Anis Ben Brik
Associate Professor, USI Switzerland · Visiting Professor, UC Berkeley · PI & Founder, Arab AI Governance & Society Lab · Expert in AI Governance & Society across the Arab World, Gulf States & Global South
UC Berkeley
Prof. Anis Ben Brik
Visiting Professor · UC Berkeley
Principal Investigator & Founder · Arab AI Governance & Society Lab
Anis Ben Brik is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Communication, Culture and Society at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) and Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley. He is the Principal Investigator and Founder of the Arab AI Governance & Society Lab. His research combines large-scale comparative analysis of AI governance across 22 Arab states and 206 countries with critical and interpretive scholarship on how artificial intelligence reshapes identity, discourse, ethics, and political life in the Gulf and broader Arab world.
His central question: what does artificial intelligence do to human agency, identity, and democratic self-governance? He studies the human consequences of algorithmic governance — how AI systems reshape accountability, construct digital identities, erase marginalised voices, and challenge the foundations of self-governance across the Arab world and the Global South.
He brings particular depth to the Gulf Cooperation Council. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar are not merely the most advanced AI governance actors in the Arab world — they are among the most consequential AI governance actors globally, deploying sovereign language models, national AI strategies, and regulatory architectures that challenge Western governance frameworks. His Qatar monograph (Springer, 2025), his Gulf welfare and digital governance research, and his Arab AI Governance Lab make him one of the few scholars who can speak to Gulf AI governance from both deep area knowledge and rigorous comparative method. He has lived and worked in Doha and knows the Qatar Foundation's Education City ecosystem from the inside.
As Founder and President of the Global South Evaluation Society and President of the MENA Evaluation Association, he has built international evaluation capacity through global coalitions and academic programmes, including the first master's degree in evaluation in the Global South.
How do states — particularly in the Arab world and Global South — govern artificial intelligence, and how does AI in turn govern societies? What structural conditions produce effective AI regulation? And what are the implications for human identity, ethics, creativity, and democratic accountability?
These questions connect four research streams that are not separate projects but a single cumulative intellectual programme. Across every project: does the institution do what it claims to do — or has form outpaced function? And when form outpaces function, what happens to the humans who live under that governance?
AI, Society & the Arab World
How AI reshapes Gulf and Arab identity, discourse, and citizenship — sovereign LLMs, ethics charters as performative texts, e-participation, and the erasure of conflict-affected voices from the algorithmic future.
AI Ethics, Agency & Accountability
How do Gulf and Arab states construct AI ethics? The accountability dispersal thesis. Data protection as dignity. Competing Islamic, liberal, and technocratic philosophies of human oversight.
Comparative AI Governance
Cross-national analysis of AI regulatory architectures across 206 countries and 22 Arab states. Governance typologies, diffusion mechanisms, measurement validity, and the gap between regulatory form and governance function.
Welfare, Evaluation & the Global South
Welfare governance, social protection, and evaluation capacity across MENA and the Global South. Leading international evaluation coalitions and building evidence infrastructure for policy that works.