[Editor’s Note: This is a write-up of a workshop proceedings. It is posted under my name, but the participants wrote the piece; they are listed at the end.]

If Politics and IR urgently needs to discuss our approach to AI and pedagogy. The reverse is equally true.

In 2025, the authors of this piece participated in a BISA-ISA joint Workshop on AI Pedagogies: Practice, Prompts and Problems in Contemporary Higher Education, sponsored by the ASPIRE (Academic Scholarship in Politics and International Relations Education) Network. This was prompted by several calls for Politics and International Relations (IR) to discuss how to approach Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its impact on teaching practices. We came out of the workshop, however, realizing that less attention has been paid to what our discipline can offer in turn. This is despite the fact that our field can provide crucial tools to advance the debate on AI education, moving from discussions of functionality towards deeper understanding of power, legitimacy, ethics, and global justice.

Not only does our field equip us with these key tools for understanding and framing AI and its impact, but the topics we teach, and the means we typically use to teach them, provide us with the practical means to teach about AI. Our teaching of controversy, the ability to discuss these sensitive topics, and the ability to embrace competing narratives all mean we have unique insights for teaching AI. Politics and IR scholars are therefore well-positioned to unpack its complexity and help shape a more reflective, inclusive AI pedagogy.

We understand power systems

Politics and IR are fundamentally concerned with the distribution and exercise of power. We bring to AI pedagogy concepts like hegemony, sovereignty, governance, and legitimacy. In the politics classroom, these concepts are transformed from abstract theory into concrete lenses for analysing the design, deployment, reception, or rejection of AI systems. For instance, who decides the ethical principles embedded within AI models? What geopolitical power dynamics are reinforced through data colonialism or platform dependency and divergence? Is algorithmic governance an extension of state sovereignty or a challenge to it?

Technical proficiency can only do so much in approaching these questions; they require critical engagement with concepts of authority, power, transparency, and the politics of scale. We teach the critical skills to engage with these power dynamics and can surface them in our classrooms. Indeed, exploring Politics and IR as a field already equips students with the tools to analyse these dynamics by interrogating who benefits, who is excluded, and how structures of power shape technological development.

Teaching AI politically through the lens of power makes the interests and the exclusions visible, questioning the ostensible “neutrality” of these technologies. We are already teaching students to critically explore how narratives have power, and how these reinforce power structures in politics and IR. These dynamics are fundamental to AI and both the opportunities and threats that are associated with its use.

We centre ethics and accountability

From just war theory to debates on humanitarian intervention, IR has long grappled with the moral complexities of decision-making in high-stakes, uncertain environments. These traditions offer ready-made frameworks for evaluating responsibility, legitimacy, and restraint; frameworks that map directly onto contemporary debates about AI, especially in areas such as autonomous weapons, predictive policing, border control, and mass surveillance. IR gives us language for thinking about proportionality, discrimination, intention, and accountability – concepts urgently needed when machines are involved in decisions that can harm, exclude, or kill.

Questions such as “Who is responsible when AI causes harm?” or “What constitutes ethical use of AI in conflict zones?” are deeply political and moral questions, not just technical ones. IR’s diverse ethical traditions – from realism’s focus on state interest and restraint, to just war theory’s moral criteria, to cosmopolitanism’s emphasis on global responsibility – provide centuries of normative thought to ground these discussions. Drawing on these traditions allows AI pedagogy to move beyond compliance checklists and risk frameworks toward richer forms of moral reasoning, helping students to think critically about the human values and political choices embedded in AI systems.

We embrace complexity

AI systems operate under conditions of partial knowledge and significant variation by

context; areas with which IR scholars are very familiar. Our field deals with competing narratives and uncertain evidence, whereby interpretations evolve and power dynamics change. Whether analysing diplomatic intent, tracing conflict escalation, examining institutional adaptation, or evaluating the consequences of emerging technologies on global governance, we train students to work within ambiguity with rigour and reflexivity, recognising that understanding often lies in interpretation rather than certainty.

