Digital Colonialism
- NOTOC**
Digital Colonialism, Data Sovereignty, and Technological Power
Digital colonialism describes systems in which powerful states, corporations, and technology platforms control the digital infrastructure, data, software, knowledge, and labor of less powerful societies. Although these systems rely on new technologies, they often reproduce older colonial relationships involving extraction, dependency, cultural domination, and unequal control over resources.
The expansion of artificial intelligence, cloud computing, social-media platforms, digital identification systems, educational technology, and data centers has intensified concerns about who owns digital infrastructure and who benefits from the data generated by communities. Countries and communities throughout Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Indigenous territories are increasingly seeking greater authority over their data, technological development, and digital futures.
Understanding Digital Colonialism
Digital colonialism is broader than the collection of personal information for advertising. It includes foreign control over software, operating systems, cloud services, telecommunications infrastructure, artificial-intelligence models, digital marketplaces, educational platforms, and technical standards.
Under these arrangements, people in less powerful regions may provide data, labor, natural resources, cultural knowledge, and markets while ownership, decision-making, and profits remain concentrated elsewhere. Digital systems can therefore create relationships resembling colonial economies, in which raw materials are extracted from one region and transformed into valuable products controlled by outside powers.
Data colonialism focuses specifically on the appropriation of human experience through data. Everyday activities, communications, movements, preferences, relationships, and cultural practices are converted into information that can be analyzed, sold, or used to train automated systems.
The concept of digital coloniality emphasizes that colonial patterns can continue even after formal colonial rule has ended. Technological systems may reproduce assumptions about whose knowledge is authoritative, whose languages matter, whose needs receive investment, and who is permitted to govern digital resources.
Artificial Intelligence and Algorithmic Colonialism
Artificial intelligence has become one of the most important areas of debate about digital colonialism. Most leading AI systems are developed by corporations and institutions located in wealthy countries. These organizations control much of the computing infrastructure, training data, investment capital, and technical expertise required to build large-scale models.
AI systems trained primarily on Western or English-language data may marginalize languages, histories, and knowledge traditions that are poorly represented online. Oral cultures and communities whose knowledge is not recorded in large digital archives are particularly vulnerable to exclusion or misrepresentation.
Algorithmic colonialism occurs when automated systems developed in one social and political setting are imposed on another without sufficient attention to local conditions. Imported algorithms may influence health care, education, welfare, policing, employment, finance, urban planning, and public administration while embedding foreign assumptions about risk, efficiency, identity, and acceptable behavior.
AI development also depends on large international supply chains. Data-labeling workers, content moderators, miners, energy producers, and communities hosting data infrastructure may bear significant social and environmental costs while receiving only a small portion of the resulting economic value.
Decolonial approaches to AI call for local participation, culturally representative data, community consent, benefit-sharing, transparent governance, linguistic inclusion, and public control over essential infrastructure.
Africa and the Struggle for Data Sovereignty
Africa is central to debates about digital colonialism because many countries rely heavily on foreign corporations for cloud services, telecommunications equipment, social-media platforms, payment systems, digital identification technologies, and artificial-intelligence tools.
Foreign ownership of infrastructure can limit the ability of governments and communities to determine how data is collected, stored, analyzed, and shared. Public institutions may become dependent on proprietary systems that are expensive to replace and difficult to regulate.
African data and labor contribute to the global digital economy through content moderation, data labeling, platform work, online commerce, digital finance, and AI development. Critics argue that the value produced through these activities is often transferred to companies outside the continent.
Digital health and educational technology illustrate these concerns. Platforms may provide useful services while routing sensitive information through foreign systems, promoting external standards, and weakening public institutions. AI tools designed without local languages, labor-market knowledge, infrastructure constraints, or cultural context may deliver inaccurate or inappropriate results.
African scholars and policymakers have proposed stronger data-protection systems, regional cloud infrastructure, locally developed AI models, public digital services, open-source technology, investment in technical capacity, and cooperation among Global South countries.
Asia, India, and Regional Platform Power
Asian countries face complex forms of digital dependency involving both Western and regional technology corporations. The growth of major Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and South Korean platforms complicates a simple division between the Global North and Global South.
India has pursued data localization, domestic digital infrastructure, public digital systems, and local AI development. Supporters view these policies as necessary for technological sovereignty, while critics warn that national control alone does not guarantee democratic or equitable governance.
Indonesia has also confronted questions about foreign platform dominance, international digital-trade agreements, and the ability of governments to regulate data and infrastructure. Technology agreements may restrict national policy options when they prohibit localization, taxation, source-code review, or other forms of public oversight.
Small businesses throughout Asia increasingly depend on platforms such as WhatsApp, Google, Meta, TikTok, Amazon, and regional marketplaces. Changes to platform rules, fees, rankings, or technical requirements can dramatically affect livelihoods without meaningful consultation or accountability.
Regional digital sovereignty requires more than replacing foreign corporations with domestic monopolies. It also involves protecting workers, users, minorities, small businesses, and civil society from concentrated technological power.
Latin America and Digital Extractivism
Latin American debates connect digital colonialism with the region's long history of resource extraction and economic dependency. Digital infrastructure requires land, electricity, water, minerals, telecommunications networks, and favorable regulatory conditions.
The rapid construction of data centers has generated concern in areas already experiencing drought, energy shortages, or environmental conflict. Large facilities may consume substantial quantities of water and electricity while providing limited employment or long-term local economic benefits.
Digital extractivism describes the removal of data, energy, natural resources, and economic value from communities to support technology systems serving distant markets. Projects promoted as smart, efficient, or environmentally sustainable may intensify existing patterns of territorial inequality.
Smart-city technologies can also create dependency when municipalities purchase proprietary systems from multinational corporations. These arrangements may transfer control over transportation, surveillance, public services, and urban planning to private vendors.
Latin American alternatives include community networks, public infrastructure, free software, cooperative platforms, regional digital policy, and approaches grounded in dependency theory, liberation thought, and Indigenous concepts of territory.
Indigenous Data Sovereignty
Indigenous data sovereignty is the right of Indigenous peoples to govern data concerning their communities, lands, languages, bodies, histories, cultures, and knowledge systems.
Conventional data-governance models often treat information as an individual commodity or an open resource. Indigenous frameworks emphasize that data can be collective, relational, sacred, territorial, and inseparable from responsibilities to past and future generations.
Artificial-intelligence companies may collect Indigenous language materials, ecological knowledge, artistic traditions, genomic information, or cultural images without meaningful consent. Once incorporated into commercial systems, this knowledge may be misrepresented, privatized, or used to produce products from which the originating communities receive no benefit.
The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance emphasize collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility, and ethics. These principles complement privacy and open-data standards by recognizing collective rights and historical inequalities.
Indigenous communities are developing their own archives, language technologies, data protocols, research agreements, secure storage systems, and community-controlled AI projects. These initiatives demonstrate that technological development can be guided by stewardship, reciprocity, consent, and cultural continuity rather than unrestricted extraction.
Platforms, Labor, Culture, and Media
Digital platforms shape how people work, communicate, learn, shop, travel, create culture, and participate in politics. Their economic power comes partly from controlling the infrastructure through which these activities occur.
