under Indigenous control.
Decolonizing NLP for “Low-Resource Languages”
Critiques the deficit label “low resource” and advocates African data ethics, local authority, relational methods, and community benefit.
Using AI to “Decolonise” Language
| Forus | Global Voices | 2023
Profiles efforts to use AI for language inclusion while warning that communities must retain control over data, meanings, and technological priorities.
The Workers Behind AI Rarely See Its Rewards. This Indian Startup Wants to Fix That
| Astha Rajvanshi | TIME | 2023
Profiles Karya’s model of paying rural Indian workers fairly for producing language data and sharing value from future reuse.
MasakhaNER 2.0: Africa-Centric Transfer Learning for Named Entity Recognition
| David Ifeoluwa Adelani et al. | arXiv | 2022
Builds a large human-annotated dataset for twenty African languages and shows the value of Africa-centered benchmarks and transfer choices.
The Role of Technology in Indigenous Language Revitalization
| Multiple authors | Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development | 2021
Synthesizes lessons about digital tools for language revitalization, including access, community ownership, pedagogy, and long-term sustainability.
Decolonising Speech and Language Technology
Reviews colonial assumptions in language technology and proposes community-led methods that support Indigenous language vitality and self-determination.
Masakhane—Machine Translation for Africa
| Iroro Orife et al. | arXiv | 2020
Describes a grassroots, continent-wide research community building African-language machine translation through open collaboration and local expertise.
Decolonizing Minority Language Technology
| Internet Languages | Internet Languages | 2020
Reports on community consultation for Breton, Basque, Sardinian, and Karelian technologies and highlights different paths to digital language vitality.
Labor, Infrastructure and Environmental Extraction
The Hidden Cost of AI: Digital Colonialism and the Global South
| WACC | World Association for Christian Communication | 2026
Examines invisible data labor, extractive infrastructure, and the global inequalities hidden behind automated systems and corporate AI narratives.
The Environmental Cost of Digital Sovereignty
| Muntaser Syed et al. | arXiv | 2026
Models water, energy, and emissions burdens of sovereign AI infrastructure in the UAE, Bangladesh, India, and Africa, including Kenya.
Who Is Going to Pay Us When We’re Replaced by Robots?
| The Guardian | The Guardian | 2026
Reports on Indian factory workers filmed to train robots without meaningful consent, ownership, or compensation for their embodied knowledge.
Pollution from Musk’s Unpermitted xAI Power Project Hits Hardest in Black Communities
Investigates fossil-fuel power used for AI infrastructure and its disproportionate pollution burden on historically Black communities.
The People vs. AI
Profiles communities organizing against data centers, energy costs, land loss, cultural harms, and unaccountable AI expansion.
Artificial Intelligence Colonialism
| Salvador Santino F. Regilme Jr. | International Affairs | 2025
Connects AI to extractive labor, resource use, data centers, geopolitical domination, and human-rights crises concentrated in the Global South.
Reimagining the Future of Data and AI Labor in the Global South
| Multiple authors | Brookings Institution | 2025
Explores exploitation, trauma, organizing, and policy options for data workers who label content and train AI systems.
“Magic” AI Is Exploiting Data Labour in the Global South—but Resistance Is Happening
Documents low wages and insecure conditions in AI data work while highlighting worker organizing and demands for rights and transparency.
The Perilous Future of AI Work in the Global South
| LSE Media | London School of Economics | 2025
Warns that automation may deepen a global division in which Southern workers perform hidden tasks while Northern firms capture value.
Data Workers in AI: A New Frontier of Labour Exploitation in the Global South
Focuses on Kenyan and other Global South data workers facing unfair contracts, weak protections, poor pay, and limited representation.
Economy and Exploitation: The AI Industry’s Unjust Labor Practices
| UAB Institute for Human Rights | University of Alabama at Birmingham | 2025
Explains how AI depends on fragmented human labor that is obscured by automation narratives and distributed through unequal supply chains.
Example of Digital Taylorism in Data Labelling
| Multiple authors | DergiPark | 2025
Analyzes surveillance, fragmentation, insecurity, and low wages in data labeling as a digital form of Taylorist labor control.
