Digital Surveillance in Africa : Power, Agency, and Rights

Tony Roberts

ISBN 10: 135042207X / ISBN 13: 9781350422070

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Mär 2025, 2025

About this Item

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Digital Surveillance in Africa : Power, Agency, and Rights
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Mär 2025
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 135042207X
• ISBN 13: 9781350422070
• Binding: Taschenbuch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 234W x 156H x 20D millimeters 234 millimeters width by 156 millimeters height by 20 millimeters depth
• Weight: 376 grams

About this title

Synopsis

Choice 2025 Outstanding Academic Title

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's Digital Africa series, 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 Africa is 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.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Civic Futures.

About the Authors

Tony Roberts is a Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex, where he works on digital inequalities and digital rights. He is currently the Principal Investigator on the GCRF-UKRI-funded African Digital Rights Network.

Admire Mare is Full Professor and Head of the Department of Communication and Media Studies at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.