This mindset is essential when working with generative AI. These models do not deliver objective truths; their outputs are shaped by probabilities, patterns, and the biases embedded in the data they were trained on. Instead of expecting singular answers or neatly resolved explanations, students need to become comfortable navigating ambiguity and contested interpretations.

Developing this habit means learning to interrogate outputs rather than accepting them at face value. Students should be encouraged to ask: “What is missing from this response? Whose perspectives or experiences are absent? What assumptions underpin this model’s reasoning? And what consequences – political, social, or ethical – might follow if we act on this information?”. Our field is already exploring these questions, and has both the experience and tools necessary to apply these insights to AI.

Doing so will enable us to cultivate a habit of critical scrutiny that treats AI as a fallible, partial interpreter of the world that must be contextualized and questioned, not trusted blindly.

We teach controversy

Politics is inherently contested, and IR education embraces that complexity, equipping students to analyse and engage with conflict as a space for learning and reflection. We teach students to approach disagreement with curiosity and critical awareness, recognising the values and assumptions that shape opposing views and the ongoing nature of political debate. As Politics and IR scholars, we have the vocabulary and the approaches to discuss these difficult, controversial, and sensitive topics. We also have frameworks to explain and contextualize AI, too.

AI pedagogy benefits enormously from this approach because contentious questions are fundamental to the AI debate. The role of AI in education and wider society – from facial recognition, to its role in policy-making – demands political judgement and critical discussion. Not only are IR scholars able to discuss controversial topics, we also have the skills to orchestrate and guide discussions of controversy in a productive and sensitive manner. Accordingly, by foregrounding constructive disagreement, IR scholars can demonstrate how to engage productively with AI as a site of debate.

We value pluralism

Perhaps most importantly, Politics and IR foreground the importance of diverse epistemologies and worldviews. To the extent that GenAI produces biased or incomplete information, it risks obscuring subaltern knowledges. Emerging efforts like Singapore’s SEA-LION (Southeast Asian Languages in One Network), trained on Southeast Asian linguistic data, reflect attempts to diversify the AI ecosystem. Nonetheless, Western-developed LLMs remain dominant in the region, shaping both technological dependence and epistemic orientation. With a critical commitment to non-Western perspectives, postcolonial theory, indigenous knowledge, and locally grounded epistemologies that challenge dominant narratives about technology and power systems, IR can bring a crucial (and typically absent) lens to AI pedagogy.

Too often, AI development and ethics are framed through Western liberal paradigms, marginalising alternative conceptions of intelligence, justice, and agency. By pluralising AI education, IR can help challenge the epistemic dominance of Silicon Valley, foregrounding global perspectives, and raising awareness of how AI systems often reproduce racialised, gendered, and colonial hierarchies.

Teaching AI with a pluralist lens means asking not just “Is this system fair?” but “Fair by whose standards? Who set those standards? Whose values are embedded? Whose futures are imagined?”

A disciplinary contribution with the potential to transform

Politics and IR scholars can provide essential frameworks for understanding AI as a force that redistributes power and transforms the basis of global legitimacy. If the future of education is increasingly entangled with AI, then our field has a responsibility and an opportunity to guide that entanglement toward democratic, ethical, pluralist, and inclusive ends.

In bringing Politics and IR into AI pedagogy, we are not just teaching about technology. We are teaching students how to live with it – critically, responsibly, conscientiously, and, of course, politically.

Participants

Dr Chris Featherstone is Lecturer in International Relations at the University of York, specialising in US and UK foreign policy, and the Trump administration’s foreign policy.

Dr Anna B. Plunkett is Lecturer in International Relations at King’s College London, specialising in the politics of regime transition processes.

Dr Hillary Briffa is Senior Lecturer in National Security Studies Education at King’s College London, specialising in the security of small states.

Dr Sebastian Koehler is a Lecturer of Comparative Politics at Queen Mary University of London, specialising in political economy and quantitative methods.

Lucas Knotter is a Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Bath, and specialises in IR theory and questions of sovereignty.

Dr Özge Söylemez is a Lecturer in Defence Studies at King’s College London, specialising in Chinese foreign and security policy.