Inside the Lucrative, Surreal, and Disturbing World of AI Trainers
| Business Insider | Business Insider | 2025
Describes unstable, opaque, and psychologically demanding AI-training work across global contractor platforms.
Digital Colonialism, Ecological Crisis and the Limits of Technological Solutionism
Links data extraction with mining, energy consumption, e-waste, ecological damage, and colonial patterns of unequal environmental burden.
AI Infrastructure’s Environmental Costs Clash with Pacific Island Nations’ Needs
| Brookings Institution | Brookings Institution | 2025
Examines how data-center growth can intensify climate vulnerability, energy constraints, and resource pressures in Pacific Island nations.
Big Tech Data Centers Compound Decades of Environmental Racism in the South
Connects data-center expansion with pollution, land conflicts, utility costs, and environmental racism in historically burdened communities.
The People Say No: Resisting Data Centers in the South
| MediaJustice | MediaJustice | 2025
Documents community resistance to data centers and analyzes their impacts on water, energy, land, climate, public budgets, and democracy.
Tech Imperialism Reloaded: AI, Colonial Legacies, and the Global South
| Multiple authors | E-International Relations | 2025
Connects AI’s labor and environmental supply chains to colonial extraction, unequal development, and concentrated corporate power.
Global Inequalities in the Production of Artificial Intelligence: A Four-Country Study on Data Work
| Antonio A. Casilli et al. | arXiv | 2024
Compares data work in Venezuela, Brazil, Madagascar, and France, revealing colonial labor patterns in AI production chains.
Humans Are Essential for Training AI
Explores outsourced annotation work in Madagascar and how essential human expertise generates limited local economic benefit.
OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic
Investigates low-paid Kenyan workers who labeled traumatic content to build AI safety systems, exposing hidden labor behind ChatGPT.
Q&A: Uncovering the Labor Exploitation That Powers AI
| Jem Bartholomew | Columbia Journalism Review | 2023
Discusses reporting on outsourced AI training work and the secrecy, low pay, and psychological harm experienced by Global South workers.
The Coloniality of Data Work in Latin America
| Julian Posada | arXiv | 2021
Shows how crowdsourcing platforms reproduce colonial divisions of labor, constrain worker agency, and legitimize inequality through Northern ideologies.
The Recycling of E-Waste in the Industrialised Global South
| K. Lopes dos Santos | Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning | 2021
Examines e-waste systems in industrializing Southern economies and the unequal global flows of hazardous technological materials.
Agency and Extraction in Emerging Industrial Drone Applications
| Benjamin V. Hanrahan et al. | Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction | 2020
Examines industrial drone deployments through agency and extraction, questioning who defines problems, owns data, and benefits from automation.
Digital Sovereignty, Resistance and Alternative Futures
Navigating Digital Colonialism: Sovereignty Models and Sustainable Development in the Global South
Compares strategies Global South states use to build digital sovereignty while managing development needs, dependency, and environmental constraints.
AI Is Ushering in a New Era of Colonialism
Explores concerns that AI extracts cultural knowledge and reinforces Western worldviews while marginalizing oral and Indigenous traditions.
From Distorted Mirrors to Sovereign Reflections
| Andreas Komninos, Gerasimos Vonitsanos and Spyros Sioutas | arXiv | 2026
Explores sovereign technological alternatives that reflect local languages, cultures, institutions, and social priorities rather than imported models.
Relational AI in Education: Reciprocity, Participatory Governance and Indigenous Data Sovereignty
| Multiple authors | arXiv | 2026
Proposes educational AI governed through reciprocity, participation, relational accountability, and Indigenous control of data and learning priorities.
Local Agency Is Shaping China’s Digital Footprint in the Gulf
| Multiple authors | Carnegie Endowment for International Peace | 2025
Challenges simplistic empire narratives by showing how Gulf actors negotiate, redirect, and benefit from Chinese digital investment.
What Does Decolonising AI Really Mean? An Interview with Artist Ameera Kawash
| Global Voices | Global Voices | 2025
Uses art and activism to discuss AI colonialism, Palestinian experience, representation, datasets, and resistance to technological domination.
African Data Ethics: A Discursive Framework for Black Decolonial Data Science
| T. Barrett et al. | arXiv | 2025
Develops a Black decolonial framework for data science rooted in African ethics, historical context, community accountability, and epistemic justice.
