Disrupting Africa: Technology, Law, and Development

Description

In the digital era, many African countries sit at the crossroads of a potential future that will be shaped by digital-era technologies with existing laws and institutions constructed under conditions of colonial and post-colonial authoritarian rule. In Disrupting Africa, Olufunmilayo B. Arewa examines this intersection and shows how it encompasses existing and new zones of contestation based on ethnicity, religion, region, age, and other sources of division. Arewa highlights specific collisions between the old and the new, including in the 2020 #EndSARS protests in Nigeria, which involved young people engaging with varied digital era technologies who provoked a violent response from rulers threatened by the prospect of political change. In this groundbreaking work, Arewa demonstrates how lawmaking and legal processes during and after colonialism continue to frame contexts in which digital technologies are created, implemented, regulated, and used in Africa today.

Olufunmilayo B. Arewa is the Murray H. Shusterman Professor of Transactional and Business Law at the Temple University Beasley School of Law. She writes about music, technology, and Africa and has worked as a practicing lawyer in the emerging growth company space in Silicon Valley, New York, and Boston. This book, which involved extensive archival research, brings together her training as an anthropologist and lawyer.