Sweta Rijal

Sweta Rijal is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. Her research sits at the intersection of the international political economy of artificial intelligence, global inequality, and international organizations. In her dissertation, she examines how international organizations—including the World Bank, IMF, UNDP, and ADB—have promoted AI as a development paradigm for the Global South, while the platform and semiconductor workers who make these systems possible remain largely invisible. She argues that IO discourses serve as mechanisms through which past development paradigms such as global value chains and present technological imaginaries become institutionalized, producing practices that stabilize global asymmetries and determine whose voice counts in AI governance. Through critical discourse analysis, digital ethnography, and interviews with workers and labor advocates in the Philippines and Malaysia, her research connects global policy narratives to workers’ lived experiences. Beyond her academic work, Sweta has gained experience in both the private sector and international development through internships with Intel Corporation, where she worked on economic security policy of the global ICT industry following the introduction of the CHIPS Act, and with the Economic Empowerment unit of UN Women in Nepal.