Introduction: Rethinking data colonialism: Local negotiations with data, postcoloniality, and power

This introduction to the special issue “Rethinking Data Colonialism: Local Negotiations with Data, Postcoloniality, and Power” examines the emergence of the term data colonialism, and its relationship to other key ideas like digital colonialism and AI colonialism. It opens by examining how the term “data colonialism” has been used primarily to designate the asymmetric, unequal, and extractive relationship of Big Tech with countries in the Global South. We argue that existing scholars have paid inadequate attention to historical specificity of colonial domination and the neocolonial and settler colonial forms of state domination in ongoing data colonialism projects. In order to address this lacuna, it is imperative to pay attention to the differences, conflicts, as well as the local forms of opposition within specific regions and countries beyond global North–South binaries. This introduction highlights the key goal of the special issue, which is to foreground how data colonialism operates with, through, and alongside local power relations, and how local actors negotiate and resist these extractive regimes. It also articulates themes––such as everyday lived experiences of data colonialism, and how people resist colonialist AI practices and the elites’ appropriation of anti-colonial rhetoric in postcolonial contexts––as addressed by the special issue articles. Finally, the Introduction, reiterating the contributions of the special issue, ponders the question of decolonizing AI and what decolonial AI futures look like beyond the epistemological and conceptual parameters of the Western academy.