Who Decides, and on Whose Terms? A Call for Papers on AI and Power Concentration
Artificial intelligence is often discussed as if it were weather. It arrives. It shapes our lives. We adapt. But AI is not weather. It is built by specific people, in specific places, using specific resources, and it concentrates specific forms of power in specific hands. That concentration is the subject of a new special issue of the Cambridge Journal of Artificial Intelligence, now open for submissions in partnership with NYU's Peace Research and Education Program (PREP).
The shape of the problem
The scale of concentration is by now well documented. Karen Hao's Empire of AI maps a global system in which freshwater is pulled from communities in Chile to cool data centers, annotators in Nairobi label traumatic content for wages that would be illegal in the jurisdictions where the models are sold, and a small group of firms hold the compute infrastructure that determines who can build, who can study, and who can govern. Languages without enough digital presence are quietly falling out of the models that increasingly mediate public life. Regulatory agencies find themselves negotiating with companies whose market capitalizations exceed the GDP of many of the states attempting to govern them.
None of this is incidental. It is the shape of the industry. And yet the peer reviewed literature is still catching up to the field reporting, the activism, and the policy work that has been naming these dynamics for years.
This special issue is an attempt to close that gap.
What we are looking for
We welcome empirical, theoretical, policy, and case study contributions across nine thematic areas:
Resource Extraction: water, land, energy, and the geography of the AI supply chain
Language: representation, erasure, and linguistic sovereignty in training data and model deployment
Compute as Dependency: how concentrated access to computational infrastructure shapes who can build, research, and regulate
Policy Influence and Regulatory Capture: the mechanisms through which AI firms shape the rules meant to govern them
Measurement of Power Concentration: methodologies for operationalizing and assessing concentration across domains
Data Sovereignty and Extractivism: the politics of data collection, ownership, and return
Labor and Value Chains: annotators, content moderators, and the invisible workforce behind AI systems
Epistemic Power: whose knowledge counts, whose gets encoded, and whose is displaced
Gender and Intersectional Dimensions: how concentrated power reconfigures work, care, representation, and opportunity along intersecting lines
The list is broad by design. Power concentration does not respect disciplinary boundaries, and neither should the work that analyzes it.
The questions we hope you will take on
How do we actually measure concentration, across water, compute, data, labor, narrative, and regulatory influence? What counts as evidence, and what counts as enough evidence to act? Where are the pressure points, the places where communities, regulators, and researchers have successfully disrupted or redistributed concentrated power? What have the alternatives looked like when they have worked, and what has made them fragile when they have not?
We are particularly interested in contributions grounded in the Global Majority, not as a case study appended to a theoretical argument built elsewhere, but as the starting point of the analysis. The regions most affected by the current concentration of AI power are also the sites of some of its most sophisticated critique and most creative response, and the scholarly record should reflect that.
Who should submit
Established scholars and early career researchers. Practitioners and policy analysts. Interdisciplinary teams. Researchers whose work sits at the edges of the conversation, between fields that do not always speak to each other. If you are working on any of this, or know someone who is, we want to hear from you.
How to submit
Submissions are open now through the Cambridge Journal of Artificial Intelligence website. Full guidelines, formatting requirements, and deadlines are available there: https://cjai.co.uk