Platform workers may receive access to new income opportunities while facing surveillance, insecure employment, unpredictable algorithms, low wages, and limited legal protection. Workers who label AI data or moderate disturbing content often remain invisible despite performing essential work for the technology industry.
Small businesses and cultural producers also depend on platform rules. Search rankings, recommendation systems, payment restrictions, content moderation, and account suspensions can determine who becomes visible and who can participate in digital markets.
Streaming services and social-media platforms influence which music, languages, news, and cultural traditions reach large audiences. Their algorithms can privilege commercially dominant content while marginalizing local or minority expression.
Platform imperialism describes the ability of dominant companies to expand across borders, capture local markets, collect data, and shape cultural consumption. Anticolonial platform studies examine these systems through the histories of racial capitalism, dispossession, labor exploitation, and resistance.
Alternatives include platform cooperatives, public-interest social networks, federated services, digital commons, interoperable systems, stronger labor protections, and democratic control over recommendation and moderation systems.
Digital Trade and Infrastructure
Digital-trade agreements increasingly determine how governments may regulate data flows, software, source code, digital services, taxation, and technology companies.
Rules requiring unrestricted cross-border data flows can make it difficult for countries to develop local data industries or require sensitive information to remain under domestic jurisdiction. Restrictions on source-code disclosure may limit the ability of regulators to investigate automated systems.
Supporters of liberalized digital trade argue that open data flows encourage innovation and economic integration. Critics contend that such rules mainly benefit corporations that already possess global infrastructure, intellectual property, and market dominance.
The World Trade Organization's moratorium on customs duties for electronic transmissions has also generated disagreement. Wealthier technology-exporting countries generally support the moratorium, while some developing countries argue that it reduces future tax revenue and limits industrial policy.
Infrastructure dependency extends beyond trade agreements. Governments, universities, hospitals, and businesses may become locked into foreign cloud services, proprietary software, and long-term technology contracts. Infrastructure financed through loans or public-private partnerships may create debt while transferring control to vendors.
Digital sovereignty therefore requires investment in local and regional infrastructure, open standards, portability, interoperability, cybersecurity, technical education, and the ability to regulate technology in the public interest.
Health, Education, and Humanitarian Technology
Digital technologies are frequently introduced into the Global South through health, education, development, and humanitarian programs. These projects can expand access to services, but they can also reproduce unequal relationships between donors, technology companies, governments, and affected communities.
Digital health systems collect highly sensitive information about patients and populations. When foreign companies control the infrastructure, governments may have limited authority over storage, secondary use, cybersecurity, or commercial exploitation.
Educational platforms can introduce useful learning resources while privileging foreign curricula, languages, assessment models, and definitions of knowledge. Dependence on proprietary platforms may redirect public education funds toward corporations and weaken locally controlled educational systems.
Humanitarian technologies include biometric identification, digital cash transfers, predictive analytics, satellite monitoring, and refugee-management systems. Vulnerable populations may be required to surrender personal information in exchange for food, shelter, health care, or legal recognition, making meaningful consent difficult or impossible.
Technocolonialism describes situations in which technological innovation is presented as neutral assistance while external organizations retain authority over design, data, expertise, and decision-making.
More equitable approaches require community participation, local ownership, open-source systems, public accountability, informed consent, independent oversight, capacity building, and clear limits on the collection and reuse of data.
Resistance and Decolonial Digital Futures
Resistance to digital colonialism takes many forms. Governments are pursuing data-protection laws, localization policies, competition enforcement, public digital infrastructure, regional cooperation, and investment in domestic technology.
Civil-society organizations are advocating privacy, labor rights, algorithmic accountability, community networks, open standards, and limits on corporate surveillance. Indigenous peoples are asserting collective authority over data and cultural knowledge.
Free and open-source software can reduce dependence on proprietary vendors, particularly when accompanied by local technical capacity and sustainable public investment. Open technology alone, however, does not prevent exploitation if data, labor, and governance remain controlled by powerful institutions.
Platform cooperatives and digital solidarity-economy projects seek to give workers and users ownership over online marketplaces and services. Federated networks distribute authority across independently governed communities rather than concentrating it in a single corporation.
Some scholars propose a non-aligned technology movement that rejects both corporate surveillance systems and authoritarian state control. Such a movement would support technological cooperation among countries and communities while preserving democratic autonomy.
Decolonizing technology does not mean rejecting science, digital communication, or artificial intelligence. It means questioning who designs technological systems, whose knowledge they contain, who controls their infrastructure, who bears their costs, and who receives their benefits.
Conclusion
Digital colonialism reveals that technology is never separate from politics, economics, culture, and history. Digital systems can reproduce colonial relationships when powerful institutions extract data, labor, resources, and knowledge while retaining ownership and decision-making authority.
Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, digital platforms, data centers, and automated public services have expanded the scale of these concerns. Communities may become technologically connected while remaining economically dependent and politically excluded.
Digital sovereignty offers one response, but sovereignty must include more than state control. Meaningful technological autonomy requires democratic governance, community participation, Indigenous rights, worker protections, cultural and linguistic inclusion, environmental responsibility, and fair distribution of economic value.
A decolonial digital future would treat data as a social and political resource rather than an unlimited commodity. It would support locally grounded knowledge, public and community infrastructure, accountable innovation, and cooperation that does not depend on extraction or domination.
- TOC**
Foundations and Definitions
Navigating Digital Colonialism: Sovereignty Models and Sustainable Development in the Global South
Compares sovereignty strategies used by Global South states confronting technological dependency, rule-setting power, infrastructure control, and data extraction.
Digital Colonialism, Fossil Capitalism, and Indigenous Dispossession
| Tyler McCreary | Capitalism Nature Socialism | 2026
Connects digital expansion to fossil capitalism and continuing settler-colonial dispossession, emphasizing the material infrastructures behind supposedly immaterial technologies.
Consent, Coercion, Colonialism: A Manifesto for Digital Life
| Phoebe V. Moore | Globalizations | 2026
Argues that coercive digital systems increasingly replace meaningful consent and calls for governance attentive to structural domination and colonial power.
An Intellectual History of Digital Colonialism
| Toussaint Nothias | Journal of Communication | 2025
Traces the intellectual roots of digital-colonialism theory and proposes a typology of recurring forms of technological domination.
The Origins of Digital Colonialism
| Özgür Yılmaz | İmgelem | 2025
Reviews the historical and structural foundations of digital colonialism across economic, technological, cultural, and epistemic dimensions.
Digital Colonialism: The Global South Facing Closed Platforms
| Al Jazeera Journalism Review staff | Al Jazeera Media Institute | 2024-12-31
Explains how control of software, hardware, platforms, labor, and infrastructure can turn the Global South into a dependent digital periphery.
Critiques of Data Colonialism
| Benedetta Brevini et al. | Bristol University Press | 2024-09-03
Evaluates the strengths and limits of data-colonialism theory and compares it with related concepts such as data extractivism.
Digital Coloniality
| Jan Hendrik Kroeze | Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems | 2024
Defines digital colonialism and digital coloniality and illustrates how unequal technological systems reproduce colonial patterns of knowledge and power.
