Acceso usuarios
Alice Martini
Este artículo propone una reflexión crítica sobre la inteligencia artificial (IA) desde el campo de las Relaciones Internacionales (RRII), con el objetivo de introducir al debate en lengua española algunos de los marcos teóricos que permiten comprender esta tecnología más allá de los enfoques tradicionales. Frente a las aproximaciones dominantes, que tienden a concebir la IA como una herramienta neutral o inevitable, el texto la aborda como un ensamblaje sociotécnico y discursivo profundamente político, implicado en la (re)producción de jerarquías y desigualdades globales. El artículo dialoga con distintas tradiciones reflectivistas y críticas, desde los estudios de Ciencia, Tecnología y Sociedad (CTS) y la teoría del actor-red (ANT) hasta el postestructuralismo, el feminismo y los enfoques postcoloniales y decoloniales. Todo ello con el fin de mostrar cómo la IA configura nuevas formas de poder, control y exclusión en la política mundial. Además, se exploran las dimensiones biopolíticas y de gubernamentalidad liberal de esta tecnología y, por otro lado, se ilustra cómo su desarrollo y uso se pueden estudiar desde posiciones marxistas y relacionarlas con lógicas capitalistas y militarizadas que articulan redes globales de poder. Asimismo, se describe cómo las contribuciones feministas y post/decoloniales denuncian la exclusión epistémica (más allá de la material) que caracteriza a la producción tecnológica contemporánea. El artículo concluye subrayando la necesidad de incorporar estas perspectivas críticas en las RRII en lengua española para evitar reproducir narrativas tecnocráticas o deterministas y para avanzar hacia una comprensión de la IA como espacio de disputa política, donde también emergen formas de resistencia, reimaginación y agencia colectiva frente a la expansión del poder algorítmico. Por lo general, simplificando debates teóricos, el artículo presenta debates y propone preguntas de investigación que inviten a repensar el lugar de la tecnología en las RRII en lengua española desde perspectivas críticas que permitan capturar las diferentes dimensiones de poder y de jerarquías que (re)produce la IA.
In recent years, the proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) has triggered profound transformations across all spheres of global politics. Yet, despite its growing relevance, International Relations (IR) schol-arship (particularly in Spanish-language scholarship) has tended to approach AI through conventional, state-centric and technocratic frameworks. This article seeks to introduce critical perspectives on AI to the field of IR in Spanish, offering a conceptual and theoretical bridge between critical traditions in the discipline and debates present in Reflectivist and Critical IR in English. The article thus aims to bring alternative approaches into Spanish-speaking IR and and does so by briefly and schematically present-ing various approaches to technology such as Science and Technology Studies; Actor-Network Theory; poststructuralism; feminist, post/decolonial approaches; and Marxist readings of IPE. Drawing on these fields, rather than treating AI as a neutral tool or as an inevitable technological de-velopment, the article conceptualises it as a sociotechnical and discursive assemblage, a field in which knowledge, power, and material infrastructures intersect. AI not only reflects social realities; it actively constitutes them. Every dataset, model, and technical design embeds assumptions about what is know-able, governable, and valuable in the international society, and beyond. These approaches show how AI reconfigures relations of power, subjectivities, and hierarchies at both micro and macro levels.The first section of the article offers an overview of how AI has entered the field of IR. It identifies two main trends: a technocratic approach that views AI as an instrument to improve prediction, deci-sion-making, or policy efficiency, and a security-driven approach that frames AI as both a threat and a strategic resource in international politics. While both perspectives are informative, they often naturalise technology as an autonomous force, depoliticising its development and obscuring the inequalities and power relations that underpin it.The second section introduces critical theoretical frameworks that allow for a more reflexive understand-ing of AI in IR. Drawing on STS and Actor-Network Theory (ANT), AI is analysed as a network of human and non-human actors co-producing global order. Then, from a Foucauldian perspective, it illustrates how AI can be read as a dispositif of power and governmentality: a set of discursive and material prac-tices that govern populations through diverse techniques such as freedom, efficiency, and risk manage-ment, among others. This lens exposes how AI enables new forms of (global) governance that operate heterarchically, through networks of power that circulate in society.Crucially, these assemblages are not neutral. As the following section illustrates, they reproduce existing social hierarchies of race, gender, and class, while also generating new forms of inclusion and exclu-sion. As feminist and postcolonial scholars have long argued, science and technology are not universal but situated practices. Knowledge