Digital Surveillance in Africa

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.

Tony Roberts is a Digital Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK. His research focuses on digital rights, digital inequalities and participatory methodologies. He has worked at the intersection of digital technologies, development and social justice since 1988. Dr. Roberts is the principal investigator of the GCRF African Digital Rights Network and editor of the collected edition Digital Rights in Closing Civic Space: Lessons from Ten African Countries.

Admire Mare is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He was previously Deputy Head of the Communications department at the Namibian University of Science and Technology. His research focuses on participatory journalism, social media misinformation, and digital surveillance.