Digital Colonialism: Neo-Colonialism of the Global South
| Various authors | ResearchGate | 2023-05-22
Frames contemporary platform control, data extraction, and technological dependency as a continuation of older North-South power relations.
How to Fight Digital Colonialism
| Toussaint Nothias | Boston Review | 2022-11-14
Surveys Global South activism and outlines strategies for building public understanding, coalitions, and alternative digital institutions.
Extraction of Personal Data: A New Form of Colonialism or an Extension of Capitalism?
| Lindokuhle Mukosi | Seattle University International Law Journal | 2022
Assesses whether mass personal-data extraction is best understood as colonialism, capitalism, or an overlapping system of appropriation.
Data Colonialism: Compelling and Useful, but Whither Decoloniality?
| Deborah Mumford | Information, Communication & Society | 2022
Praises data-colonialism theory while arguing that it should engage more deeply with decolonial critiques of European objectivity and universality.
Digital Colonialism: The Evolution of US Empire
| Michael Kwet | Transnational Institute | 2021-03-04
Presents a broad account of how US technology firms dominate software, cloud services, education, media, and digital infrastructure worldwide.
Decolonise Our Future
| Arturo Escobar and contributors | openDemocracy | 2020-06-08
Places digital colonialism within wider ecological, economic, and political crises and calls for plural, locally grounded futures.
Resistance to the New Data Colonialism Must Start Now
| Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias | Al Jazeera | 2020-04-28
Warns that continuous tracking turns human life into a raw material and argues that health technologies could accelerate data appropriation.
Digital Colonialism: US Empire and the New Imperialism in the Global South
| Michael Kwet | Race & Class | 2019-01-14
Develops a structural theory of digital empire centered on foreign control of software, hardware, networks, data, and mediated experience.
Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data's Relation to the Contemporary Subject
| Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias | Television & New Media | 2019
Introduces data colonialism as the appropriation of human life through data and links it to a new stage of capitalism.
The New Knowledge Politics of Digital Colonialism
| Jason C. Young | Environment and Planning A | 2019
Shows how digital technologies reshape Indigenous knowledge practices and political authority in the Arctic.
Artificial Intelligence, Algorithms and Knowledge
AI Is Ushering in a New Era of Colonialism
| Ina Fried | Axios | 2026-06-04
Explores how Western-dominated training data can flatten cultural differences, exclude oral traditions, and reproduce colonial hierarchies in AI outputs.
Algorithmic Colonialism: Rethinking AI's Role in Sub-Saharan African Health Systems
| A. Alur | AI and Ethics | 2026-05-12
Examines how imported AI systems can reproduce dependency and inequity in African health care when local knowledge and infrastructure are ignored.
Preventing AI Extractivism: Braiding Indigenous Data Justice with Access and Benefit-Sharing
| Maria Schulz and Jordan Loewen-Colón | AI & Society | 2026
Proposes consent, benefit-sharing, and accountability rules to prevent AI firms from appropriating Indigenous linguistic, biometric, and ecological data.
A Postcolonial Approach to AI and Global Justice
| M. Choi | Religious Education | 2026
Uses postcolonial theory to analyze concentrated ownership of AI systems and the global justice implications of technological dependence.
Virtual Power and Digital Colonialism
| A. Ishkhanyan | Ethics and Information Technology | 2026
Investigates how AI and platform capitalism shape identity, agency, justice, and algorithmic sovereignty in immersive virtual environments.
Robots Behaving Badly: Algorithmic Colonialism and the Consequences of AI
| Bronwyn Carlson and Tamika Worrell | Journal of Sociology | 2026
Applies an Indigenous and anti-colonial lens to policing, welfare automation, facial recognition, deepfakes, and robotics.
Data Colonialism and Indigenous Languages in AI
| J. C. Y. Kwok | AI & Society | 2026
Assesses Gaelic AI initiatives through data-colonialism theory, Indigenous data sovereignty, and the CARE principles.
Artificial Intelligence and the Transformation of South Asian Economies
| M. R. Howlader | Journal of Economy and Technology | 2026
Analyzes how asymmetric dependence on foreign AI systems could limit autonomy and development across South Asia.
AI and the New Colonialism of Climate Data in the Global South
| Public Affairs Research Institute | PARI | 2025-12-05
Examines how climate data and AI adaptation tools can reproduce extractive relationships unless local institutions control data and decision-making.
Decolonizing Algorithms: AI Bias and Digital Colonialism in Global South Governance
| Ibnu Fikri Ghozali | Jurnal Nalar Politik | 2025-09
Reviews data sovereignty, algorithmic violence, opacity, techno-solutionism, and imported safety standards in Global South AI governance.
What Will the AI Revolution Mean for the Global South?
| Krystal Maughan | The Guardian | 2025-08-03
Questions claims that AI is being democratized while compute, conferences, capital, and decision-making remain concentrated in wealthy countries.
Tech Imperialism Reloaded: AI, Colonial Legacies, and the Global South
| Various authors | ResearchGate | 2025-02-17
Links AI labor, data extraction, environmental burdens, and concentrated profits to long-standing colonial divisions of the world economy.
Algorithmic Colonialism: The Dawn of a New Era
Argues that algorithms colonize perception and consciousness through platforms, data flows, and automated systems of classification.
Decoloniality Impact Assessment for Artificial Intelligence
| Damian Eke et al. | AI and Ethics | 2025
Presents an assessment method for identifying colonial power asymmetries when Global North organizations develop AI for Global South contexts.
Creative Data Justice: A Decolonial and Indigenous Framework for Generative AI
| Payal Arora | Information, Communication & Society | 2025
Reframes debates over generative AI around creative justice, collective rights, Indigenous knowledge, and alternative data governance.
Artificial Intelligence and Technocolonialism: Not by Design?
Warns that global AI and intellectual-property rules may deepen technological dependency and marginalize developing-country interests.
Decolonial AI as Disenclosure
| W. J. T. Mollema | arXiv | 2024-05-23
Defines AI colonialism as political, ecological, and epistemic enclosure and proposes disenclosure as a model for decolonizing AI.
AI Is Steeped in Big Tech's Digital Colonialism
| Matt Burgess | WIRED | 2023-05-25
Profiles Abeba Birhane's work exposing abusive datasets, Western bias, and the unequal burdens of auditing large-scale AI systems.
Artificial Intelligence in the Colonial Matrix of Power
| James Muldoon and colleagues | Philosophy & Technology | 2023
Shows how AI systems depend on global labor exploitation, knowledge extraction, and claims of Western universality and objectivity.
Decolonial AI: Decolonial Theory as Sociotechnical Foresight
| Shakir Mohamed, Marie-Therese Png and William Isaac | arXiv | 2020-07-08
Outlines decolonial technical practices, reverse tutelage, and renewed political communities as alternatives to colonial patterns in AI development.
Africa, Data Sovereignty and Digital Dependency
Data Colonialism and AI in Nigeria
| Various authors | ResearchGate | 2026-03-02
Analyzes the political consequences of foreign ownership and control over Nigerian data and AI systems.
