Event Date: October 11, 2023 - 12:00pm to 01:30pm
Location: FSS 4004, 120 University Private, University of Ottawa

Presented by CIPS 

One in four Africans were impacted by internet shutdowns and restrictions in 2022. Scholarly analysis has generally analysed these developments through a domestic lens, understanding state-imposed internet disruptions in Africa as part of broader authoritarian regime maintenance strategies (Access Now 2023: 12). In this presentation, Jonathan Fisher nonetheless argues for a conceptual shift in how these, often highly-damaging, incidents are understood by scholars of International Relations. Drawing on research undertaken in Nigeria, Uganda, and Burkina Faso, together with interviews with former staff of Facebook/Meta and Twitter/X, he argues for a more international, and historically-centred understanding of digital disruption in Africa. Neo-/colonialism, political authority, and technological connectivity have, he underlines, been intertwined across modern African history, influencing, to a significant extent, how the contemporary flow and curation of digital content is viewed, experienced, and articulated by different actors and communities. In this context, social media platforms often manifest not as technological vectors of exchange, but as distant, Western, and (largely) unaccountable political authorities themselves.

Speaker: 

Jonathan Fisher is Professor of Global Security in, and former Director of, the International Development Department at the University of Birmingham. He is also a Research Fellow at the Centre for Gender and Africa at the University of the Free State. His current research is on authoritarianism and (in)security and the role of social media platforms and companies in African politics. More broadly, he has published on the international politics of aid, development and security with empirical focus on Eastern Africa, Nigeria and South Africa. He is the author of Authoritarian Africa: Repression. Resistance, and the Power of Ideas (Oxford University Press, 2019, with Nic Cheeseman); East Africa after Liberation: Conflict, Security and the State since the 1980s (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and (with Nina Wilén) African Peacekeeping (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Chair: 

Marie-Eve Desrosiers is the holder of International Francophonie Research Chair on Political Aspirations and Movements in Francophone Africa. She is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA).