Chapter 8 analyses the use of AI and ADM tools in welfare and surveillance through the lens of critical race studies. Aitor Jiménez and Ainhoa Nadia Douhaibi point to the necessity of building a non-Anglocentric theoretical framework from which to study a new global phenomenon: the digital welfare and surveillance state. Accordingly, the authors frame its rise within the wider context of the Southern European iteration of racial neoliberalism, what they coin as the Islamophobic Consensus. As the chapter demonstrates, the digital welfare and surveillance state does not rely on the same technologies, focus on the same subjects, and pursues the same objectives in every context. On the contrary, it draws on contextual genealogies of domination, specific socioeconomic structures, and distinctive forms of distributing power. The authors provide an empirical analysis on the ways the Islamophobic Consensus is being operationalised in Catalonia and expose the overlapped racism mechanisms governing the lives of racialized black and brown young adults. The chapter demonstrates how ADM technologies designed to govern “deviated”, “risky”, and “dangerous” Muslim youth “radicals” connect with colonial punitive governmental strategies.

The chapter is structured in two parts. The first part analyses the surveillance-governmental automated apparatus deployed over Islamic communities in Catalunya. The second part frames the ideological, epistemological, and historical fundamentals of the Southern European way to racial neoliberalism, here labelled as the Islamophobic Consensus. Drawing on surveillance and critical race studies, the authors synthesise the defining features that distinguish this model of domination from other iterations of neoliberal racism.