Resisting Digital Colonialism and Protecting Subaltern Agency in Africa
| Sylvia Ayesu | Journal of Public and International Affairs | 2026
Explains how foreign infrastructure, data extraction, surveillance technologies, and imported governance norms can constrain African political autonomy.
Mapping Data Labour Supply Chains in Africa in an Era of Digital Apartheid
| Jessica Pidoux et al. | arXiv | 2025-12-03
Maps content moderation and data-labeling operations across Africa and documents insecurity, invisibility, and inadequate psychological support.
Data Flows and Colonial Regimes in Africa
| A. Ndaka et al. | arXiv | 2025-11-24
Examines how AI platforms, recommendation systems, and digital infrastructures embed colonial futurities and gendered power relations in Africa.
The Future of Africa: Technological Sovereignty or Digital Colonialism?
| Marina Krynzhina | Valdai Discussion Club | 2025-11-14
Discusses African efforts to control data, infrastructure, and technology rather than remain dependent on foreign digital systems.
Lessons from Nigeria and Kenya on Digital Colonialism in AI Health Messaging
| Yewande O. Addie and Jasmine McNealy | Tech Policy Press | 2025-10-03
Uses health-messaging cases to show how imported AI can misread local contexts and undermine health and data sovereignty.
Digital Sovereignty and Data Colonialism: Shaping a Just Digital Order for the Global South
| Marcus Vinícius de Freitas | Policy Center for the New South | 2025-10-03
Argues that Southern states need local infrastructure, accountable governance, and regional cooperation to escape extractive digital dependency.
Digital Colonialism in Africa
| Various authors | ResearchGate | 2025-08-13
Surveys platform dependence, language marginalization, foreign ownership, e-commerce, and cultural control across African digital ecosystems.
African Digital Colonialism Is the New Face of Worker Exploitation
| Wayan Vota | ICTworks | 2025-04-17
Describes the extraction of African labor, resources, and data by technology companies without proportionate local returns.
Digital Colonialism Beyond Surveillance Capitalism?
| Samuel Singler and Akinyemi Babalola | Social & Legal Studies | 2025
Uses Nigerian cases to argue that digital colonialism includes epistemic and institutional domination that cannot be reduced to surveillance capitalism.
Digital Colonialism and the Role of Local Intermediaries
| Jake Okechukwu Effoduh | Business and Human Rights Journal | 2025
Shows how Big Tech and local intermediaries can jointly perpetuate data exploitation, infrastructure dependency, and algorithmic bias.
The World Bank's Approach to EdTech in Sub-Saharan Africa
| F. Salimi | Policy Futures in Education | 2025
Critiques market-led EdTech policies that may privatize education, extract data, weaken public systems, and intensify inequality.
Artificial Intelligence, Digital Colonialism, and Africa's Future Development
| Various authors | ResearchGate | 2024-12-01
Reviews how foreign technology assistance, infrastructure dependence, and imported AI can shape Africa's development trajectory.
Addressing Digital Colonialism: A Path to Equitable Data Governance
| Bitange Ndemo | UNESCO Inclusive Policy Lab | 2024-08-08
Calls for African data governance that supports local value creation, institutional capacity, sovereignty, and fair participation in the digital economy.
Re-Imagining Digital Colonialism in Africa through Nigeria
| Patrick A. Obi | tripleC | 2024
Uses Nigeria to examine platformization, prosumer labor, data extraction, and the return of colonial economic relations in digital form.
Digital Colonialism and Infrastructure-as-Debt
Shows how foreign investment in South African digital infrastructure can lock institutions into long-term dependence on dominant corporations.
Digital Colonialism Is Threatening the Global South
| Michael Kwet | Al Jazeera | 2019-03-13
Explains how US platforms dominate African advertising, transport, media, education, and infrastructure while extracting data and revenue.
If You Are a Kenyan Citizen, Your Private Data Is Not Safe
| Nanjala Nyabola | Al Jazeera | 2019-02-24
Warns that private foreign contractors can acquire political power over Kenyan citizens through identity systems and data access.
Digital Colonialism: The 21st-Century Scramble for Africa
| Danielle Coleman | Michigan Journal of Race & Law | 2019
Compares Big Tech's extraction and ownership of African user data with the historical Scramble for Africa.
Power as an Ethical Concern in the Global South's Digital Transformation
| Kutoma Wakunuma | TATuP | 2019
Places power, monopoly, and dependency at the center of ethical analysis of digital technologies in the Global South.
Asia, India and Regional Digital Power
Paradigm of Digital Colonialism in the United States-Indonesia Reciprocal Agreement
| Digital Society Indonesia | Center for Digital Society | 2026-03-28
Argues that international technology agreements can weaken Indonesia's bargaining power and control over data, infrastructure, and national policy.
At the ET AI Conclave, Sarvam AI Warns Against India's Digital Colonialism
| Economic Times staff | The Economic Times | 2026-02-26
Reports calls for indigenous AI models, public investment, and domestic infrastructure to reduce India's dependence on foreign systems.
Digital Capitalism, Platformization and Coloniality
| S. Sepehr | Consumption Markets & Culture | 2026
Examines how platform capitalism and coloniality shape cultural production and market positioning in the contemporary digital economy.
Indonesia's Data Sovereignty
| Sampean | Development in Practice | 2026
Examines how reliance on Google, Meta, Amazon, and other foreign platforms complicates Indonesia's pursuit of data sovereignty.
Algorithmic Dependence and Digital Colonialism in Global South Education
| S. A. Ahmed | Frontiers in Education | 2026
Proposes a framework covering data, infrastructure, knowledge, and governance colonialism in AI-dependent education systems.
What Is Digital Colonialism?
| Sunhak Peace Prize staff | Sunhak Peace Prize | 2025-12-22
Offers an accessible overview of how corporations control information access, digital infrastructure, and data in less powerful countries.
Data Colonialism and Data Sovereignty: International and Indian Perspectives
| Various authors | Journal of Constitutional Law Studies | 2025-12-17
Examines how concentrated corporate control over data challenges sovereignty and requires political as well as legal responses.
From Gambling to AI: Indonesia Rejects Global Digital Colonialism
| ANTARA News staff | ANTARA News | 2025-11-04
Reports Indonesian arguments for Global South-led digital governance and fairer returns from data, innovation, and AI.
Our Data, Ourselves: Participation, Justice and Alternative Data Sovereignty in India
| Various authors | Big Data & Society | 2025-08-06
Centers Indian civil society perspectives on participation, justice, colonial histories, and alternatives to state- or corporate-centered sovereignty.
Data Colonialism in the Global South: Who Owns Asia's Digital Future?
| Suhana Roy | Yale Review of International Studies | 2025-07-26
Surveys platform control, TikTok regulation, foreign infrastructure, and the struggle over value created from Asian data.
Business on WhatsApp Is Tough Now
| Ankolika De | arXiv | 2025-02-15
Shows how platform redesign and formalization can marginalize small Indian businesses and create coercive dependence on Meta's systems.
Platform Imperialism Theory from Asian Perspectives
| Dal Yong Jin | Social Media + Society | 2025
Updates platform-imperialism theory for an Asia where US, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Indian firms compete for regional and global influence.
