Race, space, and ‘terror’: Notes from East Africa

Al-Bulushi, Samar

doi:10.1177/09670106211024418

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…This is in part because Ethiopia was considered a suitable location for surveilling Somalia, Sudan and Yemen (see go.nature.com/3pjzxav). Kenya has shared intercepted telecommunications with the United States to track terror suspects 10 .…”

Section: Hybrid Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Africa: regulate surveillance technologies and personal data

Jili¹

2022

Nature

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Outside Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, I ask a taxi driver to take me downtown.Noting my American accent, he asks me what I'm doing there. "Researching Kenya's smart-city initiatives," I reply. Nairobi is changing fast, he says, pointing out digital cameras that have appeared on street corners, shopping centres and office blocks.I ask him if he worries about the cameras.After a pause, he replies: "Corruption is a problem, but they are here for security." Although this is true, the story of the spread of surveillance technologies through Africa is more complex, as it is elsewhere.For more than a decade, African governments have installed thousands of closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras and surveillance devices across cities, along with artificial-intelligence (AI) systems for facial recognition and other CCTV cameras and spyware are proliferating in the continent without checks and balances. Governments must legislate locally to prevent civil-rights abuses. Africa: regulate surveillance technologies and personal data Bulelani JiliAuthorities in Nairobi have installed digital surveillance cameras as part of Kenya's smart-city initiatives.

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Section: Hybrid Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Africa: regulate surveillance technologies and personal data

Jili¹

2022

Nature

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“…The total suspension of the internet and the targeted surveillance of activists, has taken place in tandem with the intimidation and arrest of activists as 'terrorists' and digital activists as 'cyber-terrorists'. The expansion of the war on terror and subsequent militarization of the continent ( Campbell 2020;Al-Bulushi, 2021Tura, 2017 have been compounded by post-revolutionary antiterrorism statutes and proclamations with which states respond to perceived threats of revolution with aggressive forms of direct and indirect repression ( Tura, 2017;Al-Bulushi, 2021). Dissent has been increasingly criminalized by the passage of capaciously worded anti-terrorism laws.…”

Section: Digital Authoritarianism and Infrastructural Harm In Cameroo...mentioning

confidence: 99%

A decolonial political geography of resistance and digital infrastructural harm in Cameroon and Ethiopia

Murrey

2022

Globalizations

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In the decisive responses to protest movements in Ethiopia and Cameroon between 2015 and 2018, state control and repression were facilitated by colonial-corporate digital infrastructures and neo-imperial techno-political configurations. In both cases, resistance was met with pervasive stateinitiated and corporate-sanctioned internet shutdowns and disruptions. I situate these techno-political practices within the longue durée of coloniality to argue that the state suspension of internet connectivity is a form of infrastructural harm; an intentional violence made socially and structurally possible by the colonial configurations of infrastructure. My analysis draws from five years of digital ethnography and ethnographic fieldwork, including 13 months in Jimma, Ethiopia and nine months in Yaoundé, Cameroon. I mobilize a decolonial praxis that unmasks practices of authoritarian control within global racial coloniality, and seeks to foster cross-fertilizations of struggle and resistance praxis.

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From the Sky to the Streets, and Back

Al-Bulushi¹

2022

Social Text

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Against the Eurocentric, heteronormative paradigms that continue to structure analysis of post-9/11 global warfare, this article asks what it means to decenter the view from the imperial war room, illustrated most poignantly in the 2016 thriller Eye in the Sky. Highlighting the role played by the Kenyan state in the ongoing war against the Somali militant group al-Shabaab, it takes seriously the African subjects who co-constitute geographies of war making in East Africa today, from the political and business elite who normalize militarized masculinities and femininities, to the African troops whose affective and violent labor sustains war making in Somalia. Far from a celebration of subaltern agency, the article engages the notion of a “subaltern geopolitics” that is mindful of asymmetries of power and that foregrounds ambiguous positions of marginality that are neither dominant nor resistant. Attention to entanglement disrupts binary analytical paradigms of global/local and masculine/feminine, and calls for a deeper consideration of collaboration and complicity.

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Race, space, and ‘terror’: Notes from East Africa

Cited by 3 publications

References 34 publications

Africa: regulate surveillance technologies and personal data

Africa: regulate surveillance technologies and personal data

A decolonial political geography of resistance and digital infrastructural harm in Cameroon and Ethiopia

From the Sky to the Streets, and Back

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