Jul 2026· Potchefstroom Electronic Law Journal· 0 citations
TL;DR
Applied to African AI governance domains, this framework reveals how institutional fragmentation, infrastructural dependency, and global platform dominance undermine state-centred regulatory models.
Abstract
The governance of artificial intelligence (AI) in Africa faces competing pressures from demands for regulatory intervention alongside concerns about institutional capacity, innovation costs, and economic vulnerability. Debates surrounding algorithmic discrimination, biometric surveillance, and extractive data practices by global platforms have sharpened questions about the appropriate roles of states, markets, and civil society in governing AI systems. Yet existing governance scholarship tends to address these questions through either ethical principles or state-centric regulatory frameworks, leaving a significant analytical gap where law and technical design intersect.
This article introduces legal-technical governance as an analytical framework for examining Africa’s emerging AI regulatory landscape. Distinguishing governance from regulation, the article argues that AI governance in Africa is already distributed across data protection statutes, fintech guidelines, cybersecurity frameworks, and content moderation policies imposed by global platforms, making a broader, systems-level analytical tool both necessary and timely. Legal-technical governance foregrounds the co-constitutive relationship between legal norms and technical operations, including data labelling, model training, and algorithmic auditing. It accounts for the various actors shaping AI outcomes, from multinational technology firms to standards bodies and affected communities.
To examine the gaps where legal frameworks and technical systems diverge, the article draws on Dooyeweerd's modal aspects as a philosophical lens. Applied to African AI governance domains, this framework reveals how institutional fragmentation, infrastructural dependency, and global platform dominance undermine state-centred regulatory models. The article concludes by advancing legal-technical governance as a productive framework for scholarship and policymaking at the intersection of law, technology, and development in Africa.
In the wake of the European Union (EU)'s landmark Artificial Intelligence Act and similar normative developments in other regions, the regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) has become a global race for governance legitimacy and leadership. While many jurisdictions are swiftly advancing binding legislative instruments to manage the opportunities and risks of AI, AI governance across African states and regional institutions has, to date, tended to favour a more deliberative and consultative approach, reflecting diverse national priorities and capacities. The African Union (AU), through various soft law initiatives and continental strategies, has established foundational principles that prioritise inclusiveness, context sensitivity, and sovereignty in technological governance. Chief among these initiatives is the AU Continental Artificial Intelligence Strategy, which articulates a vision for AI governance that reflects African values – a collection of indigenous values, a communal ethos, and socio-cultural realities – while cautiously engaging with the technical universality promoted by global standards.
The purpose of this paper is to outline an agenda for discussions on the imperative and feasibility of transitioning from soft law frameworks to an AU treaty on AI. It argues that the central challenge is not merely the codification of rules, but the normative reconciliation of African values with existing global standards. Global AI standards – often shaped by Eurocentric epistemologies and market logic – may inadequately reflect African ethical frameworks, historical contexts and development priorities. Yet the pursuit of regulatory autonomy must not lead to technological isolationism. Instead, the article argues for a hybrid normative approach that retains the technical interoperability necessary for international collaboration, while embedding the African philosophies of Ubuntu, solidarity and fairness within the legal architecture of AI governance.
L. Abdulrauf· Potchefstroom Electronic Law...· 0 citations
It is argued that ESG frameworks, which evolved through incremental adjustment, may prove insufficient for governing algorithmic systems and proposed adding a fourth pillar, Algorithmic Governance, within an extended ESGA framework to address risks that transcend traditional governance categories.
