Global Information Society Watch 2019 — Artificial Intelligence: Human rights, social justice and development

Global Information Society Watch 2019 — Artificial Intelligence: Human rights, social justice and development is the civil-society evidence-base edited volume published by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) and ARTICLE 19 on 28 November 2019 and launched at the Internet Governance Forum in Berlin the same day. Edited by Valeria Betancourt and Mallory Knodel, the 2019 edition is the annual GISWatch cycle's thematic AI volume and remains the corpus's most comprehensive single multi-country civil-society survey of AI deployment and rights harms with a Global-South-anchored authorship.

Scope and structure

The 2019 edition assembles 40 country reports, three regional reports, and eight thematic reports written predominantly by Global-South civil-society researchers in APC's network and partner organisations. The country-report register spans Benin, Argentina, India, Russia, Ukraine, and 35 other jurisdictions; the regional reports cover Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America; the eight thematic reports address data governance, food sovereignty, AI in the workplace, autonomous weapons systems ("killer robots"), and the wider cross-cutting questions of AI as it intersects with human-rights, social-justice, and development frames. The volume was released in 13 language versions — including English, Spanish, French, Arabic, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Japanese — under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence, and is registered with print ISBN 978-92-95113-12-1.

Framing — perspective from the Global South

The 2019 edition's central editorial move is the framing of AI as a Global-South question rather than as a Global-North policy debate that the Global South receives. In the editors' preface, the volume "provides a perspective from the global South on the application of AI to our everyday lives" and examines "how algorithmic decision making impact on marginalised people and the poor" across health, education, social services, and smart-city initiatives. APC's own retrospective restates the same critical move in sharper terms: "conversations on AI have been driven largely by Western and Global North predictions" while "the very real effects of AI are also more diverse" across the jurisdictions the country reports survey. The volume positions the AI-and-human-rights field as requiring the kind of ground-level Global-South perspective that the GISWatch network of national-civil-society researchers is uniquely positioned to assemble at scale.

Selected chapters and contributions

The volume's thematic and country chapters supply named-byline contributions that the corpus's wider Global-South-civil-society AI register draws on. Joana Varon of Coding Rights and Paz Peña co-authored the Decolonising AI: A transfeminist approach to data and social justice thematic chapter, anchored on Argentina's Plataforma Tecnológica de Intervención Social — the "86 per cent accuracy" teenage-pregnancy prediction system deployed in Salta province — as the through-line case for the argument that AI systems deployed in Latin America encode discrimination under the guise of objectivity, with the chapter's framing built on the Cathy O'Neil observation that "models are opinions embedded in mathematics". The IGF Berlin launch panel further surfaced Rachel Adams of the Human Sciences Research Council in South Africa, Alex Comninos on the AI-and-sustainable-human-development thematic, Daniel Mwesigwa of CIPESA Uganda on AI-enabled surveillance tools, and Varon herself on the transfeminist-decolonial thematic — with APC senior advisor Anriette Esterhuysen framing the wider editorial question of where AI policy intervention points "need to come from" — "nationally driven" or via "global standards".

The country-report register carries additional Global-South-civil-society contributions that the corpus's APC retrospective consolidates as the volume's exemplars: the Digital Empowerment Foundation in India on caste, gender, and religious bias in AI deployments in education; Cooperativa Sulá Batsú in Costa Rica on citizen-organisation participation in healthcare AI decision-making; Bytes for All Bangladesh on automation's impact on garment-worker labour; and Nodo TAU in Argentina on union responses to AI in working conditions. The cross-chapter shape of the volume is consistent throughout — each report grounds a regional or national rights-and-AI question in a specific deployment context, named local civil-society researchers contribute the analytical work, and APC and ARTICLE 19 supply the editorial and convening scaffolding that knits the contributions into a single Global-South-anchored evidence base.

Posture within the corpus

Within the corpus, GISWatch 2019 is the first publication-class entry anchored on APC, the first Global-South AI-and-human-rights edited-volume anchor on the publications slate, and the longest-running annual-publication line the publications slate references — the GISWatch annual is APC's flagship Global-South-civil-society-network publication produced continuously from 2007, with the 2019 edition the AI-thematic instalment inside that cycle. The publications slate has previously carried the Anglophone-rooted African anchor in the Paradigm Initiative-led Legal Analysis of Laws, Policies and Government Strategies Relating to Artificial Intelligence in Kenya, Mauritius, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia, the EngageMedia-led Governance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Southeast Asia, the Derechos Digitales-led Decisiones automatizadas en la función pública en América Latina, and the AfricTivistes-led AI in Elections and the Challenge to Information Integrity; GISWatch 2019 installs the cross-regional Global-South AI civil-society anchor that the other anchored publications instantiate inside their respective regions, and gives the publications slate its earliest dated Global-South AI civil-society compilation by five years.

The publication is also the corpus's first instance of the multi-publisher edited-volume register on the publications slate. Prior Global-South AI anchor publications have been single-publisher productions (Derechos Digitales, EngageMedia, Paradigm Initiative, AfricTivistes-led with DRI as methodological co-researcher). GISWatch 2019 sits inside a different shape — co-publication by APC and ARTICLE 19 with explicit dual-imprint billing, an editor pair drawn one each from APC (Valeria Betancourt) and the wider digital-rights field (Mallory Knodel), a 40-country contributing-author roster that operates as a network publication rather than a single-organisation report, and Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) institutional funding supporting the GISWatch cycle. The shape is the network-secretariat-coordinated compilation register that distinguishes APC's publication line from the single-anchor-organisation reports the publications slate's other Global-South anchors instantiate, and the GISWatch 2019 entry is the corpus's anchor for that register.

The publication is referenced from the APC body's AI and human rights section, where the 2019 edition is identified as the most comprehensive single multi-country civil-society survey of AI deployment and rights harms in the Global South that the corpus carries on its publications slate, and from voice-joana-varon's named-byline publication register through the Varon and Peña Decolonising AI thematic chapter.