Africa's sovereign debt crisis is exacerbating human rights vulnerabilities, yet the African human rights systems and institutions have remained largely absent from debt governance debates.
Over the past decade and a half the South African social grant payment system has changed several times -- but, debt has been part and parcel of each new system.
This article examines the resistance strategies employed by fintech users in Jimeta, Nigeria against the violent techniques used by fintech companies to enforce loan repayments.
This article concerns the birth and death of the proposed Survey Law of 1874 in the South African Republic (Transvaal), a law that promised to 'correct' flawed or fraudulent knowledge with an ongoing triangulation and a general survey of lands that would locate and map all aspects of geog
This paper uses manumission as a lens through which to explore the financial lives of enslaved people in nineteenth-century Cape Town. Between 1825 and 1834, more than one thousand two hundred people were manumitted in the city, about a third of whom achieved that through (self-)purchase.
How does a household come to exist? What tools do its members use to draw some together and expel others? How do households articulate with the spheres of economy and politics and their forms of power and control?
Formal recognition of Liberia’s sovereignty offered the government the opportunity to borrow on international markets that were growing rapidly during the second half of the nineteenth century.
In 1873, the Gambia colony became the first British West African colony to abolish debt imprisonment. The Gambia colony by abolishing debt imprisonment became part of a larger wave of mid-19th century advancements in progressive debtor reforms happening across the British Empire.
This study investigates the role of encrypted messaging apps, specifically WhatsApp, in disseminating political disinformation during South Africa’s 2024 general elections.
As part of the Emergency measures in the 1950s, the British colonial government in Kenya introduced regulations that imposed passbooks on the Kikuyu, Embu, and Meru (KEM), who were seen as the wellspring of Mau Mau.
Reading Faces examines the direct impact of past research on the development of AI systems; the way in which the past provides contexts which have predisposed people to accept outputs of AI systems as ‘common sense’; how the role of politics and the changing nature of the sta
Credit scoring is an increasingly central and contested domain of data and AI governance, frequently framed as a neutral and objective method of assessing risk across diverse economic and political contexts.
This seminar offers an overview of my book project, Theatres of Extraction: Performing Collectivization and Industrial Heritage in South Africa, which examines histories of workers’
In the Global South, sociotechnical systems such as digital national identification are expanding rapidly. States are using these systems to govern populations in the context of security and e-governance, with support from financial donors.
Like many countries in the Global South, Sierra Leone has recently embarked on the biometric identification of its citizens and residents in the aim to achieve ‘legal identity for all’ (Sustainable Development Goal 16.9).
With Huduma Namba and Maisha Namba, the Kenyan government has aspired to create a “single source of truth.” But the controversies these digital infrastructures have generated have instead revealed multiple, incommensurable kinds of truth and truth claims.
Across Africa, land registration initiatives have often produced contestation rather than stability. Rwanda presents a striking exception: its land governance system is widely celebrated as efficient, centralised, and increasingly digital.
That Trust can be fostered through central banking has been established through the work of scholars such as Roseveare, Carruthers, and Haber, North and Weingast amongst others, who focused on English institutional development and the role of elite politics in this institutional development.
A biometrics revolution is underway across the Global South. Undoubtedly boosted by security and anti-migration policies, biometrics is now also being deployed in the name of development and democracy.
In this article, we are gently cautioning against the dominant argument of 'document scarcity' that features in op-eds and survey-driven narratives (the belief that the non-possessi
This paper asks: what does socio-legal enquiry tell us about one of the most pressing problems of our timeclimate change? Can (and should) socio-legal enquiry provide a meaningful critique of the so-called green transition?
This article explores the political economy of digital transformation in Lomé, Togo, and unpacks the relations and contradictions that animate the development of its digital infrastructures.
Critical political economists have long urged that globalisation and financialisation be studied as products of state behaviour, rather than of unstoppable technological and market forces.
Central bank cooperation during global financial crises has been anything but consistent. While some crises are arrested with extensive cooperation, others are left to spiral.
Making a Life: Young Men on Johannesburg’s Urban Margins explores the dynamic everyday life-making strategies of young men in Zandspruit, a sprawling informal settlement on the outskirts of Johannesburg.
While biometric national identification systems have been examined in interesting ways in other postcolonial settings, notably on the African continent and in India, questions over state/citizenship, economy/economisation, and freedom/unfreedom take on a particular valence in Jamaica.