Pitabas Mohanty, Supriti Mishra· Business Strategy and the En...· 0 citations
Artificial intelligence has moved from a specialised technical concern to a central object of international economic and security policy, yet global governance arrangements remain fragmented across competing regulatory models. This article addresses how policymakers can reconcile innovation, competitiveness, human rights, security and sustainability within a coherent governance architecture for artificial intelligence operating across national, regional and multilateral levels. The goals include the review of the governance theory and current practices applicable to AI regulations, analysis of stakeholders' interests and influence, estimation of the possible economic, social, legal, technological and environmental effects of such an arrangement, as well as the design of a feasible multi-level governance system with monitoring and evaluation mechanisms. The article utilises a qualitative comparative policy analysis based on primary legal documents, which include Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, OECD Recommendation on Artificial Intelligence (as amended in 2024), UN Resolution A/RES/79/325 of 2025, and the Global Digital Compact of 2024, in addition to the academic literature on the subject from peer-reviewed sources and books. This paper proposes a framework that takes into account the multi-level and adaptive governance approaches with a particular emphasis on digital sovereignty, thereby creating a three-tier architecture that will include global normative coordination, regional and plurilateral regulatory clusters, and national or sectoral implementation, illustrated by the case study of Kenya, which has created its National Artificial Intelligence Strategy 2025-2030. The main findings in the paper suggest that regulation fragmentation among the European Union, the United States, and China is growing rather than converging, that multilateral instruments do not possess any kind of binding enforcement mechanism, and that low- and middle-income countries like Kenya experience capacity limitations even when developing a proactive national strategy. This paper argues that a layered subsidiarity approach, with specific financing for capacity-building and technical standards that work across the board, is more likely to deliver effective global AI governance than calls for a binding treaty.
Asher Odhiambo Ojuok, Julius Murumba, E. Micheni· East African Journal of Info...· 0 citations
An academic adaptation of Patrick Rudolf Dannacher's presentation at the 10th Jakarta Geopolitical Forum 2026 is presented, examining Indonesia's strategic position in the evolving global AI landscape.
Patrick Rudolf Dannacher Dannacher· Proceeding Jakarta Geopoliti...· 1 citation
This editorial introduces the special issue on the legal-technical governance and regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) in Africa, the product of a project launched by the Data Science Law Lab in collaboration with the Data Science for Social Impact research group at the University of Pretoria. It situates the five peer-reviewed contributions within a legal-technical approach to AI governance: a transdisciplinary approach in which the legal and the technical are fused to add nuance to regulatory forms and practices and to close the legal-technical gap in AI governance and regulation. The contributions move from conceptual foundations, where legal-technical governance is advanced as an analytical framework, through continental norm-making on the transition from African Union soft law to an AI treaty and national policy design on intellectual property in African AI strategies, to the operation of AI systems in practice, addressing the algorithmic sovereignty gap in AI-enabled surveillance in South Africa and Nigeria and the legal status of predictive policing in the fight against cybercrime in Nigeria.
Chijioke I. Okorie, Vukosi Marivate· Potchefstroom Electronic Law...· 0 citations
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping the structures and processes of governance and transforming the domain of cybersecurity, thereby redefining the conceptual and practical foundations of national security policy. Unlike earlier waves of digitalization, AI introduces algorithmic decision-making, predictive analytics, and autonomous systems into core governance functions, including policy formulation, service delivery, surveillance, and cyber defense. This paper examines the intersection of AI, governance, and cybersecurity from an interdisciplinary perspective grounded in political science, governance studies, and national security studies. It argues that AI constitutes not merely a technological instrument but a transformative governance force that reconfigures state capacity, sovereignty, power relations, and security practices. Drawing upon classical and contemporary literature from Indian and international scholars, the study adopts a qualitative, analytical methodology based on documentary analysis of academic texts, policy documents, and national cybersecurity strategies. The paper contends that national security in the digital age must be reconceptualized beyond military paradigms to include digital infrastructure resilience, information integrity, algorithmic accountability, and institutional legitimacy. It concludes that effective national security policy requires integrated governance frameworks that embed AI within ethical norms, legal safeguards, and democratic oversight mechanisms.
Vinay Kumar· Dynamics of Public Administr...· 0 citations
We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads.
See our Cookie Policy.
