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| Research and Reports |
| The Disruptive Politics of AI Co-edited by Steve Feldstein and Shreya Joshi, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s latest issue features ten essays discussing the ‘disruptive politics of AI’, ranging from the repressive use of AI tools by authoritarian regimes to their emancipatory uptake by activists and civil society groups. Covering a diverse set of geographical contexts–including China, Myanmar, Thailand, Nepal, India, the UAE, and Bangladesh–the contributions examine state’s strategies of digital repression and civil society’s responses to them (see e.g., Irene Poetranto, Mahsa Alimardani, Janjira Sombatpoonsiri, Nathan Law, Frank Cheng-Shan Liu, and Usama Khilji), as well as the shifting power dynamics surrounding AI technology in debates over digital sovereignty debates, policymaking, and military deployment (see e.g., Luca Belli, Shreya Joshi, Arindrajit Basu, and Yahli Shereshevsky). Read more here. The European Network: Corporate Involvement and Development Funding Behind Israel’s AI-Powered Warfare in Gaza Authored by Dima Samaro for the Arab Reform Initiative, this report exposes the transnational ecosystem of military and industrial cooperation in Israel’s war onGaza. It traces how European companies such as German Hensoldt and French-Italian STMicroelectronics and European research grants such as Horizon Europe are actively engaged in and profiting from the ongoing catastrophe. The report adopts what Samaro calls a Palestinian-centered epistemological framework that treats the supply chain “not as innovation but as infrastructure that renders Palestinian life machine-readable and targetable, erasing not only individual lives but Palestinians’ collective existence.” Read more here. Telecoms, Ubiquitous Surveillance and State Crime: A Case Study From Kenya Namir Shabibi draws attention to the mostly overlooked aspect of mobile surveillance. He argues that surveillance does not rely solely on highly specialized and costly spyware, but it becomes ubiquitous when embedded in ordinary telecommunications networks. Based on extensive investigative and ethnographic research in Kenya, Shabibi uses the case of Safaricom to show how surveillance can become embedded in everyday infrastructure through collaboration between telecom providers and public law enforcement, and how this infrastructure can contribute to state violence. Read more here. AI Workers’ Inquiry 2026 The AI Workers’ Inquiry 2026 is a worker-led investigation into how generative AI is affecting work across the tech sector. Their investigation found negative implications including deskilling, downskilling, and invasive monitoring within the workforce. It includes policy proposals that call on governments to enshrine the right to refuse the use of AI, to protect junior roles from deskilling, to ensure robust environmental and social accountability, and to protect workers from AI-led redundancies. Read more here or engage with their Instagram here. Interception and Monitoring Technologies in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay Addressing the lack of documentation on the procurement of surveillance technologies in the Southern Cone–Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay–Lucas Domínguez Rubio documents and classifies the technologies purchased and used by law enforcement and security agencies in the three countries. The report provides both a supply-side mapping of surveillance technologies as well as a “demand-side reconstruction of procurement dynamics” aimed at identifying regional patterns of technological adoption. Read the English version here and the Spanish version here. Surveillance in transit: ‘the Aadhaar model’ in the Indian Ocean World Bridging surveillance studies literature with post-colonial theory, Mallika Dharmaraj traces a genealogy of ‘surveillance in transit’ across the Indian Ocean World (IOW). Problematizing the linear understanding of coloniality, Dharmaraj situates contemporary deployments of biometric technology within longer histories of race, caste, and colonial relations. Dharmaraj examines three cases: Mauritius’ pass system, Kenya’s kipande and the Mahalanobis distance from Tanzania. Employing ‘complicity’ as a methodology, the article also serves as an example for how researchers can engage in critical reflexivity and positionality within their research. Read more here. The Digital Trade Integration Project The Digital Trade Integration Project has created a comprehensive global repository of regulatory (data) policies on digital trade governance. Covering 163 countries, the interactive map allows academics and policy researchers to explore regulatory policies across regions. From restrictions on content access, telecom infrastructure, and cross-border data flows, the interactive map provides both a summary of global trends as well as more granular country-level insight of local policies. This is part of the Data Frontiers: Exploring how internal and external agents influence policy-making on cross-border data flows in the Global South facilitated and supported by Martina F. Ferracane, Simón González Ugarte, and Tomás Rogaler Wilson. Read more here. |
| News |
| Cape Town Approving Data Centers with Rules Treating Them Like Warehouses In this investigative report, Eunice Masson, Lyse Comins, and Athandiwe Saba shed light on the grave consequences of the US-based multinational company Equinix’s roll out of its hyperscale data center in water-poor regions of Cape Town, South Africa. Nearby the planned data center are towns that are without access to basic infrastructures for water, sanitation and electricity. Lacking adequate regulation, data centers are processed under existing industrial warehousing rules, which allow hyperscalers from evading rigorous industrial impact assessments. Read more here. Telenor under investigation for crimes against humanity in Myanmar A lawsuit against the Norwegian telecom operator Telenor was permitted to proceed over allegations of crimes against humanity and violations of sanctions in Myanmar following the 2021 military coup. This comes years after civil society and human rights groups raised concerns around Telenor’s departure from the country which put telecommunication services in the hands of military-linked M1 Group. As Faiz Naeem from Access Now asserts, “leaving a market does not mean leaving your human rights responsibilities behind.” Read more here. |
