What kinds of AI futures become thinkable, legitimate, or compelling when geopolitical authority is asserted through signals, imaginaries, and infrastructural promises rather than through enforceable regulation. Contemporary AI governance increasingly operates through staged announcements, export controls, safety summits, compute thresholds, and grand infrastructure pledges. These gestures perform political resolve in a domain where direct control is limited, distributed, and often privately held. Whether such practices genuinely govern artificial intelligence or primarily perform sovereignty remains an open and contested question.

This roundtable approaches the so called AI Cold War not as a settled geopolitical condition but as a struggle over who gets to define credible futures and render them inevitable. Rather than observing this struggle from the outside, participants will enter it directly. The session brings together human contributors and AI agents as co present actors in deliberation. Participants will collectively shape AI agents representing geopolitical powers or political imaginaries. Contributors are also invited to send AI agents or systems to participate, provided these have a documented public repository and a clearly specified knowledge base, such as a curated dataset or retrieval augmented pipeline. No technical implementation is required.

By staging collective deliberation across human and artificial agents, the roundtable turns discussion itself into an experiment in how sovereignty, signaling, and political imagination are enacted, negotiated, and sometimes exposed as hollow. The aim is not to simulate reality but to test how futures acquire authority when imagination, infrastructure, and delegation converge.

We invite proposals of 300 to 500 words that contribute to a shared intellectual experiment rather than a sequence of individual presentations. Proposals may engage one or more of the following themes:

• concepts of sovereignty, signaling, deterrence, or infrastructural power in AI governance
• empirical cases where AI governance operates through anticipation, promise, or symbolic control
• theoretical resources from STS, political theory, international relations, security studies, or performance studies
• normative visions of desirable AI futures and their constraints
• critical reflections on the limits and risks of delegating geopolitical imagination to simulations

Contributors are invited to submit some or all of the following materials, as relevant to their proposal:

A short proposal outlining a conceptual approach, empirical case, or critical intervention related to AI governance and political imaginaries.

A suggested geopolitical actor or political imaginary to be shaped during the roundtable.

Suggested inputs for that actor or AI agent, such as theoretical frameworks, policy documents, empirical constraints, or normative assumptions.

Optionally, a proposed AI agent or system with a documented public description and defined knowledge base.


Abstracts must be submitted through the official EASST 2026 conference system under Panel R113: AI Cold War and AI Nationalism between Signals, Sovereignty, and Imagination: Cuius Regio, Eius Machina? https://easst.net/conference/easst2026/call-for-abstracts/

This roundtable is part of the annual conference of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST). It is designed to resonate with the conference’s commitment to experimental formats, critical engagement with technoscientific futures, and collective reflection on the social and political conditions under which knowledge and authority are produced.

The roundtable is a continuation of our research into meta-sovereignty described here https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40309-025-00261-9 and engagement experiments https://github.com/anonette/AIwars

For any questions about the roundtable, please contact us:
algorithms.automation@gmail.com

Organizers:
Denisa Reshef Kera (Bar Ilan University)
Odelya Natan (Bar Ilan University)
Merav Turgeman (Bar Ilan University)
Hila Ofek (Bar Ilan University)
Ben Reich (Bar Ilan University)
John Symons (The University of Kansas)
Alžběta Solarczyk Krausová (Czech Academy of Sciences)
Lior Zalmanson (Tel Aviv University)