Connectivity and contestation - Africa in a networked world

Online

Saturday, 18 May 2024
10:00 am – 4 pm (UTC+2)

(GMT: 8 am – 4 pm; West Africa time: 9 am -5 pm; Eastern Africa Time 11 am – 7 pm)

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Digital technologies have transformed and diversified the repertoires of contestation on the African continent. Today, the mobilization of people and resources, information and ideologies happens at the intersection of online and offline spaces. It cuts across continents, connects diasporas, and tends to amalgamate multiple concerns and interests. While earlier scholarship has tended to praise social media for their emancipatory and participatory potentials—especially in the face of autocratic regimes—today’s situation is exceedingly more complex. Social media and Internet-based technologies are used in such myriad ways—from warfare to information leaks and anti-government contestation to state propaganda—that a more nuanced and less normative approach is necessary to get a grasp of the intricate and ever-evolving relationships between power, technology and contestation on the African continent and beyond.