Toward a Decolonial Framework for Communicating AI in African Public Service
| G. A. Ooko | Emerging Media | 2025
Examines how AI communication can avoid deficit narratives and instead reflect African agency, languages, institutions, and knowledge systems.
From AI Colonialism to Co-Creation: Bridging the Global AI Divide
Argues for shifting from technology transfer toward co-creation, local capacity, shared ownership, and meaningful Global South participation.
The Memory Wars: AI Memory, Network Effects, and the Geopolitics of Cognitive Sovereignty
Analyzes control over AI memory and knowledge infrastructure as a geopolitical struggle over collective cognition and technological dependence.
The Quantified Body: Identity, Empowerment, and Control in Smart Wearables
| Maijunxian Wang | arXiv | 2025
Examines how wearable technologies classify bodies, extract intimate data, and negotiate identity, agency, and corporate control.
When Strings Tug at Algorithm: Human-AI Sovereignty and Entanglement in Nomadic Improvisational Music Performance
| Joshua Nijiati Alimujiang | arXiv | 2025
Uses nomadic musical practice to imagine human-AI relations based on improvisation, cultural agency, and entanglement rather than replacement or control.
Decolonizing Global AI Governance
| G. Ayana et al. | Royal Society Open Science | 2024
Assesses international AI-governance initiatives and measures how far they redistribute voice, authority, resources, and agenda-setting power.
Rules for Tech Giants Must Be Better Than “It’s Only Bad If China Does It”
| Lizzie O’Shea | The Guardian | 2024
Critiques selective outrage over TikTok and argues for consistent rules addressing surveillance and platform power regardless of corporate nationality.
New Digital Dilemmas: Resisting Autocrats, Navigating Geopolitics, Confronting Platforms
| Steven Feldstein | Carnegie Endowment for International Peace | 2023
Examines how civil society can resist digital repression while navigating state power, platform governance, and geopolitical rivalry.
AI Is Steeped in Big Tech’s “Digital Colonialism”
| Morgan Meaker | WIRED | 2023
Profiles Abeba Birhane’s work exposing harmful datasets, extractive research, and the concentration of AI authority in large technology companies.
The Next Superpower Battlefield Could Be Under the Sea
| Joseph Keller | Foreign Policy | 2023
Examines geopolitical competition over subsea cables and the implications for African connectivity, surveillance, security, and sovereignty.
The Geopolitics of AI and the Rise of Digital Sovereignty
| Brookings Institution | Brookings Institution | 2022
Surveys national efforts to control data, cloud infrastructure, chips, and AI amid geopolitical competition and platform concentration.
The Great Tech Game: Shaping Geopolitics and the Destinies of Nations
| Anirudh Suri | Carnegie Endowment for International Peace | 2022
Explains how technology ecosystems shape state power and why countries need strategies beyond passive adoption of foreign platforms.
Decolonizing Data to Tackle Digital Authoritarianism
| Global Voices | Global Voices | 2022
Connects data extraction with authoritarian power and highlights rights-based, locally grounded approaches to data governance and resistance.
Calling for a Feminist Revolt to Decolonise Data and Algorithms in the Age of Datification
| Genoveva Vargas-Solar | arXiv | 2022
Calls for feminist collective action against data systems that reproduce colonial, patriarchal, racial, and economic domination.
Digital Colonialism: The Evolution of US Empire
| Michael Kwet | Transnational Institute | 2021
Explains how U.S. control of digital infrastructure extends surveillance, corporate power, military capacity, and dependency throughout the Global South.
Weak US Privacy Law Hurts America’s Global Standing
| Gilad Edelman | WIRED | 2021
Shows how weak privacy protections enable extractive platform practices and undermine claims that U.S. technology governance should be globally trusted.
Twitter’s Presence in Africa Won’t End Internet Censorship
| Torinmo Salau | Foreign Policy | 2021
Explains why corporate relocation alone cannot solve censorship, infrastructure dependency, weak institutions, and unequal digital power in Africa.
Decolonising AI: A Transfeminist Approach to Data and Social Justice
| Coding Rights | Rising Voices | 2020
Presents transfeminist strategies for challenging algorithmic violence, surveillance, extractive data practices, and exclusions built into technology.
