critical infrastructure lab

Fieke Jansen, Andreas Baur, Corinne Cath, Niels ten Oever, and Nai Lee Kalema are organising a session at the AoIR2025.

The rapidly changing geopolitical landscape forces us to rethink the relation between infrastructure, politics, control, and power. This panel contributes to discussions on ruptures by exploring how digital infrastructures reconfigure the state, market, and citizen nexus and presenting research approaches that interrogate transnational networks by centring their materiality. Jointly, the papers showcase how infrastructures are used as a continuation of politics with material means.

The authors present five case studies from the global north and south, which foreground the delegation and transfer of power away from states and citizens and the anxiety resulting from this. The papers frame the leveraging of infrastructures in global power relations through the lenses of bordering, infrastructural anxiety, defamiliarization, financialization, and necropolitics. Together, the papers show how the transfer of power to third parties, with their particular agendas and interests, leads to a reconfiguration of control, bringing new challenges to states and citizens.

Jointly, the detailed case studies raise questions about initiatives surrounding digital sovereignty, digital public infrastructures, and global internet governance as means of citizen emancipation and their ability to serve the public interest. The panel invites engagement with the development of new infrastructural ideologies to underpin sustainable and equitable futures.

The panel is timely because it shows that countries have not (yet) developed an answer to the transition from privatization and globalization to predatory neorealism, which echoes 19th-century conceptions of power that assert that ‘might is right’.

Learn more: https://www.conftool.org/aoir2025/index.php?page=browseSessions&form_session=596&presentations=show

Dmitry Kuznetsov is chairing a panel on Platforms & Governments at the AoIR2025.

https://www.conftool.org/aoir2025/index.php?page=browseSessions&form_session=301

Dmitry Kuznetsov will present this paper at the upcoming AOIR2025 conference in Brazil https://www.conftool.org/aoir2025/index.php?page=browseSessions&form_session=488#paperID379

This paper examines how the Russian state, following its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, accelerated coercive controls over internet infrastructure through the rapid deployment of Technical Measures to Combat Threats (TSPU). Building on Maxigas and ten Oever’s (2023) framework of infrastructural ideologies, the study introduces infrastructural coercion as a crisis-driven strategy, contrasting it with hegemonic models reliant on tacit compliance. The research combines analysis of legislative texts with an examination of sessions from the Conference of Russian Telecom Operators (КРОС, 2018–2024). Findings reveal operators’ strategies to mitigate coercive measures: exploiting legal ambiguities (e.g., license reclassification), adopting phased DPI implementation, and leveraging sanctions-driven import substitution. KROS discourse shifted markedly—from openly mocking “unworkable” laws in 2018 to framing post-2022 challenges as “temporary difficulties” within an optimistic techno-nationalist trajectory.

The study challenges state-centric narratives of digital sovereignty by centering infrastructural actors’ agency. It demonstrates that tools like DPI are neither neutral nor inevitable: their adoption reflects ideological priorities, while material constraints expose fissures in state control. Russia’s case illustrates that “great firewalls” can emerge rapidly using existing technologies. By foregrounding implementers’ negotiations, this research advances scholarship on infrastructural governance and the political valence of technical systems.

As Europe races to scale up its AI capabilities, the Netherlands faces a pivotal moment. Will we replicate the US model of scaling up at all costs, or chart our own course that reflects European values, creates economic benefits for society, and retains value within the regions?

AI is rapidly becoming embedded across every industry, and we are told the solution is to build more, scale faster, and to subsidize harder. But the reality is: the infrastructure already exists – it’s just not being used effectively, and it’s mostly not European. An estimated €19 billion is extracted annually from European economies through AI infrastructure controlled by US tech giants. They use European energy, land, and resources while providing minimal economic returns through taxes or employment.

Too often, AI services consumed in Europe are bundled with non-European cloud infrastructure, locking in dependency, extracting economic value, and bypassing local providers. The result is a silent outflow of public value – from our energy systems, our land, our grid into the hands of a few dominant players who operate outside of our tax and policy frameworks.

This SDIA event brings together policymakers, regional leaders, infrastructure providers, and AI developers to answer one central question: How do we deploy AI infrastructure in a way that benefits the Dutch economy and society – rather than draining resources to foreign hyperscalers?

Let’s get it right – in a way that’s sustainable, sovereign, and good for people.

Do you have something to say? Then sign-up and join the conversation on October 1st, 2025 in Bushuis – Oost-Indisch Huis

On 18th September 2025 the symposium ‘The Politics of AI: Governance, Resistance, Alternatives’ will take place at Goldsmiths, University of London. You can register for the symposium here. The symposium is part of the BRAID project Sustainable AI Futures, which is mobilising interdisciplinary perspectives on AI and the environment, including the social life of AI environmental governance tools.

The rapid expansion of AI and computational infrastructure raises critical questions on whether we are governing AI responsibly, and if that is even possible at all. Contemporary governance regimes reduce social and environmental impacts to mere issues of quantification of harms and management of resources. Even if we track down an elusive number for its carbon emissions or water usage, how can we reconcile that with AI’s complex, messy and highly uncertain social impacts? What are AI’s sociopolitical effects, and how do we begin to notice, imagine, manage, or measure these effects? 

This symposium aims to consolidate researchers approaching questions of AI’s implications for sustainability, public interest technology, and economic justice across multiple disciplines. While there is a proliferation of research and public discourse around the central role that AI is playing in governance and infrastructure across multiple political contexts, the siloed approaches that exist across these disciplines have not been able to account for the complex global dimensions of AI politics and contestation across its value chain. This event invites researchers approaching these questions from different angles to propose ways in which we can come together to assess AI’s impacts in more systematic and comprehensive ways.

As a response to the current wave of AI development and deployment, concepts like responsible AI, sustainable AI, and AI governance have proliferated to manage these impacts at the point of design and consumption. We invite exploration of the nuances of these different approaches, as well as different national and regional contexts. However, despite the best intentions, these practices often end up reinforcing the very logics that they seek to question due to a lack of comprehensive assessment of global AI supply chains. As AI becomes more embedded in collective economic futures, how deeply are its core logics entangled with structural shifts – from green capitalism and the twin transition, to austerity, war, and accelerationism?

If alternative visions of AI are possible, what do they look like and what questions do they raise? What could AI look like if designed and operationalised outside dominant commercial and geopolitical frameworks? What possibilities emerge when we centre justice, sustainability, democracy, and decoloniality in AI development? How might the answers be different in different places around the world?

If AI should be resisted rather than governed, then where, how, by whom, with what resources and strategies? What precedents and projects of organising a resistance to AI exist, and what can we expect from the future? Where are the leverage points? If we reject the idea that AI is inevitable, what are the alternatives, and what new ethical, political, and epistemological questions do such alternatives raise?  

We invite scholars who centre issues of power, equity, (in)justice, governance and resistance in AI infrastructures in their research to submit a 300-word abstract for this symposium. If accepted, you will be expected to give a 20-minute presentation.