| Commentaries |
| Millions of Volunteers Are Keeping the Internet Human. For Now. Sarah Gilbert shines light on the labor of love that goes into keeping the Internet human. Unlike business-oriented social networking sites such as LinkedIn, where as much as 40% of its content is now estimated to be AI-generated, community-oriented platforms such as Reddit and Wikipedia have reportedly kept the rate as low as 5%, thanks in large part to human moderators tasked with protecting their communities from AI slop. As a moderator of the Reddit community AskHistorians herself, Sarah makes the case for supporting the work and knowledge produced by these volunteers and offers tangible next steps for doing so. Read more here. India’s Data Center Boom Should Learn from its Dams Drawing on the history of large-scale infrastructure development in post-independence India, Udisha Saklani and Astha Kapoor examine the lessons India’s data center boom can learn from past mistakes. Drawing parallels with current concerns about data centers’ environmental and resource burdens, the authors show how India’s aggressive dam-building drive in the past followed a similar trajectory – that history is repeating itself. One stark difference though is financing: while dams were publicly funded infrastructure, data centers are privately owned and controlled with little to no public oversight. They call for reimagining policy to account for an equitable distribution of infrastructure benefits: “who benefits from infrastructure is a matter of policy design, not an inevitable outcome.” Read more here. Sovereignty After the Boom Drawing on dependency theory, Vinit Ravishankar filters through the speculative promises of digital sovereignty coming out of the sub-imperial powers of Brazil and India. He places current data center buildouts and digital sovereignty discourse as a continuation of post-colonial struggle. But crucially, Ravishankar highlights its paradox: local bourgeoisies and foreign investors ultimately exacerbate structural dependency instead of counteracting it. He calls for critical engagement with overtly nationalistic promises of digital sovereignty, arguing that “stripped of all revolutionary meaning, sovereignty becomes little more than a sad imitation of the Californian ideology wrapped in nationalist robes.” Read more here. |
| Art and Interventions |
| Whose Categories? Whose AI? As part of a blog series that explores possible futures–not distant alternative realities–of technology design and deployment, Adio-Adet Dinika explores how the same technology can look radically different depending on whose voices and ways of knowing are incorporated. This short story follows a village that confronts a foreign technology as fundamentally “out-of-place” and, rather than simply adapting to it, chooses to implement a purpose-oriented technology that “matches an epistemology it already runs.” As Adio-Adet writes, “it is the system that needs the village,” and not the other way around. Read more here. |
| Workshops, Conferences, and Grants |
| Seminar on Academic Writing and Getting Published hosted by the Surveillance Studies Network and Surveillance & Society The Surveillance Studies Network and Surveillance & Society are hosting an online seminar on Academic Writing and Getting Published. The seminar takes place on October 14th at 12pm ET. It will consist of a short talk from Professor Torin Monahan, co-Editor-in-Chief at Surveillance & Society, before an informal and open Q&A with attendees. The purpose of the seminar is to de-mystify the submission and publication process and offer support to those seeking to publish with Surveillance and Society (or indeed elsewhere). Topics will include how to communicate and write academically, common mistakes the editors see, the process of publishing with us, and more. Participants are welcome to attend with specific questions or to simply find out general information. The seminar is open to anyone interested in publishing with Surveillance & Society The journal particularly welcomes early career scholars, PhD students, global majority scholars, scholars with English as a second/third/fourth+ language, independent researchers, and organisers, activists, and non-academic researchers who are unfamiliar with publication processes. Sign up here. Call for Proposals | SSN Small Research Grant (2026 – 2027) The SSN Small Grants scheme provides funding to support junior/early-career scholars working in economically under-resourced regions of the world. This year, SSN will be able to fund awards of up to £1500 each, to be used during the 2026-2027 academic year in support of surveillance studies research. Read more here about eligibility and requirements. Call for Abstracts | Global Experiences of Risk and Agency in Algorithmic Governance Ashwin Varghese is organizing a panel on Global Experiences of Risk and Agency in Algorithmic Governance for the XXI ISA World Congress of Sociology which will be held in-person in Gwangju, South Korea from 4 to 10 July, 2027. The panel is looking for abstracts that take issue with the predominantly Global North language of debates on algorithmic governance and is seeking presenters who wish to center the diverse experiences of algorithmic governance across different global contexts. Read the full call here. Surveillance Studies Critical Methodologies Working Group Emerging from the Critical Methodologies panel at SSN 2026, this working group will meet via regular online sessions to collaborate on various projects that interrogate research methodologies from an ‘anti-surveillant’ perspective (e.g. co-creating a ‘critical practical guide’ to doing anti-surveillant research) that can be shared with the wider SSN community. The first meeting will be held on October 21st at 8am PST, 11am EST, 4pm GMT, 8:30 pm IST. Register here. |
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| Surveillance in The MajorityWorld Research Network aims to expand the scope of surveillance studies to include non-Northern/Western discourses and practices. It is a place for exchange, collaboration, and activism against the undemocratic use of surveillance technologies. |