Editorial: Legal-Technical Governance and Regulation of Artificial Intelligence in Africa

Abstract

This editorial introduces the special issue on the legal-technical governance and regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) in Africa, the product of a project launched by the Data Science Law Lab in collaboration with the Data Science for Social Impact research group at the University of Pretoria. It situates the five peer-reviewed contributions within a legal-technical approach to AI governance: a transdisciplinary approach in which the legal and the technical are fused to add nuance to regulatory forms and practices and to close the legal-technical gap in AI governance and regulation. The contributions move from conceptual foundations, where legal-technical governance is advanced as an analytical framework, through continental norm-making on the transition from African Union soft law to an AI treaty and national policy design on intellectual property in African AI strategies, to the operation of AI systems in practice, addressing the algorithmic sovereignty gap in AI-enabled surveillance in South Africa and Nigeria and the legal status of predictive policing in the fight against cybercrime in Nigeria.