The AI-Magicalized Double Movement: Transforming Social Institutions

Artificial intelligence and distributed digital infrastructures—blockchains, smart contracts, decentralized autonomous organizations, and sovereign technology stacks—do not merely transform social institutions. Simultaneously, they are reconfiguring and destabilizing the social order.

This session aims to conceptualize and empirically inquire into this dual dynamic as an AI‑magicalized double movement. It is considered a process in which institutional emergence and institutional disrepair unfold in parallel and interact to shape new configurations of power, governance, and exclusion. We use the notion of magicalization to describe the structural production of outcomes, since outcomes that appear inevitable are difficult to interrogate, contest, or govern.

Dialogue is organized around two interrelated questions. First, what new institutional forms are being enabled or generated by AI and distributed digital systems—such as polycentric governance arrangements, decentralized public services, algorithmic welfare regimes, and sovereign AI architectures? Second, which existing institutions, including welfare bureaucracies, judiciaries, journalism, and democratic processes, are being eroded by these dynamics, and why and for what purpose? It raises the most difficult anticipatory examination of the institutional forms AI renders viable and those it displaces.

Theoretical and empirical exploration of these asymmetric transformations across diverse contexts will advance critical knowledge of institutional transformation under AI-driven conditions. Comparative and integrated North-South critical approaches that move beyond superficial engagements with decolonial perspectives are needed. Research drawing on cases from the Global South, primarily Asia, is invited.

Session Organizers:

Prof. Jelica STEFANOVIC STAMBUK, University of Belgrade Faculty of Political Sciences, Serbia, vzorin@gmail.com
Nikola LAZIC, Institute for political studies, Serbia, lazicnikola.fpn@gmail.com

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