My friend and colleague, the remarkable Tugrul Keskin will be presenting his paper, “Algorithmic Ummah: Turkey’s AI Ambitions and the Neoliberal Pan-Islamist Reconfiguration of the Global South,” at the conference AI and International Relations: Perspectives from the Global South and Muslim World, on December 4, 2025, hosted by Florida International University. I will be joining the event online from Almaty. Please find the conference program attached.
The Conference theme is fascinating:
The AI and International Relations: Perspectives from the Global South and Muslim World conference convenes leading scholars and researchers to examine the political, strategic, and ethical dimensions of artificial intelligence in contemporary world affairs. The conference explores how AI reshapes notions of sovereignty, governance, and agency — particularly within the Global South and the Muslim world — while considering the broader geopolitical, cultural, and technological contexts in which these transformations unfold. Through interdisciplinary dialogue across international relations, political economy, and technology studies, participants analyze AI as both an instrument of global power and a catalyst for new forms of innovation and governance. The discussions engage critical questions of digital sovereignty, security, and ethical responsibility, emphasizing how technological change redefines power and legitimacy in the international system. By situating non-Western perspectives within the study of artificial intelligence and global order, the conference underscores the need for rigorous, comparative, and theoretically informed inquiry into the governance of emerging technologies. It advances a deeper understanding of how AI influences the evolving structures of authority, strategy, and decision-making in the twenty-first-century world. (AI and International Relations: Perspectives from the Global South and Muslim World).
Keskin suggests that: "Turkey’s AI ambitions have accelerated dramatically over the past decade, enabling the country to recast itself not merely as a regional security actor but as a civilizational-technological leader. While global narratives portray the AI competition as primarily between the United States and China (Lee, 2018; Segal, 2018), Turkey positions itself as a third pole an Islamic technological vanguard capable of guiding the Global South through “moral,” “ethical,” and “justice-oriented” AI.
Of particular interest is Keskin's focus on Islamic Foundations and their role in reshaping Tirkish efforts to leverage its power.
Keskin concludes:
Turkey’s pursuit of an algorithmic Ummah represents a significant transformation in the
relationship between technology, civilizational politics, and geopolitical strategy. By integrating Islamic solidarity discourse with AI-driven modernization and defense-industrial expansion, Turkey seeks to assert itself as a moral and technological leader within the Muslim world and the Global South. Yet the project is riddled with contradictions that reflect the structural limits of middle-power technological nationalism. Turkey’s digital sovereignty remains constrained by global supply chains; its Pan-Islamic rhetoric is often overshadowed by pragmatic national interests; and its South–South partnerships frequently reproduce dependencies characteristic of neoliberal capitalism.
•Nevertheless, the algorithmic Ummah remains a powerful framework for understanding how
states in the Global South use technology to reshape moral geographies, challenge Western-centric digital orders, and articulate new civilizational futures. As AI continues to transform
global politics, Turkey’s experiment offers a critical window into the possibilities and tensions of building alternative technological worlds in a multipolar age.
The Conference Program and speaker list follows below.
Click here to register
The conference will be free and open to the public.
