Sovereignty or Serfdom? A Seven-Dimensional Framework for AI Autonomy in the Global South

Artificial intelligence is reshaping economies and governance, yet its benefits remain unevenly distributed. We ask whether countries in the Global South are advancing toward digital sovereignty, meaning control over data, compute, and governance, or drifting into digital serfdom, meaning dependency on foreign platforms. We introduce a seven-dimensional framework spanning infrastructure and connectivity, data governance, human capital, regulatory maturity, funding and investment, public trust, and exposure to sanctions, and we apply it to four case studies chosen to span a wide range of structural conditions: Singapore, Vietnam, Kenya, and Syria. The comparison surfaces three recurring asymmetries: a compute divide that reinforces vendor lock-in, a governance gap that tracks institutional coherence rather than income level alone, and a human-capital asymmetry driven by talent mobility and thin investment pipelines. We close with multipolar policy options, including pooled regional procurement, shared high-performance computing through the African Union and ASEAN, and South-South cooperation on regulatory mentorship, that could shift trajectories toward sovereignty rather than dependency.