Asshak and Teshumat
The assumption that AI governance must come from the state is also to outsource responsibility for harm caused through any limb of its lifecycle. There is a common tendency to consider governance a process of compliance with the rules of the game, rather than a meaningful engagement with one’s power and being accountable for the impact of the use of that power in ways that cause harm. As a result, whole geographies that are “ungoverned” by laws, rules, or policies are sites for innovation that operates with little consideration for ethics, care, and impact. On the other hand, regulatory arbitrage thrives in ways that help particular groups escape accountability under governance regimes by shifting their sites of operation to those that are unregulated. This is partly a function of the structural and institutional nature of governance as it currently operates.
Teshumat and Asshak, two principles from the Tuareg people, offers a path for deeper reflection on governance as a responsibility beyond the container of the state.
Before proceeding, we want to state that Teshumat and Asshak are a living moral and social concept embedded in Tuareg cultural life across the Sahara and Sahel. It is not a single unified doctrine but a distributed moral sensibility that varies across Tuareg confederations, clans, and regions, and whose meaning is carried primarily through oral tradition, social practice, and lived relationship rather than through written texts. We have drawn on the available scholarly literature to write this resource, and also acknowledge that scholarship produced by researchers, however careful, is an imperfect lens, and that the Tuareg people themselves are the authoritative custodians of what both principles mean and how it governs conduct. The Tuareg have been subject to sustained colonial and post-colonial dispossession. The concepts have lived through these pressures and has also been connected to movements of political and cultural resistance, including the Teshumara movement of the 1970s and 1980s, in which young Tuareg migrants in Libya and Algeria articulated a politics of dignity and self-determination partly through the moral vocabulary of Teshumat and Asshak. We name this political history because drawing on Teshumat and Asshak as a governance concept requires acknowledging the conditions under which it has been sustained and defended, and because the communities that carry it continue to assert their cultural and political rights against the states that surround them. We welcome correction and deeper engagement from Tuareg communities and scholars who carry this tradition, and we recognize that its meaning across the diversity of Tuareg societies is richer and more contested than any single account can hold.
Understanding Asshak and Teshumat
The Tuareg are a confederation of Amazigh-speaking Berber peoples who have inhabited the Central Sahara for millennia, sustaining nomadic pastoral and caravan-trading cultures across an environment that most governance institutions would consider ungovernable. They have done so without a state in the Westphalian sense, and without a centralized written legal code or any of the administrative apparatus that modern governance theory tends to treat as necessary for social order. They have done so, in part, through a set of moral concepts that function as distributed governance, namely internal standards of conduct that individuals carry in themselves and that the community enforces not through punishment but through social recognition and its withdrawal.
Two concepts are foundational to this system. The first of these is Asshak, which means dignity and self-respect. To behave with Asshak is to manage one’s physical and social power in order not to abuse the vulnerable, to respect the rights of women and elders, and to conduct oneself with the restraint and generosity that the community at large considers noble. Violating Asshak can earn exclusion from the social recognition that makes one part of the Tuareg community. The second concept is Teshumat, which is the broader social conscience, or the shared moral sensibility of the community. It governs conduct in the absence of formal enforcement and is a form of distributed accountability that does not require a single regularor as it is carried out in every member of the community.
What Asshak and Teshumat Unsettle in AI Governance
Asshak and Teshumat speak directly to one of AI governance’s most persistent failures, namely the diffusion of moral responsibility. Across the AI supply chain, no single actor considers themselves fully accountable for the harms produced: The data labelers say they are following instructions, model developers say they cannot control downstream deployment, platform operators say they are not responsible for the model’s outputs, and regulators say they lack jurisdiction. Everyone is implicated but no one is responsible. This diffusion of responsibility is not accidental, but by design, as it is structurally produced by the fragmentation of the AI supply chain and the absence of any shared moral standard that all actors are understood to carry.
Asshak and Teshumat remind us that genuine accountability does not require a regulator to enforce the standard of responsibility from outside. Rather, it calls for a moral community whose members carry the standard within themselves and enforce it through social recognition. This is not a naively optimistic idea, but a meaningful practice. Studies do show that the Tuareg tradition itself is not free of hierarchy, injustice, or moral failure, and does experience tensions, contradictions, and contemporary upheavals within its social life. However, the structural insight is an important grounding idea, as the community shares the moral framework with genuine social weight. A framework, whose violation results in the loss of the recognition and belonging that give life meaning, governs behavior more effectively than any external enforcement mechanism.
Asshak and Teshumat tell us that the goal of governance should go beyond merely creating external rules and penalties, to actually cultivating a moral community among AI practitioners across the AI lifecycle. They call on us to create the conditions in which violating these standards of conduct results in the loss of professional recognition and belonging that practitioners and professionals care about. Embedding both principles into the social fabric of AI development goes beyond creating a mere compliance obligation, as the very act creates a shared moral identity whose violation is understood as a form of exclusion from the community to which one belongs.
References
Rasmussen, S.J. (2001). Healing in Community: Medicine, Contested Terrains, and Cultural Encounters among the Tuareg. Bergin & Garvey.
Rasmussen, S.J. (2006). Those Who Touch: Tuareg Medicine Women in Anthropological Perspective. Northern Illinois University Press.
Rasmussen, S.J. (1998). Tuareg Concepts of Truth, ‘Lies,’ and ‘Children’s Tales.’ Oral Tradition, 13(2), 247-284. https://journal.oraltradition.org/wp-content/uploads/files/articles/13ii/2_rasmussen.pdf
Kohl, I. (2010). Modern Nomads, Vagabonds, or Cosmopolitans? Reflections on Contemporary Tuareg Society. Journal of Anthropological Research, 66(4), 449–462.
This article draws from the wisdom and work of the Tuareg people. While educating ourselves on Indigenous worldviews is important, we understand that our actions can also contribute to and enable appropriation. As part of our ongoing attempts at practicing accountability, we invite readers to consider donating to Indigenous groups, collectives, organizations, or initiatives to support their lives and work.
