Datta, Ayona;
Hoefsloot, Fenna;
(2024)
The state as auteur: Timing digitisation in Africa's Silicon Savannah.
Dialogues in Digital Society
10.1177/29768640241295479.
(In press).
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Abstract
Kenya is in the midst of an information revolution and has recently unveiled a set of digitisation initiatives to become the Silicon Savannah of East Africa. While the African state is often examined through the notion of absence or failure, we argue that we need to pay more attention to timing as a mode of statecraft in a digital era. Drawing upon a Deleuzian conceptualisation of ‘time-images', we argue that the Kenyan state operates as an ‘auteur’ to give meaning and significance to a seemingly asynchronous set of disconnected digitisation initiatives across spaces, scales and institutions. Timing as a form of state power determines which initiatives are prioritised, what gets executed, in what sequence and at what pace. As an auteur, the state presents a linear narrative from the past to the future, but in the end, as with all auteurs, the state's identity and authority are defined in part through the actions of its actors and the experience of citizens.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | The state as auteur: Timing digitisation in Africa's Silicon Savannah |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1177/29768640241295479 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1177/29768640241295479 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © The Author(s), 2024. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives License 4.0 (CC-BY-NC-ND), where it is permissible to download and share the work provided it is properly cited. The work cannot be changed in any way or used commercially without permission from the journal. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ |
| Keywords: | Digitisation, temporality, state power, timing, time-images, Kenya, land administration, Deleuze |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Geography |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10197996 |
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