Call for Abstracts | Algorithmic Governance and Criminal Justice in the Global South: Perspectives from South Asia

Special Issue for the International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy

Theme

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are being integrated into criminal justice systems and legal institutions around the world. Such technologies are optimistically presented as data-driven solutions, from predictive policing and smart prisons to digital courts and legal databases. The optimism stems from their perceived promise to transform surveillance work, revolutionize policing, investigation, sentencing, probation, and parole, as well as judicial decision-making. It is believed that this promise may be fulfilled if technologies are democratically designed, effectively regulated, and responsibly governed, or “future-proofed” through judicial, legal, and individual responses. These perspectives often stem from Global North experiences where state-society relationship has developed through an evolving liberal ideology.

Critical perspectives have critiqued the unchecked deployment of carceral technologies, noting persistent algorithmic bias (Brayne, 2021), digital profiling (Arrigo & Shaw 2023), and the devaluation of judicial human decision-making in favour of the machine. Advances and innovations in surveillance, grounded in the supposed “race-neutrality” of these technologies have also been called out for their ability to socially sort citizens while dispossessing communities (Byler, 2022). Within legal scholarship, concerns have been raised about ethical issues with algorithmic decision-making, bias, transparency, and accountability (Srivastav 2026) as well as “the human-AI fairness gap” that compromises procedural fairness for the sake of “codified justice” (Alqatwana, 2024, p. 14) These perspectives caution against taking the safety and effectiveness offered by algorithmic carceral technologies for granted and demand critical examination of their oppressive and penal power (McKay, 2022). Relatedly, they ask us to think beyond tech-reformist solutions that view algorithmic bias as a technical problem rather than pre-existing structural problems persisting due to unequal power and societal structures (Ugwudike, 2022).

Responding to these calls, we seek to draw from regional perspectives where modern state-society relations have been introduced through violent modes of colonialism, and where colonial legacies continue to condition the evolution of state and criminal justice systems. In this vein, this special issue focuses on South Asia, noting that the region offers an indispensable but critically neglected lens for understanding how algorithmic governance does not evolve autonomously but is co-produced by socio-political and historical conditions. Here, the past continues to shape the present, particularly in the fields of policing (Waseem, 2022), surveillance work (Arun, 2025), legal technicalities, judicial procedures, and administrative and bureaucratic discretion (Varghese, 2025).

We approach South Asia as a vantage point for exploring and contextualizing the relationship between algorithmic governance and criminal justice in the Global South, and especially in postcolonial contexts. Here, algorithmic bias and digital injustice are produced by violence and inequality rooted in casteist, classist, communal, and patriarchal structures, as well as racialized preferences and positionalities.

Here, the regimes in power have begun integrating technology into their legal and criminal justice systems. But modes of governance are undeniably shaped by historical legacies, unresolved conflicts, and a lack of democratic consolidation. Domestically, within contested jurisdictions, where the writ of the state has been challenged or rejected, local populations continually serve as laboratories for imperial domination, repression, surveillance, and punishment. Therefore, we note that questions around how AI prediction and surveillance technologies shape criminal justice institutions, laws, and cultures in the Global South more broadly and South Asia specifically cannot be delinked from these complex historical and political realities, and they can no longer be avoided.

Against this evolving landscape, some questions demand urgent attention. We ask: How are AI technologies being harnessed in similarly layered and complex legal ecosystems? How can they be governed ethically, if at all, and mobilized in accordance with diverse criminal justice structures and their complicated histories? What roles can social and community actors play in shaping the relationship between AI, algorithmic governance, and criminal justice? As AI technology is rapidly adopted into various aspects of the criminal justice system in contexts such as South Asia, questions also arise as to how the intersection between algorithmic governance and criminal justice is likely to impact human rights, constitutional protections, and civil liberties.

To address these questions, we invite abstracts on the following topics:

The special issue guest editors are open to informal enquiries to discuss ideas if this would be useful. Please contact Dr Zoha Waseem (Zoha.Waseem@warwick.ac.uk) and Dr Ashwin Varghese (av690@cam.ac.uk) 

Key Dates

Abstract submission deadline: 30 September 2026 (abstracts of 250 words should be sent to both Guest Editors with the subject: “Special Issue: Algorithmic Governance in South Asia”)

Publication: Early 2029 (articles that complete the review process sooner, will be published ‘Online First’).

Special Issue Guest Editors

Dr Zoha Waseem is an Associate Professor in Criminology at the Department of Sociology, University of Warwick and an incoming Visiting Fellow at the Faculty of Law, University of Hong Kong. Waseem’s research has produced critical scholarship on postcolonial and southern perspectives on policing, criminal justice, and police-community relations, with a focus on Pakistan. She is the author of Insecure Guardians: Enforcement, Encounters, and Everyday Policing in Postcolonial Karachi (OUP/Hurst, 2022), and co-editor of the collection Postcolonial and Southern Perspectives Upon Policing, Security, and Social Order (Bristol University Press, 2023).

Dr Ashwin Varghese is an Assistant Professor at O.P. Jindal Global University, India and a Research Network Affiliate at the Centre of Governance and Human Rights, University of Cambridge. He is a political sociologist studying power, algorithmic governance and policing. He has ethnographically studied power relations in everyday policing in India. His subsequent work has focused on the concept of algorithmic governance, analysing digital transformations of state practices, focusing on the changing dynamics of discretion, autonomy and control. His research has been published in Big Data and Society, Sociology Compass, Economic and Labour Relations Review, and the Journal of Organizational Ethnography, among others.

 

References

Arrigo, B., & Shaw, O. P. (2023). The de-realization of black bodies in an era of mass digital surveillance: A techno-criminological critique. Theoretical Criminology, 27(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/13624806221082318 

Arun, P. (2025). Communications under siege: Colonial legacy and authoritarian surveillance in India. Surveillance and Society 23(1). https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v23i1.18896

Alqatwana, A. (2024). Utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) in criminal justice and policing. Comparative Law Review, 30: 9-33. https://doi.org/10.12775/CLR.2024.001

Brayne, S. (2021). Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing. Oxford University Press.  

Byler, D. (2022). Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City. Duke University Press.

Srivastav, S., Shruti, K. M., Agarwal, D., Soni, S., & Singh, R. (2026). Intelligent justice: AI-driven forensics and legal process for criminal justice reforms. International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice, 84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijlcj.2026.100832

McKay, C. (2022). The carceral automaton: Digital prisons and technologies of detention. International Journal for Crime, Justice, and Social Democracy 11(1): 100-119. https://doi.org/10.5204/ijcjsd.2137  

Ugwudike, P. (2022). Predictive algorithms in justice systems and the limits of tech-reformism. International Journal for Crime, Justice, and Social Democracy, 11(1): 85-99. https://doi.org/10.5204/ijcjsd.2189   

Varghese, A. (2025). The dialectics of discretion in algorithmic governance and smart policing. Big Data and Society. Advance online publication.  https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517251403966

Waseem, Z. (2022). Insecure Guardians: Enforcement, Encounters, and Everyday Policing in Postcolonial Karachi. Oxford University Press.