Smart for Whom? Africa’s Smart Cities and Digital Authoritarianism

Abstract

The predicament of digital authoritarianism is particularly grievous for Africa because democratic institutions have been gradually eroded in several countries throughout the region. Illiberal regimes, in particular, exploit digital technologies to undermine such fragile democracies as Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia. Moreover, surveillance technology is expanding throughout the region as national and local governments seek to increase their capacity to monitor and control their populations—a trend that has been aggravated with the COVID-19 pandemic. This article assesses the risks posed by smart cities to democratic institutions and processes by identifying the main models of smart city development and how they conceive of the state and citizens’ relationship, then assessing how smart cities can potentially foster and consolidate digital authoritarianism, with a particular focus on the technology that a regime can exploit to pursue illiberal goals. I provide cases to illustrate how smart city systems promote digital authoritarianism and conclude by discussing proposals to mitigate the technological risks and promote democratic smart cities.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

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2 Ibid.

3 United Nations, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2018 Revision (New York: Population Division and Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations, 2019), https://population.un.org/wup/publications/Files/WUP2018-Report.pdf

4 Urbanization refers to a “shift in a population from one that is dispersed across small rural settlements in which agriculture is the dominant economic activity towards one where the population is concentrated in larger, dense urban settlements characterised by industrial and service activities.” United Nations, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision (New York: Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2015), p. 1.

5 Mira Slavova and Ekene Okwechime, “African Smart Cities Strategies for Agenda 2063,” Africa Journal of Management, Vol. 2, No. 2 (2016), pp. 210–229.

6 Ibid., p. 584.

7 Adaku Echendu and Peter Okafor, “Smart City Technology: A Potential Solution to Africa’s Growing Population and Rapid Urbanization?” Development Studies Research, Vol. 8, No. 1 (2021), p. 89.

8 Vito Albino, Umberto Berardi, and Rosa Maria Dangelico, “Smart Cities: Definitions, Dimensions, Performance, and Initiatives.” Journal of Urban Technology, Vol. 22, No. 1 (2015), pp. 3–21; Andrés Camero and Enrique Alba, “Smart City and Information Technology: A Review,” Cities, Vol. 93 (2019), pp. 84–94; Martina Fromhold-Eisebith, “Cyber-Physical Systems in Smart Cities—Mastering Technological, Economic, and Social Changes,” in Smart Cities: Foundations, Principles, and Applications, edited by Houbing Song, Ravi Srinivasan, Tamim Sookoor, and Sabina Jeschke (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons, 2017), pp. 1–22.

9 “Making African Cities Great.” African Smart Cities (n.d.), https://africansmartcities.info/

10 Lucas Melgaço and Rosamunde van Brakel, “Smart Cities as Surveillance Theatre,” Surveillance & Society, Vol. 19, No. 2 (2021), pp. 244–249.

11 Sarah Repucci and Amy Slipowitz, Freedom in the World 2022: The Global Expansion of Authoritarian Rule (Washington, DC: Freedom House, 2022).

12 Josh Miller, Antoine Sander, and Sharath Srinivasan, “Control, Extract, Legitimate: Covid‐19 and Digital Techno‐Opportunism across Africa,” Development and Change, Vol. 53, No. 6 (2022), pp. 1283–1307.

13 Alina Polyakova and Chris Meserole, Exporting Digital Authoritarianism: The Russian and Chinese Models, Brookings Institution (2019), https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/FP_20190827_digital_authoritarianism_polyakova_meserole.pdf.

14 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Smart Cities and Inclusive Growth. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (2020), https://www.oecd.org/cfe/cities/OECD_Policy_Paper_Smart_Cities_and_Inclusive_Growth.pdf

15 Charalampos Alexopoulos, Gabriela Viale Pereira, Yannis Charalabidis, and Lorenzo Madrid, “A Taxonomy of Smart Cities Initiatives,” in Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance (Melbourne, 2019), p. 284.

16 Hille Koselka and Liisa Mäkinen, “Surveillance,” in The International Encyclopedia of Geography, edited by Douglas Richardson, Noel Castree, Michael Goodchild, Audrey Kobayashi, Weidong Liu, and Richard Marston (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2017), pp. 1–9.

