Global Governance

This study examines the intersection of artificial intelligence, global governance, and disaster risk management through a qualitative investigation of 92 Iranian experts across disciplines such as geoinformatics, emergency planning, and environmental engineering. While AI offers a significant promise for enhancing early warning systems, damage assessments, and real-time decision-making, its integration into DRM systems remains constrained by fragmented data infrastructures, institutional silos, and geopolitical exclusions. Participants underscored AI’s potential to improve response coordination and risk forecasting, but emphasized the need for robust data governance, algorithmic transparency, and capacity building. The study highlights critical ethical and political concerns—particularly in countries like Iran facing technological marginalization due to sanctions and limited access to global data ecosystems. Drawing on grounded theory and thematic analysis, the research identifies institutional fragmentation, interoperability barriers, and normative governance deficits as primary obstacles to AI-enabled DRM. It argues for a globally coordinated approach grounded in justice, inclusivity, and human-centered design.

This study investigates the way in which public discourse on social media reflects and shapes global power dynamics surrounding AI. Leveraging a corpus of approximately 21,000 English-language posts from Platform X (2021–2025), this study utilizes a computational linguistics framework—incorporating topic modeling, sentiment analysis, emotion classification, and named entity recognition—to analyze the construction of AI, interrogating its thematic narratives and affective investments across geopolitical contexts. Findings reveal a discourse shaped by U.S.–China technological rivalry, AI militarization, and infrastructural sovereignty, with strong currents of fear, anger, and skepticism. While Western powers and corporate actors dominate the narrative space, alternative discourses from the Global South emphasize digital dependency, exclusion, and justice. The emotional intensity and thematic complexity of the discourse suggest that publics are not simply reacting to geopolitical developments, but actively construct contested imaginaries of AI’s role in world order. This research contributes to a growing body of literature that recognizes public discourse as a critical site of informal geopolitics and underscores the need for more inclusive, responsive, and ethically grounded AI governance frameworks.