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Call for Submissions

Volume 21(2): Special Issue on “Global South Perspectives on Technology Regulation”

In 2025, the Indian Journal of Law and Technology (IJLT) marks twenty years since its founding. To commemorate this milestone, IJLT invites submissions for a Special Issue (Volume 21(2)) on the theme of Global South Perspectives on Technology Regulation.

This Special Issue seeks to reflect upon IJLT’s intellectual trajectory as a technology-focused journal located within the Global South, while engaging with contemporary regulatory challenges arising from rapid technological change. The Issue is conceived as an opportunity to foreground policy, legal, and empirical concerns that emerge in distinctive ways from contexts in the Global South and other regions situated at the periphery of developing technologies.

Vision for Volume 21(2)

IJLT’s vision for Volume 21(2) seeks to foreground the policy and empirical questions that arise when legal and regulatory frameworks for technology – often developed in, and for, jurisdictions in the Global North – encounter markedly different institutional environments, developmental priorities, and constitutional histories.

Technology regulation in the Global South frequently unfolds under conditions of uneven state capacity, rapid digitalisation, infrastructural heterogeneity, linguistic plurality, and persistent socioeconomic inequality. These conditions both constrain and shape regulatory choices, and require conceptual frameworks that are attentive to context rather than premised on universal assumptions.

At the same time, the Global South has been a site of considerable regulatory innovation. The emergence of large-scale digital public infrastructures, identity and welfare platforms, novel approaches to data sharing, and distinct institutional arrangements for platform governance demonstrate that regulatory responses are neither derivative nor merely reactive. Instead, these responses frequently embody alternative regulatory logics that reflect domestic political economies, constitutional commitments, and societal needs. As innovative capacity grows in the Global South, the role of regulation becomes increasingly salient: what concerns must states contend with in regulating new technologies, and how do these concerns intersect with questions of state power itself?

In light of these developments, this Special Issue aims to encourage scholarship that is attentive to the particularities of Southern experience while remaining in dialogue with global debates. The Issue seeks to interrogate how technologies are adopted, contested, and regulated within the Global South, and how Southern contexts illuminate the limits of existing regulatory paradigms.

Indicative Sub-Themes

IJLT seeks to cover themes including, but not limited to, the following. Authors are encouraged to advance related or novel lines of inquiry:

  • Investigating how large-scale digital systems are designed, governed, and contested in the Global South, and assessing their implications for access, exclusion, and institutional accountability.
  • Examining how artificial intelligence and automated systems are incorporated into administrative, regulatory, and adjudicatory processes, including questions of transparency, error, discrimination, and institutional capacity.
  • Assessing emerging approaches to data governance, including collective and community models, public-interest data sharing, and state stewardship, and analysing their consequences for autonomy, privacy, and innovation.
  • Exploring the regulation of digital platforms and intermediaries, with attention to market power, interoperability, content moderation, gig work, and the interface between platforms and informal economies.
  • Analysing the growth of surveillance and security technologies and evaluating how courts, legislatures, and regulators respond to concerns involving rights, discrimination, and state power.
  • Evaluating the environmental and material dimensions of technological systems, including waste, sustainability, supply chains, energy use, resource extraction, and the governance of climate-related technologies.
  • Examining transnational interactions in technology regulation, including regional alliances, standards-setting, digital trade, and forms of South–South cooperation and comparison.

Submission Guidelines

The Special Issue will include both invited and submitted contributions and aims to reflect a diversity of intellectual, regional, and disciplinary perspectives. Interdisciplinary work is particularly encouraged.

IJLT accepts submissions across the following categories:

  • Articles: 5,000-12,000 words
  • Essays: 3,000-5,000 words
  • Case Notes, Legislative Comments, Book/Article Reviews: 2,000-5,000 words

Detailed Submission Guidelines and instructions for use of the Submissions Portal are available here.

Deadline for submissions: 31 January 2026

Contact

For questions or clarifications, please write to ijltedit@gmail.com.