Nai Lee Kalema

Nai Lee Kalema is an American scholar of international relations and global governance and PhD researcher in Innovation and Public Policy at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP), at University College London. Kalema's research is on the global political economy of digital transformation and algorithmic governance.

As tied to her doctoral research, Kalema was a 2024-2025 Technology and Human Rights fellow at Harvard Kennedy School's Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights Policy ^[1] and is a Critical Infrastructures Lab fellow (geopolitics) at University of Amsterdam. ^[2] She is also a member of Tierra Comun ^[3].

Kalema's doctoral research is on the global political economy of digital transformation and algorithmic governance, specialising on international organisations' coordination and advancement of global digital policy (referring to the growing body of transnational and international laws, treaties, agreements, norms, standards, etc.) and governance arrangements through globally coordinated efforts and prominent digital transformation initiatives (e.g., digital public infrastructure, data governance, and algorithmic governance).

In the academic edited volume Decolonial Narratives in Economics: Alternative and Underrepresented Voices, Kalema's chapter proposes a critical ' Global Political Economy of Digital Transformation' (GPEDT) framework to critically examine how political economic and cultural forces shape global digital transformation governance, policy, and projects within and amongst countries. ^[4]

Drawing on decolonial, postcolonial, and critical economic perspectives, Kalema introduces her concept of the ' Coloniality of Global Digital Transformation' (CGDT), referring to global digital transformation's entanglements with colonial power dynamics, oppressive structures, and geographical and social stratification of economic exploitation, political exclusion, and imperial expropriation across world systems and in countries, especially (though not exclusively) for many in the Global South. ^[5]

Kalema also examines globally prominent Digital Transformation for Development (DX4D) initiatives' depoliticising, technocratic, and value‐extractive dynamics and effects. Extending political anthropologist James Ferguson's Anti-Politics Machine, Kalema's DX4D Anti-Politics Machine concept describes how global digital transformation is strategically oriented and advanced through global development and humanitarian initiatives to operationalise powerful global and non-state actors' infrastructural, political, and network ideologies and extend their infrastructural control and bureaucratic reach into states, especially through large-scale digital public infrastructure and algorithmic governance projects. ^[5]

Building upon computer scientist and digital activist Joy Buolamwini's Coded Gaze concept, extending from her landmark research on algorithmic bias in AI-powered facial-recognition systems ^[6], Kalema's ' Global Coded Gaze' concept examines the way global inequality and structural violence become encoded not only into digital technologies and AI but also into global digital transformation and algorithmic governance, policy, and infrastructures and, more broadly, deeply embedded across global political-economic systems and societies.^[7]