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| News Articles |
| Zambia Cancels RightsCon Summit, the Largest Human Rights and Technology Conference Access Now, organizers of RightsCon, canceled the 2026 summit after Zambian officials informed them that Chinese diplomats were pressuring the government because Taiwanese civil society participants were planning to attend. Lifting the postponement, Access Now was told, would require moderating specific topics and excluding Taiwanese participants from both in-person and online participation, conditions the organizers refused. The cancellation landed three months before Zambia’s national elections, amid mounting evidence of democratic erosion, including new cyber surveillance laws and increased harassment of journalists. Read more here Security Concerns about UpScrolled When Palestinian journalists, activists, and people documenting atrocities found their content suppressed on major platforms, many turned to UpScrolled, which attracted 2.5 million users within two weeks of launch. Skyline International documents security vulnerabilities flagged by external analysis, including risks around location data, IP address exposure, and deleted content remaining accessible on servers, noting that for human rights defenders and journalists operating in authoritarian contexts, what appears to be insignificant metadata can quickly become a targeting tool for state surveillance. Read more here The Human Cost of the Data Center Push in Latin America A cross-border piece from Global Voices gathering stories from several countries in Latin America where communities are pushing back against AI-driven data center development. Tech giants including Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are pouring investment into the region, often bypassing environmental protections and public hearings while promising governments economic growth and jobs. Communities on the ground are telling a different story. Read the piece here |
| Commentaries |
| The Rise of Infrastructure for Digital Censorship Apar Gupta and Nikhil Pahwa trace what they call an “India Censorship Stack,” successive amendments to the IT Rules since 2021 whose common thread is speed without scrutiny, prioritizing removal pace overdue process. The most recent draft, circulated on 30 March 2026, widens the net from news platforms to ordinary social media users who comment on news and current affairs. Taken together, the authors argue, these layers amount to the quiet construction of a durable censorship infrastructure. Read more here The Politics of Technology in Trump’s Second Term Policy & Internet editor-in-chief Joanne E. Gray reached out to technology scholars across four continents, from Bangladesh to Uruguay, Scotland to South Africa, for their reactions to this extraordinary political moment, asking what Trump’s second term means for digital society and where the most enduring consequences might lie. Contributors touch on the rise of digital authoritarianism, the erosion of accountability in algorithmic governance, and what it means when the politics of technology are no longer hidden but fully on display. Read more here Why Aadhaar’s Missing Middle is Causing an Identity Crisis in India’s Adivasi Areas Aadhaar has a clear entry point and a clear endpoint but lacks a functioning middle, a system that can track, diagnose, and resolve breakdowns between enrollment initiation and successful issuance. In Adivasi regions, where documentation is uneven and access to services is limited, this gap becomes particularly visible, with people facing repeated enrollment attempts, unresolved failures, shifting requirements, and weak institutional support. Read the piece here Datafication and the Erosion of Citizenship Rights This essay traces how digital identities have become the primary lens through which the Indian state recognizes its citizens, from birth registration and Aadhaar to health IDs, land registries, and old-age pensions. While the case for datafication rests on promises of efficiency and seamless delivery of benefits, the authors argue it has produced a troubling transfer of accountability from the state to the citizen, with governance strategies prioritizing scale over accuracy and leaving people’s complex social realities poorly represented in the systems that determine their access to rights. Read more here. |
| Research Reports |
