Convenor(s)
Martin Aaron / University of Oxford
Recent trends in African politics and society have brought issues of securitization, surveillance, monitoring, identification and cybersecurity to the fore. State registration practices are expanding, driven by new forms of welfare and security concerns. Borders are a particularly dense site for tracking, serving to monitor and curtail mobility for large population groups. And the use of mobile phones for an ever-increasing range of commercial and government transactions has opened the door to new forms of legibility and calculation. Compared to other regions, little is known about surveillance in Africa, as well as its motivations and consequences. This panel aims to bring together researchers exploring urgent questions related to surveillance and securitization in Africa. In particular, we aim to document how surveillance is used to monitor and silence political mobilizations—both mass and everyday—and the ways in which that is contested or resisted. This proposed panel aims to continue filling this knowledge gap. It seeks to document the diverse drivers of surveillance and the dynamics of resistance or quiescence. The panelists represent a variety of academic disciplines and theoretical perspectives.
The Contested Politics of Surveillance and Securitization in Africa
Recent trends in African politics and society have brought issues of securitization, surveillance, monitoring, identification and cybersecurity to the fore. State registration practices are expanding, driven by new forms of welfare and security concerns. Borders are a particularly dense site for tracking, serving to monitor and curtail mobility for large population groups. And the use of mobile phones for an ever-increasing range of commercial and government transactions has opened the door to new forms of legibility and calculation. Compared to other regions, little is known about surveillance in Africa, as well as its motivations and consequences. This panel aims to bring together researchers exploring urgent questions related to surveillance and securitization in Africa. In particular, we aim to document how surveillance is used to monitor and silence political mobilizations—both mass and everyday—and the ways in which that is contested or resisted. This proposed panel aims to continue filling this knowledge gap. It seeks to document the diverse drivers of surveillance and the dynamics of resistance or quiescence. The panelists represent a variety of academic disciplines and theoretical perspectives.
Taylor Linnet / University of Amsterdam
Big (Mobile) Data and African Mobilities
This presentation focuses on the ethical and methodological problems with tracking human mobility using data from mobile phones. I provide an overview of the state of the art in this area of research, then set out a new analytical framework for such data sources that focuses on three pressing issues: first, the risks involved in such research with relation to data subjects in areas of limited statehood; second, issues of interpretation and disciplinary bias; and third, ethical problems of data protection and privacy. Using the case study of a data science challenge involving African mobile phone data, I show how human mobility is becoming legible in new, more detailed ways, and that this carries with it the dual risk of rendering certain groups invisible and of misinterpreting what is visible. Thus this emerging ability to track movement in real time offers both the possibility of improved responses to conflict and forced migration, but also unprecedented power to surveil and control unwanted population movement.
Scharrer Tabea / Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology
Biometric Bureaucracy, the War on Terror and the New Citizenship and Immigration Act — Kenya and its Somali inhabitants
While the recent change of the Kenyan citizenship law might open new spaces for socio-political involvement for its Somali inhabitants, other developments like the on-going suspicion of Somali people as potential terrorists or the move towards biometric bureaucracy potentially reduces this space again. The presentation will discuss these developments in the light of questions of surveillance and securitization. It is based on empirical research with Somali migrants in Kenyan urban settings.
Already during colonial times Somali residents in the limits of the Kenyan territory were treated with suspicion. They had to carry special movement passes and were required to seek permission for travelling inside the Kenyan territory. This situation continued after the independence of Kenya and after short period of relaxation became even worse at the beginning of the 1990s when many refugees from Somalia came to Kenya. Subsequently anti-Somali sentiments grew, linked to feelings that Somalians acquire Kenyan citizenship illegally. In recent years the fear of terrorism has also fed into this animosity. In this context calls for registration and surveillance have become frequent. Registration is however not always discussed as constraint but also as a chance to be recognized. The presentation will show the at times contradictory developments towards securitization and biometric bureaucracy in Kenya and discuss the opening & closing spaces of possibility for its Somali inhabitants.
Frowd Philippe M. / University of Sheffield
Biometrics and postcolonial security practices in West Africa
Observing a rapid proliferation of forms of digital biometric identification in West Africa, this paper argues that these have become a crucial mode of ensuring border control in the region. This perspective draws on five months of ethnographic fieldwork in Senegal and Mauritania to make three main arguments. First, the paper argues that the adoption of biometrics in the global south relies on an ideal of the secure border promulgated by security experts and publications from organizations such as the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM), as well as emulated by local security professionals. Second, the paper argues that the installation of these technologies (in airports and beyond) is seen as central to state capacity. This reinforcement of capacity, pursued as a response to weak identification and border control institutions, at once facilitates the legibility of border crossing populations (through risk analysis at borders) and the production of irregularity (through the use of ID for deportation). Thirdly, the paper posits that resistance to biometrics is at once social and technical. In Mauritania, citizen groups resist discriminatory biometric enrolment while in Senegal the incompatibility of different algorithms highlights how the stubbornness of technology can undermine aspirations to friction-free border management.
Sureau Timm / Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology
How (Rumors of ) Internet Controls Support and Threaten Statehood