AI Governance and the Global South: Power Mechanisms of Exclusion and Strategic Responses

Abstract

This study examines the power mechanisms through which the Global South is excluded from AI governance. No document bars developing countries from participating, and most profess inclusivity; yet 118 states have joined none of the major initiatives outside the United Nations, and most of them belong to the Global South. To account for this coexistence of formal openness and substantive exclusion, this study combines norm contestation theory with Barnett and Duvall’s taxonomy of power and shows that exclusion operates through four mechanisms: compulsory, institutional, structural, and productive. Compulsory exclusion works by blocking or selectively granting access to technology, as seen in export controls and adequacy decisions, while institutional exclusion operates through the prior structuring of eligibility and agenda setting. Structural exclusion works through positions within the international division of labor and the uneven distribution of the capacity required for norm compliance, and productive exclusion through representations that cast developing countries as recipients of capacity building rather than as co-authors of norms. Each mechanism rests on a different set of conditions: what response is available to a state is governed by its resources and domestic politics, whereas how far that response is effective is governed by the conditions on which the targeted mechanism rests. The cases of India, Brazil, Kenya, Indonesia, the African Union, and ASEAN bear out these correspondences. At the same time, the resources each practice presupposes are unevenly distributed within the Global South, so that only a small number of emerging powers can combine practices across multiple layers. Their practices cannot be assumed to represent the Global South as a whole, and the responses available to each developing country are further constrained by the hierarchies within it.