Journal of Global Ethics

The ethics of AI sociotechnical systems in global development: choice, power, and justice

The 2025 UNDP Human Development Report, A Matter of Choice: People and Possibilities in the Age of AI (UNDP, 2025), makes a timely and important contribution. It brings AI into the human development agenda, insists on the centrality of human agency in shaping technological futures, and raises concerns that are too often absent from mainstream AI discourse: the mental health consequences of technology for young people, the risks to decent work and labour opportunity, and the possibility, and necessity, of designing AI sociotechnical systems that complement rather than displace human capacities. In framing AI as a matter of choice, the Report places human beings, rather than technological imperatives, at the centre of the conversation.

While supporting the importance of agency and the valuable points made in the Report, this Special Issue takes a critical approach to this framing and aims to explore what it leaves unexamined. Central to our inquiry is the claim that choice is not a neutral or universally accessible capacity. It is political, thus, enabled and foreclosed by social and material conditions such as poverty, inequality, gender, geography, and the concentration of political, economic, cultural and epistemic power. We ask what it means to talk about AI as a matter of choice in a world where the very preconditions of meaningful choice are already unequally distributed, both across and within nations, and indeed, where these systems are not external to those inequalities, but structurally embedded within them.

Why this, why now, why here

AI-driven sociotechnical systems, including Large Language Models and autonomous agents, are rapidly proliferating across critical sectors such as health, education, governance, business, and environmental management. These systems will profoundly impact our choices, views, behaviours, and opportunities in ways that are currently unknown, and not always visible or legible to those they affect.

Critically, AI sociotechnical systems are being developed and rolled-out upon an already existing severe digital, cultural, social, and global divide (Kuhn et al., 2023). Nearly a quarter of the world’s population are not on the Internet. Its adoption is proportional to the economy’s level of development: it is nearly universal (94 %) in high-income countries but less than a quarter (23 %) in low-income countries. (Atlas of Global Development, 2026). This is more than the entire population of North America and Europe combined. In Bangladesh approximately 50% of the population do not use the internet, in India the figure is 30%, 91% in Burundi, and there are hardly any in North Korea (World Bank, nd). Freedom of the Internet, thus access to digital tools driven by AI, is curtailed by bans in some major countries. Illiteracy, language and other forms of cultural capital also provide an effective barrier to participation. Gender disparities are evident, 885 million women remain without mobile internet access, not by choice, but because the cost of an entry-level handset represents 24% of a woman's monthly income in LMICs, compared with 12% of men's. Women in LMICs are 14% less likely than men to use mobile internet, a gap driven by affordability, safety concerns, social norms, and structural inequalities. Progress in closing this gap has stalled (Jeffrie, 2025).

Furthermore, the development of AI sociotechnical systems is concentrated in the hands of a small number of corporate, multinational actors, and dominant, strategically-placed, economically powerful nations across the globe, including both democratic and authoritarian regimes. This concentration of power has alarming and significant consequences regarding who controls content and infrastructure, who profits and benefits, and how the terms on which AI enters, influences and impacts people's lives will be decided. For example, AI infrastructure is currently highly unequally distributed. According to a report by the World Bank (2025), the US currently accounts for 39%, other high-income countries’ 38%, and China 7% of global co-location data center capacity (proxied by total megawatts), compared with 0.1% in low-income countries. Furthermore, the AI ‘arms race’ is fueling political divisions, fracturing democratic foundations, and destabilising systems that support human development and social protections. This geopolitical agenda forces states to prioritise speed and dominance over safety,  leading to domestic policy rollbacks and weak international enforcement, which impacts ethical and regulatory structures and entrenches already existing injustices and inequalities (Harding, 2026).

The Journal of Global Ethics has built a distinctive space for ethical inquiry that is genuinely cross-cultural, and grounded in the real conditions of global development. However, it has yet to examine the rapid global proliferation of AI-driven systems and the unequal consequences this could carry for human capability, dignity, agency, and justice (Nussbaum, 2011; Sen, 1999). Existing scholarship on AI ethics largely addresses bias, transparency, and governance within frameworks that presuppose access and participation, or that focus on risks in high-income contexts. Critical engagement with AI sociotechnical systems, especially as concerns agency, remains underrepresented. The bottom-up universalism (Da Hora and Reiter, 2026; Gasper & Wells, 2026), non-anthropocentric ethics (Tan and Senda, 2026), and intergenerational accountability (McKinnon and Gardiner, 2026) with which the Journal for Global Ethics is engaging  offer urgent and as yet unexamined ethical framings of AI sociotechnical systems. Additionally, concerns over AI control and deployment as being a form of digital colonialism (Mejia and Couldrey, 2024) and authoritarianism (Beidollahkhani, 2026) need examining, as well as tensions between dominant and alternative worldviews (e.g. pluralism and ecocentricism) that will inevitably underpin the ethical shaping of AI sociotechnical systems (Baum et al., 2023; Broo et al., 2024; Escobar et al., 2026; Nothias, 2025). This Special Issue aims to provide a space for that discussion, while welcoming other theories of agency, ethics and justice.

