The Leaders' Summit, representing a transition to a new strategic orientation for the NATO, has been discussed from many different angles and, by all appearances, will continue to be so. One of the central pillars of this new strategy—in which Russia and China are officially designated as the principal threats and subjected to containment—will be the strategic competition unfolding through Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data analytics technologies. The balance of power, once grounded in physical and industrial capacity, is now being forced to restructure around a more complex geopolitical logic based on the control of data flows, computing infrastructure, and algorithmic decision-making systems. The summit has once again made it clear that NATO is formally integrating military AI into its collective defence and security frameworks. Presented in the sanitised language of "responsible use" and "ethical principles", this technological initiative, when examined closely, emerges as an integral component of a system of digital colonialism and necro-extractivism (resource extraction through death).

DATA COLONIALISM UNDER THE GUISE OF ETHICS

NATO’s artificial intelligence strategy, adopted in 2021 and revised in 2024, functions as a ‘soft law’ mechanism that conceals the power relations underpinning the alliance beneath generalised phrases such as legality, accountability, explainability and neutrality. NATO’s principles point to a model of “accountability” that legitimises the use of force provided it complies with a technical standard of “explainability”.

Military AI is inseparable from a emerging economy that, in one respect, could be described as “digital colonialism”. Whilst historical colonialism involved the occupation of territories and the plundering of raw materials, today’s digital colonialism commodifies data—the behavioural traces of billions of people—by collecting it without consent. Viewed from a broader perspective, this extractivism essentially takes place on three levels:

Natural Resource Extractivism: Minerals such as cobalt and lithium, which are necessary for AI hardware, are extracted from the countries of the Global South under conditions of exploitation.Data Extractivism: Mass data is harvested from post-colonial populations to train machine learning models.The Dependency Trap: The Global South is made dependent on the hardware and cloud infrastructures owned by Western tech giants (Nvidia, Palantir, Amazon) in order to maintain their military "up-to-dateness".

THE BATTLEFIELD AS A LIVE LABORATORY: NECRO-EXTRACTIVISM

However, there is another particularly pressing aspect to this issue, which has come to light alongside Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians. NATO’s technological modernisation is transforming active conflict zones in the Global South into ‘live laboratories’ for institutional machine learning. AI models are prone to making errors by exhibiting ‘vulnerability’ in environments outside their training data. Defence technology companies and states use active conflict zones as testing grounds to overcome this technical limitation.

At this point, ‘necro-extractivism’—a concept developed in the recent past, which refers to the optimisation of targeting algorithms on the bodies of marginalised populations by harvesting real-time combat telemetry and field data from battlefields via military AI systems—has become the fourth level of this digital colonialist policy.

The “specialised” systems used by the Israeli military in Gaza—which analyse mobile phone metadata and social media connections to automatically add thousands of people to “target lists”, routinise violence, legitimise killing through algorithmic procedures, and, by bypassing the human factor, are elevated to an almost elevated to a “techno-theological” level—stand out as the most tragic example of this on an industrial scale.

Another aspect of the issue that must be emphasised time and again is the sidelining of the human factor. Although NATO’s relevant policy documents claim that AI will bring precision and accuracy to warfare, in reality these systems lead to the human factor being reduced to a mere symbolic approval, whilst machines unquestioningly accept decisions that reflect the intentions of the elites who designed the algorithms.

Furthermore, the boundary between military and commercial interests is rapidly becoming blurred. As military AI systems require vast infrastructure exceeding states’ own routine computing capacity, collaboration with Big Tech is taking place to develop the computing infrastructure known as ‘clouds of death’, leading to war and violence becoming a direct source of profit and model development for the technology industry. The Pentagon and NATO are openly advocating a policy that will directly involve companies such as Palantir and OpenAI in military targeting processes, and may even consider conferring military ranks upon some of these companies’ senior executives.

DIGITAL BANDUNG

Ultimately, imperialism’s military artificial intelligence project is, at its core, an instrument of hegemony that poses an imminent threat, aimed at completely eradicating the sovereignty of the Global South—a sovereignty already eroded by various neo-colonial practices.

Specific policies and measures to counter this algorithmic hegemony must be discussed as a matter of urgency. Above all, a radical decoupling is a fundamental necessity; it has become a top priority for dependent countries to rid their national defence and governance infrastructures of Western-owned models and cloud systems. In this context, proposals that would enable countries of the Global South to collaborate on data sovereignty and shared technological ecosystems, following a logic similar to that of the ‘Digital Bandung’ (1), are also attracting attention.

The structural impasses and tragic outcome of the 1955 Bandung experience are well known to us all. Any initiative that fails to recognise the link between imperialist relations of domination and the mechanisms of capitalist exploitation, or that disregards the fact that imperialism is an internal phenomenon, is doomed to failure. However, it would be another major mistake to take refuge in the purity of theory whilst failing to recognise that political struggle is, at its core, a struggle for hegemony, and that the path to this lies in a down-to-earth and workable alliance policy. For this reason, whilst I do not regard it as a fully defensible proposal, I would like to briefly summarise its key points in the hope that it might deepen the debate:

The fundamental principles advocated by this vision are as follows:

Intellectual and Digital Sovereignty: Digital Bandung advocates that countries of the Global South should have full control over their own data and infrastructure.

Multipolarity: It aims for a multipolar digital order in which no single power or tech giant dictates the rules, and where diverse voices and values play a role in determining technological standards.

Digital Justice: This principle entails the equitable sharing of value derived from data, ensuring that the Global South moves beyond being merely a passive consumer of imperialist technologies to become an equal stakeholder in the digital economy.

South-South Cooperation and Solidarity: Recognising that no single state can stand alone against digital giants, this principle calls for the establishment of strategic cooperation and technological solidarity amongst countries of the Global South.

Autonomy and Self-Determination: It advocates for the autonomy of societies to build technological infrastructures in line with their own cultural, legal and strategic interests, thereby freeing themselves from the traps of technological dependency.

In summary, Digital Bandung defines the digital age not merely as a process of technological progress, but also as part of the struggle for dignity, autonomy and full post-colonial independence.

(1) www.theideasletter.org/essay/digital-bandung

Note: This article is translated from the original article titled Emperyalizmin askeri yapay zekâ projesi: Veri sömürgeciliği ve NATO, published in BirGün newspaper on July 15, 2026.