Much of how cybersecurity is implemented and regulated today is now shaped by new developments in artificial intelligence (AI). International standards and donor benchmarks demand AI-related risk management requirements from developing states, prompting them to adjust procurement, auditing and data-governance policies as part of their funding criteria. For many developing and underdeveloped states however, the adoption of AI-enabled security practices is not necessarily a sovereign policy choice made on equal footing. Rather, it is a process shaped by long-standing dependency on foreign infrastructure, knowledge and expertise. Drawing on dependency theory, Foucauldian governmentality, and decolonial and postdevelopment critique, this paper examines AI and cybersecurity governance in Ghana and Trinidad & Tobago. Employing qualitative data analysis from these case states (2020-2023), it demonstrates how donor-driven digital development initiatives that are designed to aid their preparedness efforts, alongside vendor-managed services, formalise national strategies around emerging technologies while deepening infrastructural and epistemic asymmetries. The paper argues therefore, that responsible AI governance in such states must move beyond standard ethics checklists to embrace epistemic plurality and regional solidarities to ensure that sovereignty is realised in practice rather than simply on paper, or through discursive rhetorics.
During the Latin American 'left turn' of the early 2000s, several governments in Latin America advanced anti-neoliberal discourses, foregrounding the defence of natural resources against private corporations and adopted progressive constitutional reforms to enshrine peoples' power and strengthening state capacity. Yet in practice, these administrations reproduced extractivist development models, coupling resource extraction with redistributive social programs. A decade later, Andres Manuel L & oacute;pez Obrador (2018-2024) came to power in Mexico promising to revert neoliberal injustices while restoring energy sovereignty. Central to his project was the expansion of large-scale infrastructure projects. We examine the case of the Dos Bocas refinery as a result of an enduring extractivist constitutional order. Though framed as a sovereign, state-led alternative to neoliberal dependency, the Dos Bocas project expands the infrastructural and labour extractive regimes that sustain fossil-fuel production accumulation. By bringing constitutional materialism into dialogue with infrastructure studies, we show how extractivism persists not only through typical resource extraction but also through the material reorganisation of territory, labour and state capacity. We contribute to debates on constitutional materialism through an in-depth examination of the endurance of an extractivist constitutional order in Mexico, which includes infrastructure building and the creation of racialised jobs.
This study analyses Saudi Arabia's evolving foreign policy amid intensifying US-China competition and growing systemic uncertainty. Historically, Saudi Arabia's influence derived from its role in stabilising global oil markets and its close alignment with the United States. Today, however, the energy transition, the US shale revolution and intensifying US-China rivalry have collectively reshaped the strategic landscape, creating new pressures and opportunities for Riyadh. The study argues that Saudi Arabia's contemporary strategy is best understood as institutionalised strategic hedging: retaining core security ties with the United States while expanding economic, technological and selective security cooperation with China and other emerging partners. Drawing on hedging theory and middle-power literatures, the study highlights the interaction between external structural pressures and domestic regime-survival imperatives under Vision 2030. It demonstrates that external diversification is not a temporary adjustment but a politically consequential strategy designed to secure economic transformation, reduce vulnerability and preserve strategic autonomy. More broadly, the Saudi case illustrates how resource-rich middle powers can leverage competitive interdependence to institutionalise hedging as a durable foreign policy orientation in an increasingly fragmented global order.
The literature on resistance against extractivism often focuses on the external dynamics of contestation - that is, community-corporation or community-state dynamics. This study illustrates the importance of the 'messy' internal politics of class, caste and religion in shaping the political actions of social groups. I analyse the Gorano protest movement against coal mining in Tharparkar, Pakistan, which is part of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Tharparkar is a majority Hindu district, making it a unique outlier in a Muslim-majority country. The study was conducted using qualitative methods, including semi-structured in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and participant observation. The results of the study demonstrate that the Gorano movement successfully formulated a collective identity as Thari anchored in a shared folklore, history and territory. The Thari identity, with a set of socio-cultural dynamics that include patronage politics, logic of sociality and alliances, helped overcome differentiation and created the conditions for collective action. The findings highlight the paradoxical role of the types of socio-cultural conditions where tensions and synergies for collective action can originate. These synergies hold the key to formulating transformative alternatives to extractivism.
While multiculturalism in Latin America recognised specific Indigenous peoples' collective rights, the prevailing legal, institutional and political arrangements privileged the neo-extractive economic model, which I understand as extractive constitutionalism. In Guatemala, this extractive constitutionalism supports a regime normatively and institutionally designed to serve the interests of small non-Indigenous elites whose power and wealth depend on the control of land and public institutions. In the specific case of Quetzaltenango (the country's second-largest city), the dominant extractive industry is the quarrying of construction materials located in the hills of the Pa Lajuj No'j valley mainly inhabited by the Maya K'iche'. This cement and concrete industry creates Indigenous sacrifice zones by not only destroying the environment but also damaging people's livelihoods and community weaving. However, my findings show that in these K'iche' territories, organised Indigenous leadership has engaged against these industries by using legal instruments and invoking a justice of nature as a core Indigenous repertoire of socio-legal mobilisation. Drawing upon interviews with public officials at national and municipal levels, Indigenous and mining actors, secondary sources, and ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that extractive constitutionalism, although difficult to alter due to its entrenchment, is contested by reclaiming territorial ancestry through the sacred and care.
This article conceptualises selective silence as an institutional outcome through which the United Nations avoids recognising genocide when such recognition would conflict with dominant power interests. The article uses the Anfal campaign against the Kurds in Iraq as a critical case to argue that UN non-recognition was the result of four recurring institutional mechanisms: agenda prioritisation, reluctance to investigate, substitution of humanitarian action for security measures, and avoidance of legal declarations that could trigger enforcement obligations. As such, the article disputes commonly accepted explanations for the UN's non-intervention during the Anfal campaign, which claim that non-intervention was due to insufficient information, normative absence, or isolated moral failure. The analysis demonstrates how early exclusion of Anfal from actionable atrocity categories produced a path-dependent legacy of non-recognition that persisted beyond the Cold War and survived subsequent normative reforms, including the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). By locating failure at the level of recognition rather than response, the article contributes to critical debates on global governance, institutional accountability, and the structural limits of humanitarian norms in a power-stratified international system.
Relative to other global conflicts, the ongoing war in Sudan has exemplified a paradigmatic forgotten war, despite its varying ramifications for victims and the wider civilian population. In many ways, exploitation and its utilitarian value in hostility have often been rationalised by warring parties to justify their war aims. Although Sudan was plunged into its latest cycle of hostility in April 2023, the extent to which the conflict has induced vulnerability to exploitation, especially trafficking and slavery, remains largely uninterrogated in the academic literature. The scope of legal obligations and compliance by parties equally remain unclear. This paper therefore proceeds with two main objectives: firstly, it seeks to understand the relationship between war and exploitation in Sudanese conflicts (past and present), and, secondly, it investigates the implementation of applicable international law relating to trafficking and slavery, including compliance by parties. Given the collapse of many governance structures and widespread exploitation risks, the article further examines the roles of mutual aid networks at the community level and the impact of their work in mitigating exploitation.
