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...
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Forthcoming events in the Trust programme
This paper is about the dynamics of land buyers and land buying groups in Natal between the 1850s and 1920s. It is about how land buyers negotiated a set of laws, policies and attitudes from...
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...
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...
How should we understand 1970s Kenya, with its combination of inequality and relative political stability? This article offers a new perspective on that by following the early history of the...
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-...
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...
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This paper examines the functioning and implications of a little-known legal trust that forms the financial foundation for M-Pesa. The M-Pesa Holding Company operates a trust fund which is...
WISER invites applications for two-year post-doctoral fellowships to be awarded to outstanding candidates from any appropriate discipline.
The fellows will be expected to...
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In this Chapter (6), `Trading inequality’ follows copper on its journey from Solwezi to world markets and shows where profits flow. In this chapter, the interdependent relationship between...
Large-Language Models (LLM) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT are key among the so-called ‘AI’ agents that increasingly mediate global digital economies. This AI-driven wave of...
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...
WISER's Trust Project invites you to an online panel discussion:
Crypto in Africa
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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...
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...
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...
In this article, we are gently cautioning against the dominant argument of 'document...
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...
...
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. This...
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. Going beyond...
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...
Milk from a bird is an impossibility. This idiom was used to articulate the nature of documentary requests from NADRA during “citizenship reverification.” This chapter describes how...
WiSER’s Trust Project invites you to an online panel discussion:
Techbros and...
Two sets of arguments dominate the mainstream discourse on privacy in India. One position pushes for equal and robust rights to privacy for the poor. The view against privacy contends that privacy...
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...
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...
This book, which is available open access here,...
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...
WISER's Trust Project invites you to an online panel discussion. Please register on Zoom ...
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...
Digital identity systems convert individuals into machine-readable data. Despite an increasingly diffused view of digital ID as a route to development, multiple forms of harm have been found to...
Keith Breckenridge spoke to Session 5: DPI for what?...
The Wits Centre for Journalism and WISER invite you to join us as we host Ms Maria Ressa, Nobel Laureate, journalist and co-founder of Rappler in conversation...
[ This is an on-line...
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...
WISER and the Pro Vice-Chancellor for Climate, Sustainability and Inequality invite you to a seminar.
Presented by Paul...
Decolonization in East Africa was more than a political event: it was a step toward economic self-determination. In this innovative book, historian and anthropologist Kevin P. Donovan analyzes the...
This project involved a partnership between the London School of Economics (LSE), human rights NGO Black Sash, Stellenbosch University Law Clinic (SULC), and the National Finance Ombud Scheme...
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The notion of the ‘public sphere’ remains one of the key concepts in the field of media and communications studies. The book that coined the term, Jürgen Habermas’ The...
[ This is an on-line seminar; please...
[ This is an on-line seminar; please...
[ This is an on-line seminar; please...
Nigeria commenced enrolment to its national identity program in 2007, and enrolment numbers as of July 2023 stands at 101.6 million. National identity programs have proliferated across Africa in...
Asked why they intended to vote for William Ruto in Kenya’s 2022 presidential election, many people in central Kenya had a simple answer: ‘we owe Ruto a debt’. This was not the...
24th & 25th July 2024
WiSER, Johannesburg
Call for Papers
Delegation – or indirect rule - is ubiquitous. Leaders at...

Short programme |...
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I hope to explore the confrontation between on the one hand efforts of the postcolonial state to create a biometric citizen and, on the other the implications of local visions of the...
Keith Breckenridge with commentary from Ayesha Omar
Historians of the medieval law of trust have pointed to its origins in the religious obligations of waqf that the English crusaders...
This article analyzes how individuals react to the age barriers established by the state for access to public service in Cameroon. The use of civil age as an instrument of identification reveals...
We invite you to join us for the series of lectures on trust hosted in hybrid format in the WISER Seminar room and on Zoom. Please ...
[ Please register on Zoom in advance of this event. ]
Kigali and Nairobi have been dubbed...
[ Please register on Zoom in advance of this event. ]
This paper explores data security...
WiSER Seminar room or register...
[ Please register on Zoom in advance of this event. ]
Propelled by...
Over the last twenty years WiSER has established itself as the leading interdisciplinary research institute in the Humanities and Social Sciences on the African continent. From 2023, with generous...
by Keith Breckenridge
Hosted by the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, this is a day long workshop of stakeholders in mining and mine-affected communities attended by the directors of all...
WISER, in collaboration with the IUSSP, IIGH and ISER, invite you to join us for a panel discussion of the interdisciplinary research project on population registers, ethics and human rights....
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Secure land and natural resource rights are key ingredients for rural transformation, social inclusion, and the realization of the Sustainable Development Goals. In many cases, these rights are...
In the early 20th century, groups of black land buyers purchased land in the Transvaal with the intention of farming on a large scale. Three of those farms include: Daggakraal and Driefontein in...
Presented by Gabriel Davel
Wednesday, September 6, 2023 at 12:00pm
Abstract : this talk will discuss why...
This is a hybrid seminar. Please join us in the WISER seminar room or register for the session in advance of the meeting at : ...
This is an on-line seminar. Please, register for the session in advance of the meeting at : ...
Ataya, HUMA Interdisciplinary Seminar Series, University of Cape Town
"Land, debt and...
This is an on-line seminar. Please, register for the session in advance of the meeting at : ...
This is a hybrid seminar. We will meet in...
ZOOM only : Please register for the session in advance of the meeting at : ...
WISER seeks to appoint a Researcher on a three year contract renewable for a further three years, or the funded term of the Trust Chair....
Platform economies are depicted as the foundation for a new era of economic production. This transpires through the incorporation of digital technologies and algorithmic operations into the heart...
This article considers the changing role of a local municipality in the political economy of the Waterberg region of Limpopo. It considers the effects that centre-led processes of municipal fiscal...
This paper explores how processes of white supremacy and racialisation coalesce in governing differential im/mobilities in mid-Twentieth Century African Trusts administered by the British under...
This paper charts the rise of digital credit in Kenya. It highlights the data on evidence on the problems of digital credit, including the high cost of credit, overindebtedness, and unfair...
This paper examines digital media contents created by young Guineans on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube which all foreground literacy as a site of generational contention and struggle. Recognizing...
Participants should please read the paper in advance of the seminar and...
Where: WISER Seminar Room & Zoom (Register Here)
A discussion, with Jeanne Bouyat, of...
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One of the key features of today's global economy is an ‘offshore world’ of financial structures, institutions and techniques designed to provide secrecy, asset protection and tax...
Simandou mountain chain in Guinea contains the biggest unexploited high-quality iron ore reserves in the world. The French colonial regime, Soviet Union, Mitsubishi, Rio Tinto, Chinalco, Vale,...
Over the last twenty years WiSER has established itself as the leading interdisciplinary research institute in the Humanities and Social Sciences on the African continent. From 2023, with generous...
Keynote speaker: The Honourable Njabulo Nzuza, Deputy Minister of Home Affairs
Welcome address: Prof Tshilidzi Marwala, VC and Principal: UJ
Respondents:
- Prof Elias...
See the list of panels below.

The third biennial workshop...