| Global IFJ Study Exposes Worldwide Systemic Surveillance of Journalists Drawing on interviews with cybersecurity experts, forensic analysts, and journalists from across the world, as well as technical investigations spanning 2021 to 2025, the report documents how practices once limited to isolated state operations have evolved into a global industry involving commercial spyware vendors, telecommunications infrastructure, and weak or absent oversight. Spyware tools including Pegasus, Predator, and Graphite, once reserved for military intelligence, are now marketed to governments worldwide as “lawful intercept” technology, while ordinary phishing emails, fake websites, and stalkerware coexist with these state-grade tools to create a continuum of threats. Journalists in the Global South are found to be particularly vulnerable, with only a handful of organizations worldwide having the forensic capacity to detect infections and their resources stretched thin. Read the report here How SHA Was Used to Load Health System Costs onto Poorest in Kenya This powerful investigation by Africa Uncensored, Lighthouse Reports, and The Guardian examines Kenya’s controversial use of artificial intelligence to determine healthcare contributions. At the center of the system is an algorithm that estimates the incomes of informal workers and assigns premiums accordingly—despite widespread confusion and public concern. Through an in-depth audit based on obtained data and internal documents, the authors reveal how the model systematically overcharges the poorest while favoring wealthier households. Read the report here China and African Parliaments In this interview, Batsani-Ncube, author of China and African Parliaments (Oxford University Press, 2025), uses the financing and construction of parliament buildings as a lens into China-Africa relations. Rather than a heavy-handed transfer of authoritarian norms, he argues that China’s investment in these buildings reflects a subtler, long-term relationship-building strategy, where designing and maintaining the structures makes China structurally indispensable to the states it works with. Drawing on fieldwork in Lesotho, Malawi, and Zimbabwe, Batsani-Ncube raises questions about ownership, dependency, and the physical embedding of political influence. Read more here |
| Books |
| AI from the Global Majority Edited by Luca Belli and Walter B. Gaspar, and published as the official outcome of the UN Internet Governance Forum’s Data and Artificial Intelligence Governance Coalition, Springer’s volume centers voices from Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East across 25 chapters covering AI’s impacts on human rights, democracy, labor, and digital sovereignty, including algorithmic bias, data governance, disinformation, and AI’s role in entrenching global power asymmetries. Backed by case studies from 16 countries, it makes the case for inclusive, ethics-grounded AI regulation built from the realities of the Global Majority. More information here. The Many Faces of Data Access: Legal and Policy Implications for Research Edited by Jef Ausloos and Siddharth Peter de Souza, and published Open Access by the Institute of Network Cultures, the collection examines who gets to access data for research and on what terms. It interrogates the politics of knowledge production embedded in data access regimes, asking whether certain geographic and institutional positions are quietly privileged. Freely available to download here |
| Events |
| The Past, Present and Future of China’s Surveillance State This talk by Valentin Weber examines the evolution of China’s digital surveillance infrastructure from the early digitization of policing to today’s AI-driven, fully networked security ecosystem. It explores how law enforcement operates through systems of geo-positioning, real-time data visualization, predictive analytics, digital twins, and autonomous technologies such as drones and robotic agents. At the same time, it considers how these same technologies are presented to citizens under the label of “smart” environments—smart schools, workplaces, prisons, and elderly care facilities. By tracing this overlap, the talk highlights different perspectives on the surveillance infrastructure – those of the police and that of the population. More information here. BCCN Lecture Series on AI Governance in China Organized by the Berlin Contemporary China Network at Freie Universität Berlin and held online, the series explores the multiple dimensions of AI governance in China, from state regulation and AI in public administration to how Chinese society is living with these technologies, examining how China’s AI ambitions intersect with broader global trends and geopolitical tensions. Previous sessions have covered topics including propaganda’s influence on large language models, digital control under autocracy, and the role of international industry associations in shaping China’s technology standards. Register here. |
| Opportunities |
| Global Visiting Researcher Program 2026 at the Danish Institute for Human Rights The program funds researchers across three thematic areas: technology and human rights, examining the impacts of new and existing technologies on democratic governance in the Global South, the role of national human rights institutions in preventing violent extremism in Sahelian and coastal West African contexts, and the interaction of customary and informal justice mechanisms with human rights standards and formal justice institutions. Selected researchers will be affiliated with the Institute for up to six months under a flexible hybrid model. The application deadline is 1 June 2026. More information here. |
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