New Publication! | Towards a Fourth Digital Empire?
New Op-Ed on the African Union and Global AI Rule-Making
Published on Völkerrechtsblog, the op-ed asks whether the African Union can reshape global AI governance without being absorbed into the power structures described in Anu Bradford’s Digital Empires.
The op-ed “Towards a Fourth Digital Empire? The African Union and Global AI Rule-Making”, by Chiara Spiniello, has been published on Völkerrechtsblog on 21 October 2026.
Starting from the first UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance (Geneva, 6–7 July 2026), the piece engages with the three-centre framework of Anu Bradford’s Digital Empires – a United States model led by private enterprise, a Chinese model combining state direction with industrial capacity, and a European model relying largely on regulation – and uses the African Union’s Continental Artificial Intelligence Strategy to examine its limits.
Summary
The first UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance was meant to broaden a debate in which countries with less AI capacity have had limited ability to shape international discussions that directly affect them. The op-ed argues that Bradford’s framework explains why choices made in Washington, Beijing or Brussels travel beyond their places of origin, but is less satisfactory as a complete map of where normative priorities emerge: countries outside the three centres appear mainly as recipients of European rules, American platforms or Chinese infrastructure.
Taking the African Union’s Continental AI Strategy (adopted by the AU Executive Council in July 2024) as a lens, it asks not whether a single instrument amounts to evidence of a fourth digital empire, but how the African Union can exercise normative influence when participation is formally broad while control over infrastructure, agendas and concepts remains concentrated.
Looking beyond the three digital empires
The op-ed looks beyond regulatory alignment: legal influence travels through material relationships – procurement, technical standards, commercial dependence and switching costs – and a focus on the three most powerful centres can reproduce the asymmetry it seeks to explain.
It argues that regional soft law such as the Continental AI Strategy matters less for creating legal obligations than for organising priorities, coordinating positions and providing an institutional basis for coordinated action, and that capacity-building should be judged by the degree of autonomy that remains once a partnership matures or ends.
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