Call for Papers | Sovereign Intelligence: Power Relations in the Governance of Artificial Intelligence – IPSA 2027
Sovereign Intelligence: Power Relations in the Governance of Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence is reshaping the distribution of political, economic, and epistemic power at the global level. As AI systems become embedded in critical infrastructures, public administration, security, scientific research, and economic production, their governance increasingly raises questions about who possesses the authority, resources, and capabilities to develop, regulate, control, and benefit from these technologies.
AI is therefore not only an object of regulation. It is also a domain in which sovereignty is claimed, negotiated, contested, and reconfigured.
This panel develops the notion of Sovereign Intelligence as a framework for investigating the changing power relations surrounding the governance of artificial intelligence. We invite contributions examining how states, technology firms, international organizations, standard-setting bodies, research communities, and civil society actors compete and cooperate in shaping the institutions, infrastructures, norms, resources, and knowledge on which contemporary AI systems depend.
The panel particularly seeks to move beyond exclusively legal, ethical, or technical accounts of AI governance and to approach it as a political process structured by struggles over authority, strategic dependencies, infrastructural control, and competing conceptions of the public interest.
Suggested areas for paper proposals
The panel welcomes theoretical, comparative, and empirical papers addressing, among others:
AI sovereignty and digital sovereignty;
geopolitics of AI and technological competition;
public authority and private power in AI governance;
AI infrastructures, compute, cloud, data, and strategic dependencies;
semiconductor, energy, and infrastructure dependencies in AI ecosystems;
international organizations and emerging architectures of global AI governance;
technical standards, standard-setting organizations, and regulatory competition;
AI, national security, and strategic autonomy;
democracy, fundamental rights, and algorithmic power;
multistakeholder and alternative models of AI governance;
the political economy of foundation models and frontier AI;
concentration, dependency, and asymmetries within global AI value chains;
AI governance and technological capacity in the Global South;
comparative approaches to AI governance across political systems;
the relationship between AI capabilities, sovereignty, and political authority.
The broader aim of the panel is to investigate how artificial intelligence is transforming contemporary configurations of political authority and to assess whether emerging struggles over AI capabilities, infrastructures, and governance are producing new meanings and practices of sovereignty.
Submit a paper proposal
Paper proposals must be submitted directly through the IPSA World Congress online submission system, using the “Submit a paper to this panel” option on the official page of Panel PL-4096.
Each proposal must include
- A paper title of no more than 25 words
- An abstract of no more than 350 words
- A clearly identifiable research question
- A brief indication of the methodological approach
References, bibliographical notes, and authors’ contact information should not be included in the abstract.
Submission rules
- Proposals for this panel must be submitted in English
- Only the main author should submit the proposal
- Co-authors can be added after submission and must also have an IPSA online account
- A free IPSA online account is required to submit a proposal
- IPSA membership is not required at the submission stage
- Accepted participants must become IPSA members in order to register and participate
- Presentations at the Congress will be in person
Important deadlines
Accepted authors are expected to register by 5 May 2027, upload their full paper in PDF format by 1 July 2027, and present their work in person at the Congress.
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