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The Banality of Global Algorithmic Violence: Global digital transformation’s cultivation of predatory algorithmic governance | UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) Working Paper (WP 2026-02)
Authors:
- Nai Lee Kalema | PhD Student, UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, University College London and Technology & Human Rights Fellow 2024-2025, Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights, Harvard Kennedy School
Abstract:
This discussion paper focuses on the following key question: what are the implications of the current global political economy of digital transformation (GPEDT), examining how the global political, economic, and governance structures and systems driving digital transformation—such as digital transformation for development (DX4D)3 and algorithmic governance—reshape states, societies, and lives through infrastructural, structural, systemic, and ideological means, alongside its implications for human well-being. Centred on the World Bank Group’s current global digital transformation approach, this paper examines how GDT governance and policy—particularly digital public infrastructure (DPI), GovTech, and AI-driven governance—are translated into global systems, states, institutions, and people’s everyday lives through global algorithmic governance.
The paper argues that the World Bank Group’s current GDT approach—by promoting digitally and algorithmically mediated forms of governance—is also accelerating and deepening inequality, precarity, and avoidable suffering worldwide, particularly in some of the world’s most impoverished countries as illustrated throughout the paper. Its decision to pursue this GDT trajectory is neither neutral nor naturally inevitable; it is a choice and thus a form of global algorithmic violence. Global algorithmic violence refers to the convergence of structural, infrastructural, and direct forms of harm that emerge from, or are enhanced by, a form of predatory global algorithmic governance being advanced by powerful global institutions. Global algorithmic violence can be made visible through its direct and indirect material implications for human health and well-being, especially as reflected in individual-, population group-, country-, and global-level health outcomes and health equity indicators.
This paper explores GDT as a determinant of health (DOH), looking at predatory global algorithmic governance’s downstream implications for health and well-being, from its material effects for public institutions to its unjust and violent implications for everyday life. Drawing interdisciplinary insights from a variety of scholarship—global political economy, economic sociology, science and technology studies, political science, social medicine, and decolonial/postcolonial studies—and from over 50 semi-structured qualitative interviews with GDT policy leaders, practitioners, experts, corporate actors, and technologists, most with World Bank Group experience, this paper critically reframes discussions about the global political economy of digital transformation, foregrounding the harmful consequences of predatory global algorithmic governance for human health and well-being.
Reference:
Kalema, N. L. (2026). The Banality of Global Algorithmic Violence: Global digital transformation’s cultivation of predatory algorithmic governance. UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, Working Paper Series (IIPP WP 2026-02). ISSN 2635-0122
Available at: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/publications/2026/feb/banality-global-algorithmic-violence
This working paper is part of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose’s (UCL IIPP) publication series.
Explore more working papers and policy reports here.