The Politics of Technology in Africa Communication, Development, and Nation-Building in Ethiopia

As more Africans get online, information and communication technologies (ICTs) are increasingly hailed for their transformative potential. Yet, the fascination for the possibilities of promoting more inclusive forms of development in the information age have obfuscated the reality of the complex negotiations among political and economic actors who are seeking to use technology in their competition for power. Building on over ten years of research in Ethiopia, Iginio Gagliardone investigates the relationship between politics, development, and technological adoption in Africa's second most populous country and its largest recipient of development aid. The emphasis the book places on the 'technopolitics' of ICTs, and on their ability to embody and enact political goals, offers a strong and empirically grounded counter-argument to prevalent approaches to the study of technology and development that can be applied to other cases in Africa and beyond.

Acknowledgements; 1. Introduction; 2. Technopolitics, communication technologies and development; 3. Avoiding politics: international and local discourses on ICTs; 4. A quest for hegemony: the use of ICTs in support of the Ethiopian national project; 5. Ethiopia's developmental and sovereign technopolitical regimes; 6. Resisting alternative technopolitical regimes; 7. ICT for development, human rights and the changing geopolitical order; 8. Conclusion; Bibliography.

Iginio Gagliardone teaches Media and Communication at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and is Associate Research Fellow in New Media and Human Rights at the University of Oxford. He holds a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and has spent years living and working in Africa, including for UNESCO. His research focusses on the relationship between new media, political change, and human development, and on the emergence of distinctive models of the information society in the Global South. He has extensively published in communication, development studies, and African studies journals, and his work has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, French, and Italian.