The rapid expansion of AI and cloud computing is transforming data centers into critical infrastructures of the global economy. Yet behind seemingly immaterial notions of the "cloud" are intensely physical and political questions concerning land, water, energy, labor, communities, and development.
Their significance therefore extends beyond the study of infrastructure or digitalization: data centers invite us to reconsider how politics is organized, where political power is located, and what counts as a political object. They also raise historical and postcolonial questions about whether the contemporary expansion of digital infrastructure represents a new political-economic formation or a reorganization of older relations of empire and capital. Do data centers reproduce familiar patterns of territorial appropriation, resource extraction, labor differentiation, and unequal development, in which value is generated through the control of land, energy, water, and connectivity while costs are displaced onto less powerful communities? Or do their transnational ownership structures, computational capacities, and dependence on globally distributed networks produce forms of power that are genuinely different from earlier imperial infrastructures? Are data centers like power plants or is there more to how they might (re)shape our understandings of territory, sovereignty, and the relationship between the local and the global?
This panel invites papers that engage with such questions and examine data centers as a central political puzzle
Potential topics and questions can include:
- People and the cloud: Where are people situated within an increasingly automated, capital-intensive digital economy?
- Development without employment? What happens to traditional development models when large investments and resource demands generate comparatively limited long-term employment?
- Global North–South politics: Do data centers reproduce relationships of dependency, extraction, or unequal exchange, or create new opportunities for development and technological agency?
- Representing and reporting resistance: Is opposition to data centers framed differently across the Global North and South? When are communities represented as legitimate political actors, and when as obstacles to development?
- Territory and sovereignty: What does territorially embedded but globally networked digital infrastructure mean for sovereignty, state power, and the relationship between local authority and global capital?
- Rethinking IR: Do data centers require new approaches to territory, infrastructural power, dependency, sovereignty, development, and the relationship between domestic and international politics?
