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.
Digital Public Infrastructures or DPIs has become the newest technological export from India that is being globally recognised and efforts are being made to replicate its “success” in other countries of the global south (Sharma and Saran, 2023).
This paper examines the role of ambiguity attitudes in shaping trust decisions. Traditional trust games often ignore or conflate the role of risk and ambiguity, though trust decisions typically involve the latter.
Trust in people whom we know or work with in organizational contexts has been widely discussed, and scholars have also talked a lot about trust in our governments and other institutions, although not all of them agree that one should call this trust.
Applying Gurminder Bhambra’s reparative history framework, this paper examines the historical institutionalisation of income protection for working-age adults and asks how this can inform contemporary debates about welfare reform.
After the League of Nations designated Palestine as a British Mandate in 1920, British colonial authorities created a Fingerprint Bureau in their newly-formed Palestine Police. When Israel was established in 1948, the Israel Police acquired the Bureau’s experts, methods, and technologies.