Digital Colonialism: Reimagining Power, Identity and Resistance by Decolonizing AI
| Samavia Zia | Drestanta Pelita Indonesia Press | 2025
Connects AI bias and technological inequality with postcolonial struggles over identity, knowledge, power, and resistance.
AI Colonialism
| Digital Economy Promotion Agency | DEPA Thailand | 2025
Explains how AI can extract data, labor, and cultural value from the Global South while privileging Western languages and histories.
Digital Sovereignty and Data Colonialism: India's Emerging Legal Framework
| Various authors | SSRN | 2025
Reviews Indian legal and policy efforts to prevent foreign control over essential data, cloud systems, and digital infrastructure.
Open-Source AI Data Sharing: Yes; Data Colonialism: No
| Open for Good Alliance | Medium | 2023-10-31
Calls for safeguards that keep African and Asian open AI datasets from being enclosed, privatized, or exploited without fair benefit.
The Specter of Digital Colonialism and the Ummatic Imperative
| Ummatics Institute | Ummatics | 2022-09-12
Examines data extraction, foreign platforms, and technological dependency from a Muslim civilizational and political perspective.
Big Tech Is Bending to the Indian Government's Will
| Vidushi Marda | WIRED | 2021
Describes how global platforms trade compliance and user data for market access, creating overlapping corporate and state forms of digital domination.
Data Sovereignty in India
| A. Bhatt | ILI Law Review | 2021
Analyzes data localization, cloud jurisdiction, and India's efforts to move from digital dependence toward effective data sovereignty.
Inside Facebook's New Power Grab
| Carl Miller | WIRED | 2020-08-17
Revisits Free Basics and Facebook connectivity projects that critics describe as poor internet for poor people and a form of digital colonialism.
Latin America, Data Centers and Digital Extractivism
Digital Decolonialism from Mexico to Latin America
| Geert Lovink and guests | Institute of Network Cultures | 2026-04-07
Discusses Mexico's dependence on foreign investment, weak sovereign policy, extractive infrastructure, and grassroots digital alternatives.
Popular Digital Sovereignty and Infrastructural Dependencies in Brazil
| W. Estima | Digital Society | 2026
Studies Brazilian movements using popular education, free software, and community infrastructure to contest platform dependency.
Artificial Intelligence and Digital Extractivism: Who Benefits from Data Centers in Latin America?
| Natalia Zuazo | El País | 2025-10-17
Questions whether mega data centers provide meaningful local benefits or simply export energy, water, data, and profits.
The Rise of Data Centers and Water Conflicts in Santiago de Chile
| Various authors | ResearchGate | 2025-10-13
Examines conflicts over water-intensive data-center development and debates over how digital extractivism should be defined.
Draining Cities Dry: Data Centres in Drought-Hit Latin America
| Tom Phillips and contributors | The Guardian | 2025-05-22
Investigates the water and energy demands of expanding data centers in Brazil and Chile and the lack of meaningful public oversight.
As Demand for AI Data Centres Grows, We Must Avoid Digital Extractivism
| María Laura Rojas | Dialogue Earth | 2025-03-28
Calls for energy, water, transparency, and local-benefit safeguards so Global South data centers do not serve wealthy markets at local expense.
Where Does Digital Sovereignty Lie in Building the Brazilian Smart City?
| I. Schiavi et al. | Cities | 2025
Finds that Brazilian smart-city policy often privileges global market infrastructure over local autonomy and collectively defined territorial needs.
Smarter, Greener Extractivism: Digital Infrastructures and the Environment
| Patrick Brodie | Information, Communication & Society | 2025
Shows how data infrastructure can intensify resource extraction while being promoted as efficient, smart, or environmentally sustainable.
Data Sovereignty and the Global South's Resistance to Digital Colonialism
| O. J. Egungbemi | SSRN | 2025
Compares Nigeria, India, and Brazil and identifies legal, infrastructural, and civil-society strategies for reclaiming digital autonomy.
Neo-Colonial Intelligence in Urban Planning
| U. Baresi et al. | Cities | 2025
Warns that AI planning systems can encode colonial spatial assumptions and calls for participatory, plural, and locally grounded urban design.
Big Tech from the South: Thinking Beyond Data Colonialism in Latin America
| Jonas C. L. Valente and Rafael Grohmann | Bot Populi | 2024-10-28
Complicates North-South binaries by examining Latin American firms, regional power, and multiple centers of platform domination.
Critical Data Studies with Latin America
| Jonas C. L. Valente and Rafael Grohmann | Big Data & Society | 2024
Draws on Latin American dependency, liberation, and social thought to move critical data studies beyond simplified colonial metaphors.
Decoding the Digital Fuku: ChatGPT in Dominican Education
| Anaelia Ovalle | arXiv | 2023-10-26
Uses the history of US occupation and educational reform to assess the risk that generative AI will reproduce coloniality in Dominican schools.
Millions of Workers Are Training AI Models for Pennies
Documents precarious data-labeling work in Venezuela and Colombia and the transfer of value from low-paid Southern labor to Northern AI firms.
Terrestrial Politics and Body-Territory
| Márcia M. Tait, Alcides Eduardo dos Reis Peron and Marcela Suárez | Tapuya | 2022-09-20
Uses Latin American concepts of territory and embodiment to expose the material infrastructures and asymmetries of digital colonialism.
Towards a Digital New Deal for Latin America
| Renata Ávila | Heinrich Böll Foundation | 2021-06-16
Advocates regional cooperation, public infrastructure, digital rights, and economic policy to prevent externally imposed digital dependency.
Decolonial Thinking in Brazil and Hegemonic Digital Colonialism
| Gustavo Silveira Borges and José Luiz de Moura Faleiros Júnior | Studia Prawnicze | 2021
Applies decolonial legal thought to platform power, regulatory weakness, and the exploitation of digital vulnerability in Brazil.
The Global Village for Rural Villagers
| Bruce Sterling | WIRED | 2017
Reviews community-centered technology projects that reject imported techno-solutionism and support Indigenous and rural communication autonomy.
Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Digital Settler Colonialism
A Framework for Kara-Kichwa Data Sovereignty
| WariNkwi K. Flores et al. | arXiv | 2026-01-10
Presents an Indigenous legal and ethical framework for governing data as relational memory rather than a freely extractable commodity.
Watching the Well Run Dry: Digital Settler Colonialism
| H. Jernigan | Springer | 2026
Compares Big Data with extractive water industries to show how digital systems can endanger natural resources, community rights, and self-determination.
Sovereignty in the Digital Age: Indigenous Perspectives on Health Data
| S. Hurst et al. | The Lancet Regional Health | 2026
Centers Indigenous governance, consent, and collective authority in decisions about health data and emerging digital technologies.
Could AI Drive Indigenous Knowledge Out of Fashion?
| Bella Webb | Vogue Business | 2026
Explores how Western-biased AI can marginalize traditional textile knowledge and why Indigenous communities need authority, consent, and compensation.
