Digital Surveillance in Africa: Power, Agency, and Rights

Media coverage and scholarly research on digital surveillance has focused primarily on the USA and Europe. Everyone knows about Cambridge Analytica’s social media surveillance; Edward Snowden’s revelations of the West’s mass internet and phone surveillance; and Pegasus Spyware’s mobile phone surveillance of activists, journalists, judges, and presidents across the world. Comparatively little is known about the millions of dollars now being spent on digital technologies for use in the illegal and illegitimate surveillance of citizens in Africa.

In this open-access third volume of Bloomsbury’sDigital Africaseries, a broad range of African and European scholars and practitioners map the development, procurement and (mis)use of the ever-expanding suite of digital surveillance and policing technologies across the continent. Drawing on the empirically rich, theoretically sophisticated research of the African Digital Rights Network, this book examines how public and private actors in Africa use spyware, mobile phone extraction, biometric and face recognition systems, and other technologies for smart-city and other social, and social-control, applications. Eight chapters examine eight African countries, and each of these begins with a thorough political history of the nature of surveillance there under colonial and post-liberation political settlements. This enables new analyses of the socio-cultural, political, and economic drivers and characteristics of contemporary digital surveillance in each country, all of which ultimately leads to concrete policy recommendations at local, national, and international levels.

For its empirical richness and breadth, as well as its theoretical sophistication,Digital Surveillance in Africais essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary African studies, and it is of keen interest to anyone concerned with how digital surveillance affects everyday lives across the world.