What we are looking for

We welcome contributions that examine AI sociotechnical systems through the lenses of choice, power, and justice, empirically, theoretically, or through policy analysis. We are particularly interested in work that engages with the conditions shaping human agency in relation to AI sociotechnical systems. We especially welcome work that challenges the frameworks, including the aforementioned, and that brings empirical or theoretical perspectives we have not anticipated.

Contributions may address, but are not limited to:

• How conditions, including poverty, gender inequality, cultural context, and sociopolitical exclusion, shape the real possibilities people have to engage with AI systems, and what this means for capability, flourishing, freedom, justice, and thus agency
• The power asymmetries embedded in AI sociotechnical systems design, deployment, and governance, including political control, corporate concentration, epistemic authority, and the reshaping of global value chains
• Feminist, intersectional, and ethics of care perspectives on AI and choice, including how race, class, gender, disabilities and geography compound one another in determining who can meaningfully participate in AI-driven futures. Especially countries of low and medium human development.
• Pluriversal and ecocentric alternatives to dominant AI development paradigms, including critiques of anthropocentric design and the ecological costs of AI infrastructure
• The politically and economically motivated design and control of the role of algorithmic systems for the purpose of (designed and controlled by dominant players)  in shaping information/disinformation environments, restricting freedom, eroding epistemic trust, and constraining democratic deliberation
• AI's differential impacts across health, education, labour, and governance, and the obligations of AI-producing nations and corporations in relation to global justice
• Legal, regulatory, and governance frameworks for more just, rights-based, and ecologically grounded AI.

We welcome contributions from philosophy, development studies, science and technology studies, political economy, political ecology, and scholarship engaging with indigenous cosmologies and onto-epistemic traditions. Empirical, theoretical, and policy-analytical work is all within scope.

We especially encourage submissions from early career researchers and cross-regional voices, particularly those working in or on the global south. Contributions that challenge Eurocentric, liberal, and capitalist frameworks of technology and development, and that reconstruct or propose alternative ethical frameworks, are especially welcome.

What contributors will gain

This Special Issue offers a platform for work that engages simultaneously with global ethics, technology, political economy, and justice, a combination that remains underrepresented in the literature. The Journal of Global Ethics reaches audiences across philosophy, development studies, and policy, and the SI's grounding in major contemporary policy documents ensures the work will enter active conversations.

Contributors whose abstracts are accepted will receive editorial feedback before full paper submission.

References:

Atlas of Global Development. (2026). The Unfinished Digital Revolution: Expanding Internet Access | Atlas of Global Development. [online] Available at: https://data360.worldbank.org/en/atlas/internet-access/#c6 [Accessed 28 Aug. 2026].

Baum, S. D., & Owe, A. (2023). Artificial Intelligence Needs Environmental Ethics. Ethics, Policy & Environment, 26(1), 139–143. https://doi.org/10.1080/21550085.2022.2076538

Beidollahkhani, A. (2026) ‘The political economy of authoritarian AI policy assemblages in the Global South: balancing innovation and digital control in comparative perspective’, New Political Economy, pp. 1–22. doi: 10.1080/13563467.2026.2637132.

Broo, D.G., Gellers, J.C., Sætra, H.S., (2024). Re-imagining intelligent machines in an anthropocentric-ecocentric continuum: The case for ecocentric intelligent machines. Journal of Industrial Information Integration 41, 100636. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jii.2024.100636

Da Hora, Leonardo, and Bernd Reiter (2026). “Beyond Top-down Universalism: Constructing the Pluriverse through Bottom-up Universalism.” Journal of Global Ethics 22 (1). https://doi.org/10.1080/17449626.2026.2627326.

Escobar, A., Osterweil, M., Sharma, K., (2026). Pluriversal Horizons: Notes for an Onto-epistemic Reorientation of Technology, in: Majaca, A. (ed.) Incomputable Earth: Technology and the Anthropocene Hypothesis. Bloomsbury Publishing.

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Harding, V., (2026). Reimagining the AI race. An Anthology. Bennette School of Public Policy, Cambridge, UK. Available at: https://www.bennettschool.cam.ac.uk/publications/reimagining-the-ai-arms-race/. Accessed August, 26 2026.

Jeffrie, N. (2025). The mobile gender gap report 2025. GSMA. Available from: https://www.gsma.com/gender-gap-2025. Accessed July 21, 2026

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Mejia, U. and Couldry N. (2024). Data Grab. The New Colonialisms of BigTech and How to Fight Back. The University of Chicago Press

Nothias, Toussaint  (2025). An intellectual history of digital colonialism, Journal of Communication, Volume 75, Issue 5, October 2025, Pages 385–397, https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqaf003.

Nussbaum, M. (2011). Creating Capabilities. The Human Development Approach. Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

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Tan, Petrus, and S. S. Senda (2026). “From Local Wisdom to Global Ethics through a Spinozist Reading of the Barong Wae Ritual of the Manggarai Community.” Journal of Global Ethics 22 (1).

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World Bank, (nd.) Individuals Using the Internet  Available from: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS. Accessed August, 29 2026

UNDP (2025). Human Development Report 2025: A Matter of Choice: People and Possibilities in the Age of AI. New York: United Nations Development Programme.