War, Climate Change and AI at the UN Indigenous Forum
| Jamey Keaten and Associated Press staff | Associated Press | 2026
Reports Indigenous concerns about AI extraction, health, land, climate, cultural data, and the dilution of collective rights in global institutions.
AI and Indigenous Data Sovereignty
| Various authors | Somatechnics | 2025-12-18
Introduces work on Indigenous control over AI-related data, knowledge, representation, and technological decision-making.
Digital Sovereignty or Digital Colonialism? Indigenous Communities Fight for Their Data
| Peace and Humanity staff | Peace and Humanity Monitor | 2025-09-11
Explains how present data extraction grows from older colonial practices of classifying, governing, and dispossessing Indigenous peoples.
Indigenous Peoples and AI: Defending Rights, Shaping Technology
| Cultural Survival staff | Cultural Survival | 2025-08-08
Describes Indigenous data sovereignty as the right to govern data concerning cultures, lands, languages, bodies, and sacred knowledge.
Indigenous Data Sovereignty in Intangible Cultural Heritage Governance
| I. Spano | International Journal of Cultural Property | 2025
Uses Te Hiku Media and other cases to examine corporate digitization, cultural appropriation, and community-controlled alternatives.
Electronic Empires and Digital Domains
| S. A. Montoya | University of California eScholarship | 2025
Reinterprets telecommunications history through settler colonialism and the material seizure of land, routes, labor, and communication space.
Indigenous Data Sovereignty: A Catalyst for Ethical AI in Business
| V. Rana | Business & Society | 2025
Presents Indigenous data sovereignty as a practical framework for resisting exploitation and misrepresentation in commercial AI.
Indigenous Scientists Are Fighting to Protect Their Data and Culture
| Justine Calma | The Verge | 2025
Reports efforts to build secure storage, community protocols, and independent infrastructure for environmental, cultural, and scientific data.
Indigenous Data Stewardship Stands Against Extractivist AI
| University of British Columbia | UBC Arts | 2024-06-18
Explains how large-scale AI scraping commodifies knowledge without consent and how Indigenous stewardship offers a relational alternative.
New Guidelines for Indigenous Data Sovereignty in AI
| UNESCO | UNESCO | 2023-12-11
Presents participatory guidelines for including Indigenous communities in AI development across Latin America and the Caribbean.
In Consideration of Indigenous Data Sovereignty
| Jennafer Shae Roberts and Laura N. Montoya | arXiv | 2023-09-19
Applies the CARE principles to data mining and argues that current practices reproduce colonial relationships with people and ecosystems.
CARE Statement for Indigenous Data Sovereignty
| WAMPUM Lab and collaborators | United Nations submission | 2023-04-30
Calls for digital policy to recognize collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility, ethics, and the rights of Indigenous children.
Decolonisation, Global Data Law and Indigenous Data Sovereignty
| Jennafer Shae Roberts and Laura N. Montoya | arXiv | 2022-07-28
Proposes global data law that protects Indigenous cultures, ecosystems, privacy, access rights, and community authority over data.
Data Colonialism and Data Sovereignty in Indigenous Research
| Coppélie Cocq | AoIR Selected Papers | 2022
Examines renewed colonial tensions around the collection, use, circulation, and governance of Indigenous data.
Indigenous Data Sovereignty and the Land Grab of Universities
| Tiara Roxanne | Heinrich Böll Foundation | 2021-02-11
Critiques academic data extraction and connects university research practices with settler-colonial land and knowledge appropriation.
The Logics of Digitisation: Race, Cyberspace and Digital Settler Colonialism
| K. Ali | Macquarie University | 2021
Argues that online systems can extend settler sovereignty, racial ordering, and white-supremacist power into digital space.
Platforms, Labor, Culture and Media Power
Introduction: Platform Labour in the Global South
| Various authors | Journal of Sociology | 2026-05-04
Introduces research on how platform work in the Global South combines opportunity with surveillance, precarity, unequal value capture, and regulatory gaps.
Cultures of Platformization in Africa
| Society for Social Studies of Science | 4S | 2026-04-20
Summarizes scholarship on how platforms reshape African culture, work, infrastructure, knowledge, and everyday social relations.
Data Colonialism in the Algorithmic Age
| Various authors | Eurasia Review | 2026-02-20
Explains how platforms turn Global South behavior into predictive commodities while concentrating ownership and decision-making elsewhere.
Gender and Digital Platform Work During Turbulent Times
| Melissa Langworthy and Yana Rodgers | arXiv | 2026-02-17
Shows how platform work can provide emergency income while reinforcing gendered caregiving burdens, insecurity, and unequal access.
Beyond Platform Capitalism: Digital Solidarity Economy
| Leonardo Foletto | Internet Policy Review | 2026
Explores cooperative, commons-based, and solidarity-economy alternatives to extractive platform ownership and governance.
Platform Imperialism: The New Digital Colonization
Argues that contemporary imperial power operates through control of platforms, data, infrastructure, algorithms, and labor markets.
Has the Global South Benefited from the Digital Media Revolution?
| Al Jazeera Journalism Review staff | Al Jazeera Media Institute | 2026
Assesses the opportunities and constraints facing Global South media under platform governance, censorship, and unequal digital markets.
Towards a Feminist Understanding of Digital Platform Work
| Clara Punzi | arXiv | 2025-10-22
Organizes platform-work research around exploitation, surveillance, blurred employment boundaries, and colonial legacies.
Anticolonial Platform Studies
| Various authors | Social Text | 2025-06-01
Develops an approach to platform studies centered on colonial history, racial capitalism, dispossession, and anti-colonial struggle.
Digital Colonialism and Platform Power
| Lorenzaj Harris | ResearchGate | 2025-06
Connects platform monopolies with informational inequality, cultural dependence, weakened local innovation, and democratic vulnerability.
The World Majority's Social Media versus Data Colonialism
| Alexander Sytnik | Russia in Global Affairs | 2025-04-01
Argues that local and regional platforms can counter foreign data extraction, deplatforming, algorithmic invisibility, and information dependence.
Digital Platforms and the Global South
| Jing Guo | Critical Arts | 2025
Reviews research on platform imperialism, cultural hegemony, political economy, and the sociotechnical construction of platform power.
Platform Mechanics of Hate and Marginality
| G. Eapen et al. | AoIR Selected Papers | 2025
Uses cases from India and Kenya to show how platform affordances interact with colonial histories, racialized dispossession, and extraction.
Examining Platformization in Cultural Production
| Na Ta et al. | arXiv | 2024-11-17
Compares TikTok and Spotify to show how platform-specific rules shape cultural visibility, hit production, and cross-platform influence.
Platformization of Inequality
| Isabel Muñoz et al. | arXiv | 2023-09-28
Finds that online labor platforms reproduce gendered and racial stereotypes instead of creating the neutral markets often promised.
Flying the KITE High Against Digital Colonialism
| Michael Kwet | Bot Populi | 2023-06-27
Examines Kerala's free-software education program as an alternative to corporate EdTech platforms and proprietary dependence.
To Fix Social Media, We Need Digital Socialism
| Michael Kwet | Al Jazeera | 2020-05-19
Advocates publicly governed, interoperable, federated social networks rather than merely breaking up surveillance-based corporations.