production in AI remains dominated by Western, male actors, while alternative epistemologies, often non-Western, “feminine”, or community-based, are marginalised. This epistemic asymmetry mirrors broader global inequalities, positioning the “Global North” as the producer of technologies and the “Global South” as a testing ground, among other dynamics.From a postcolonial perspective, AI governance reproduces the hierarchies of the global racialised or-der: countries in the Global South often provide raw data, cheap labour, and testing environments for technologies designed in the Global North. This dynamic consolidates a new form of digital colonialism, where control over technological infrastructures translates into geopolitical and epistemic power. These patterns of dependency and extraction reinforce the uneven geography of the digital world and perpet-uate inequalities in global governance, development, and security.These approaches, as the article illustrates, argue that the rise of AI exposes and intensifies the colonial and heteropatriarchal foundations of global governance. They highlight how AI systems reproduce gen-dered and racialised hierarchies embedded in data, language, and institutional logics. Examples include algorithmic discrimination in surveillance and border control, where AI-driven technologies dispropor-tionately target racialised bodies, or gender biases in automated hiring and policy evaluation systems that reinforce the exclusion of women and non-binary individuals. These cases illustrate how AI partic-ipates in the production of subjectivities, constructing categories of the desirable and the deviant, the governable and the disposable. Overall, this section also explores how critical approaches (feminist, postcolonial, and decolonial) inter-vene in these debates by uncovering the invisible power relations that structure technological develop-ment. Feminist epistemologies emphasise that technological knowledge is always situated and partial. They call for a more inclusive understanding of “innovation” that recognises historically marginalised forms of knowledge and of existence, from women’s reproductive work to Indigenous and communal practices of care and sustainability. Some authors advocate for a more inclusive technological future; others go further, questioning whether technological development should continue at all, given its colo-nial, patriarchal, and environmental costs.In its final section, the article engages with the relationship between AI, capitalism, and militarisation. Building on the work of Marxist Feminist scholars, it argues that the militarisation of AI is part of the capitalist growth cycle and the continuous search for new markets. States and corporations invest heav-ily in the development of increasingly “efficient” and “enhanced” killing systems, while simultaneously defunding social infrastructure and care economies. AI thus reinforces a global political economy where technological innovation is driven by profit, extractivism and security imperatives, not by social (or eco-logical) needs. The expansion of AI into military and security domains contributes to a broader process of social militarisation, normalising surveillance, control, and pre-emptive governance as everyday prac-tices of global politics.In its final reflections, the article turns to the normative and political implications of these analyses. Much of the critical literature rightly exposes the risks of AI, its role in deepening inequality, (re)pro-ducing sociopolitical hierarchies, militarisation, and ecological degradation, among others. It is equally important to acknowledge spaces of resistance, subversion, and reappropriation. Practices of refusal, ethical boycotts, and digital minimalism challenge the inevitability of technological progress, as the fi-nal reflections illustrate. Other forms of resistance lie in the struggle for technological justice, efforts to decolonise AI development. These initiatives connect AI to broader debates on global political economy, environmental sustainability, and North–South inequalities. Even the critical act of questioning whether certain technologies should exist at all constitutes a political intervention that disrupts the myth of tech-nological inevitability.In the conclusion, the article calls for a repoliticisation of technology in IR. AI should not be seen mere-ly as an instrument of state power or a site of competition among great powers, but as a constitutive force shaping global order, knowledge, and subjectivity. Engaging with AI through critical lenses (such as Foucauldian, feminist, post/decolonial, STS and ANT) allows IR to confront its own epistemological limits and, hopefully, open itself to interdisciplinary dialogues. Ultimately, the goal of this article is not to provide definitive answers but to open new avenues of debate and research, especially in Spanish-lan-guage scholarship. It invites Spanish-speaking IR to ask: What does the discipline lose if it continues to approach technology through reductionist, state-centric narratives? How might critical, post/decolonial, and feminist and other perspectives transform our understanding of global politics and the (re)produc-tion of power inequalities in the age of artificial intelligence?