Platform Colonialism: The Lower Circuit at the Center of Capitalist Accumulation
| Various authors | Academy of Management Proceedings | 2020
Uses Latin American micro-entrepreneurs to show how platforms capture value from informal and small-scale economic activity.
Digital Citizenship in the 21st Century
| Renata Ávila | openDemocracy | 2019-04-12
Discusses rights, literacy, journalism, and the danger that digital systems could reproduce colonial structures of unavoidable dependency.
Digital Trade, Infrastructure and Sovereignty
Digital Sovereignty Is No Longer a Policy Debate
| TechRadar Pro staff | TechRadar | 2026
Argues that sovereignty must be designed into cloud and AI systems through modularity, portability, open standards, and reduced vendor lock-in.
Digital Sovereignty in the Commonwealth: Evaluating South Africa
| B. Saurombe | The Round Table | 2026
Examines data extraction, foreign jurisdiction, and infrastructure control as sovereignty challenges for South Africa and other Commonwealth states.
Digital Trade Negotiations at the WTO
| Our World Is Not for Sale Network | OWINFS | 2025
Collects analysis opposing pro-Big Tech e-commerce rules and advocating policy space for development, regulation, and public interest.
Governing Digital Trade: A New Role for the WTO
| Various authors | German Institute of Development and Sustainability | 2025
Proposes development-sensitive WTO approaches to e-commerce, tariffs, data governance, and unequal digital capacity.
What Was Agreed at the WTO Negotiations in Abu Dhabi?
| Reuters | Reuters | 2024-03-02
Explains the contested extension of the e-commerce tariff moratorium and the divisions between major exporters and developing countries.
Policy Brief on Inclusive WTO E-Commerce Negotiations
| Georgetown IIEL contributors | Georgetown Law | 2023-07-20
Examines how special treatment, technical assistance, and development provisions could make digital-trade negotiations more inclusive.
Planning Cities Beyond Digital Colonization
| António Ferreira | Land Use Policy | 2022
Offers policy recommendations for smart-city planning that recognizes local context instead of importing standardized corporate models.
Digital Colonialism: Analysis of Europe's Trade Agenda
| Alberto Arroyo Picard and colleagues | Transnational Institute | 2021-10-06
Analyzes EU digital-trade clauses and argues that unrestricted data flows can lock developing countries into subordinate value chains.
Security Implications of Data Colonialism in Environmental Data
| Matthias Stürmer, Jasmin Nussbaumer and Pascal Stöckli | arXiv | 2021-07-04
Maps risks across the collection, storage, processing, and use of environmental data and proposes sovereign, sustainable alternatives.
Digital Neo-Colonialism in the Smart City
| M. Mouton and colleagues | Regional Studies | 2021
Examines how smart-city projects enable dispossession and profit through unequal relationships between municipalities and global technology firms.
The Potential Impact of Data Localisation on South Africa
| Mandela Institute researchers | University of the Witwatersrand | 2021
Evaluates claims that localization can prevent digital colonialism while considering trade, development, privacy, and infrastructure costs.
Digital Trade Rules
| Deborah James | Center for Economic and Policy Research | 2020-07
Explains how proposed trade rules affect source code, data flows, privacy, taxation, public services, workers, and development policy.
The Digital Colonialism Behind .tv and .ly
| Sarah Emerson | WIRED | 2020-02-07
Investigates foreign control of valuable country-code domains belonging to Niue, Tuvalu, Libya, and colonized island territories.
WTO E-Commerce Negotiations
| European Parliamentary Research Service | European Parliament | 2020
Summarizes disputes over data flows, localization, source-code disclosure, electronic contracts, and customs duties on digital transmissions.
Why the Global South Should Nationalise Its Data
| Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias | Al Jazeera | 2019-12-14
Argues that collective data control can challenge the conversion of everyday life into a privately owned source of corporate profit.
Digital Colonialism and the World Trade Organization
| Various authors | TWAILR | 2019-11-20
Critiques e-commerce liberalization as a project that can strengthen Big Tech while weakening the economic sovereignty of developing countries.
Giant Tech Corporations and the WTO's Digital Colonialism Agenda
| Deborah James | Center for Economic and Policy Research | 2019-06-26
Describes civil-society and developing-country resistance to WTO rules that would entrench corporate control of data and digital markets.
Digital Sovereignty or Digital Colonialism?
| Renata Ávila | Sur - International Journal on Human Rights | 2018
Advocates regional, national, and community ownership of communications infrastructure as a foundation for privacy and democratic autonomy.
The Scramble for Data and Network Self-Determination
| Luca Belli | openDemocracy | 2017-12-15
Calls for network self-determination as platforms transform an open internet into controlled spaces optimized for data capture and behavioral influence.
A New Digital Trade Agenda: Are We Giving Away the Internet?
| Renata Ávila | openDemocracy | 2017-06-13
Warns that trade agreements could consolidate a digital neo-feudal order governed by technology giants rather than democratic institutions.
Health, Education, Development and Humanitarian Technology
Regulating Digital Health in the Global South
| Sharifah Sekalala and colleagues | International Journal of Law in Context | 2026
Develops critical and decolonial approaches to health-data extraction, platform dependence, regulation, and the political economy of digital care.
Educational Digital Sovereignty and EdTech Platform Governance
| E. J. Díez-Gutiérrez | Preprints | 2026
Argues that imported EdTech embeds Global North assumptions about knowledge, learning, innovation, ownership, and governance.
Structural Dilemmas of PeaceTech
| M. Wählisch | Peacebuilding | 2026
Shows how AI-driven peace technologies can reproduce surveillance, dependency, and digital colonialism despite humanitarian intentions.
Implications of Foreign Digital Health Infrastructure for African Health Sovereignty
| M. Mulumba et al. | The Lancet Regional Health - Africa | 2026
Warns that routing patient information through foreign private systems can undermine health sovereignty, accountability, and public control.
Ubuntu-Ẹ̀kọ́ Framework for AI Education
| T. R. Feyijimi et al. | International Journal of Educational Development | 2026
Proposes an African critical-cultural framework that integrates Ubuntu, local knowledge, data sovereignty, and digital-colonialism analysis.
Artificial Intelligence in East Asian Music Education
| Yasumasa Yamaguchi | AI & Society | 2025-11-13
Examines cultural bias, language, repertoire, and digital colonialism in the use of AI for East Asian music education.
Evaluating LLM Career Guidance Across Ten African Countries
| Precious Eze, Stephanie Lunn and Bruk Berhane | arXiv | 2025-10-20
Finds that leading language models often miss local labor markets, languages, infrastructure, policy, and cultural contexts in African career advice.
Digital Colonialism: How Tech Giants Control Food Aid
| The Contrapuntal staff | The Contrapuntal | 2025-06-09
Investigates how digital food-assistance systems generate valuable data and shift power toward corporations, donors, and states.
Philanthropic Digital Colonialism and Mobile Learning in Sub-Saharan Africa
| Mirriam Banda and Pempho Chinkondenji | Research in Comparative and International Education | 2025
Maps how philanthrocapitalism and mobile learning can reinforce unequal power while presenting corporate platforms as educational aid.
Digital Colonialism in Language Education
| Various authors | ResearchGate | 2025
Critiques celebratory narratives about educational technology that overlook corporate extraction, language hierarchy, and Southern dependency.
Context-Aware Africa-Led Design of Responsible AI
| M. Zimba et al. | Springer | 2025
Calls for African-led design grounded in local values, infrastructure, social realities, and governance rather than imported universal models.
Interrupting Coloniality: (De)humaning Digital Technologies in Language Education
| Francesca Helm | Springer | 2025
Examines how language technologies and educational platforms can reproduce dehumanizing hierarchies and proposes more relational, multilingual, and decolonial practices.
Beyond Instrumentarianism: Facial Recognition in the Global South
| Various authors | Science, Technology and Society | 2024-10-05
Links automated facial recognition with colonial policing, disciplinary violence, surveillance capitalism, and unequal social control.
4 Ways Humanitarians Can Stop Digital Colonialism
| Wayan Vota | ICTworks | 2024-09-17
Recommends local ownership, open-source systems, capacity building, and data sovereignty in humanitarian and development projects.
Colonialism in the New Digital Health Agenda
| Sharifah Sekalala et al. | BMJ Global Health | 2024
Argues that global digital-health programs can reproduce colonial agendas when technology, standards, funding, and expertise remain externally controlled.
From Making Up Professionals to Epistemic Colonialism
| Dimitra Petrakaki, Petros Chamakiotis and Daniel Curto-Millet | Social Science & Medicine | 2023
Shows how a medical education platform in Somaliland transferred useful knowledge while privileging English, Western infrastructure, and foreign professional norms.
Beyond Privacy: Big Tech in Medicine
| Tamar Sharon | openDemocracy | 2022-02-02
Argues that privacy alone cannot address the broader transformation of medicine by platforms, data markets, and corporate infrastructure.
Artificial Intelligence in the Global South: Potential and Risks
| P. J. Wall, Deepak Saxena and Suzana Brown | arXiv | 2021-08-23
Reviews the benefits and dangers of applying Global North AI systems in very different political, cultural, and infrastructural settings.
Technocolonialism: Digital Innovation and Data Practices in Humanitarian Response
| Myria Georgiou and Mirca Madianou | Social Media + Society | 2019
Shows how humanitarian biometrics, connectivity projects, and innovation discourse can reproduce abandonment, surveillance, and unequal power.
Disruptive Play or Platform Colonialism in Educational Virtual Reality
| Zoetanya Sujon | Digital Culture & Education | 2019
Assesses whether Google Expeditions expands educational imagination or extends corporate control over classrooms, content, and data.
Resistance, Alternatives and Decolonial Futures
From Distorted Mirrors to Sovereign Reflections
| Andreas Komninos, Gerasimos Vonitsanos and Spyros Sioutas | arXiv | 2026-06-14
Proposes transferable algorithmic identities and decolonial infrastructure to break platform monopolies over inferred models of the self.
The World Is Sounding an Alarm: Why Big Tech Is the New Colonist
| Al Jazeera staff | Al Jazeera | 2026-05-14
Examines warnings that AI, platform monopolies, and Western-centered data are creating new centers of power over culture, identity, and public memory.
Smart Adaptation or Data Colonialism?
| Various authors | Environment and Planning E | 2026-01-22
Questions whether data-intensive climate adaptation empowers vulnerable communities or creates new forms of external knowledge and infrastructure control.
Digital Sovereignty in the Global South: Autonomy in a Platform-Dominated World
| G. Mekonnen et al. | Procedia Computer Science | 2026
Reviews strategies for local infrastructure, open technology, regional cooperation, and governance capable of reducing platform dependency.
Data Colonialism and Digital Sovereignty in the Global South
| Y. A. Reba | Development in Practice | 2026
Analyzes how Southern countries can pursue autonomy over data, infrastructure, and digital policy without isolating themselves from global networks.
Countering Digital Colonialism
| Carlos Delclós | CCCB Lab | 2025-02-25
Describes digital infrastructure as a new dependency and highlights political, cooperative, and public-interest responses to data extractivism.
Global Effort Is Needed to Close the Digital Divide
| Amandeep Singh Gill | Financial Times | 2025
Calls for coordinated investment and local decision-making so the AI divide does not harden into new forms of data and technological colonialism.
Artificial Intelligence and the Risk of New Colonialism
| CIRSD contributors | Horizons | 2025
Warns that the scale and centralization required by AI could create winner-takes-all global dependencies benefiting a small group of firms and states.
Beware America's AI Colonialism
| Financial Times columnist | Financial Times | 2025
Argues that dependence on US-controlled AI infrastructure can become geopolitical leverage and urges coalitions to build sovereign alternatives.
The Sovereignty-Internationalism Paradox in AI Governance
| A. Ishkhanyan | Discover Artificial Intelligence | 2025
Explores the tension between national control and international coordination in AI governance under conditions of unequal technological power.
A Postcolonial Critique of European Digital Sovereignty
| M. Rogat | Environment and Planning D | 2025
Argues that European sovereignty projects can reproduce geopolitical hierarchy when they ignore colonial histories and external dependencies.
What's Really at Stake in Moves to Target TikTok?
| Al Jazeera staff | Al Jazeera | 2024-01-02
Contrasts geopolitical competition over TikTok with deeper critiques seeking democratic, decentralized alternatives to all dominant platforms.
Artificial Intelligence Colonialism
| Salvador Santino F. Regilme Jr. | Leiden University | 2024
Analyzes the AI industry's global political economy and argues that unequal control of data, capital, labor, and infrastructure produces colonial relationships.
AI and the Tyranny of the Data Commons
| Ulises A. Mejias | Al Jazeera | 2023-08-19
Challenges the assumption that publicly accessible data is free for corporate appropriation and links AI training to data colonialism.
Calling for a Feminist Revolt to Decolonise Data and Algorithms
| Genoveva Vargas-Solar | arXiv | 2022-09-17
Highlights feminist, Indigenous, and Global South movements building critical literacy, alternative datasets, and non-hegemonic algorithmic practices.
Avoiding the Data Colonialism Trap
| Data4SDGs contributors | Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data | 2021-06-21
Recommends equitable partnerships, local capacity, accountability, and community benefit in data-for-development projects.
To Fight Data Colonialism, We Need a Non-Aligned Tech Movement
| Parminder Jeet Singh | Al Jazeera | 2020-09-08
Proposes technological non-alignment between US corporate surveillance and Chinese state-centered digital control.
Tech Colonialism Today
| Data & Society contributors | Data & Society | 2020-02-25
Explains how technology projects can exploit labor, impose external expertise, and use humanitarian or innovative language to obscure unequal power.
Another Internet Is Possible
| Jonathan Gray | openDemocracy | 2019-12-04
Explores public broadband, data trusts, collective banks, interoperable systems, and democratic infrastructure as alternatives to extraction.
Curating Digital Geographies in an Era of Data Colonialism
| Alistair Fraser | Geoforum | 2019
Examines how people curate digitally mediated places and identities within broader systems of data extraction and platform control.