17 Deloitte, The Integrated Digital City (Australia: Deloitte, 2019), https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/au/Documents/future-of-cities/deloitte-future-of-cities-dtt_citysynergy-whitepaper_20190423.pdf

18 Michael Porter and James Heppelmann, “How Smart, Connected Products Are Transforming Competition,” Harvard Business Review, Vol. 92, No. 11 (2014), pp. 64–88.

19 Ibid.

20 Koskela and Mäkinen, “Surveillance.”

21 David Murakami Wood and Debra Mackinnon, “Partial Platforms and Oligoptic Surveillance in the Smart City,” Surveillance & Society, Vol. 17, No. 1/2 (2019), p. 176.

22 Gary T Marx, “What’s New About the ‘New Surveillance’? Classifying for Change and Continuity,” Surveillance & Society, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2002), p. 15.

23 Lucan Way and Steven Levitsky, “The Dynamics of Autocratic Coercion after the Cold War,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Vol. 39, No. 3 (2006), pp. 387–410.

24 Feldstein, “Surveillance in the Illiberal State”; Steven Feldstein, “How Artificial Intelligence Is Reshaping Repression,” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2019), pp. 40–52; Ronak Gopaldas, Digital Dictatorship Versus Digital Democracy in Africa, South African Institute of International Affairs (2019), http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep25956; Willem Gravett, “Digital Coloniser? China and Artificial Intelligence in Africa,” Survival, Vol. 62, No. 6 (2021), pp. 153–178; Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Erica Frantz, and Joseph Wright, “The Digital Dictators: How Technology Strengthens Autocracy,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 99, No. 2 (2020), pp. 103–115; Eda Keremoğlu and Nils Weidmann, “How Dictators Control the Internet: A Review Essay,” Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 53, No. 10–11 (2020), pp. 1690–1703.

25 Feldstein, “Surveillance in the Illiberal State.”

26 Kendall-Taylor and Wright, “The Digital Dictators.”

27 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1977).

28 Ibid.

29 Ross Andersen, “When China Sees All,” The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 326, No. 2 (2020), p. 60.

30 Ibid.

31 Polyakova and Meserole, Exporting Digital Authoritarianism; Xiao Qiang, “The Road to Digital Unfreedom: President Xi’s Surveillance State,” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2019), pp. 53–67.

32 For these actors, Africa is part of a broader strategic outlook where technologies, particularly digital technologies, are critical to international geopolitical competition. Mathew Burrows, Julian Mueller-Kaler, Kaisa Oksanen, and Ossi Piironen, Unpacking the Geopolitics of Technology (Atlantic Council, 2021). https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/report/unpacking-the-geopolitics-of-technology/

33 Luis da Vinha and Hongyi Liang, “China vis-à-vis the EU: The Competition for Africa’s Smart Cities,” in The Palgrave Handbook on China-Europe-Africa Relations: Legacies and the New International Order, edited by Francisco Leandro, Jorge Tavares, Yichao Li, and Carlos Rodrigues (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).

34 Alice Ekman, China’s Smart Cities: The New Geopolitical Battleground (Paris: Institut Français des Relations Internationales, 2019), https://www.ifri.org/en/publications/etudes-de-lifri/chinas-smart-cities-new-geopolitical-battleground

35 Ursula von der Leyen, State of the Union 2020. The European Commission (2020), https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/default/files/soteu_2020_en.pdf

36 European Commission and the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Joint Communication to the European Parliament and the Council on Strengthening the EU’s Contribution to Rules-Based Multilateralism (2021), https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/ALL/?uri=CELEX:52021JC0003

37 In this case, Europe differs from the United States, which has no federal data protection law. Benedikt Erforth and Kerstin Fritzsche, Towards a Digital Development Partnership That Meets African Interests (Washington, DC: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, 2022).

38 European Commission and the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Joint Communication to the European Parliament and the Council: Towards a Comprehensive Strategy with Africa (2020), https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A52020JC0004

39 European Council, Sixth European Union—African Union Summit: A Joint Vision for 2030 (2022), https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2022/02/18/sixth-european-union-african-union-summit-a-joint-vision-for-2030/

40 Erforth and Fritzsche, Towards a Digital Development Partnership That Meets African Interests.

41 Digital for Development Hub, Supporting Africa’s Digital Transformation (n.d.), https://d4dhub.eu/au-eu-project

42 Graham Allison, Kevin Klyman, Karina Barbesino, and Hugo Yen, The Great Tech Rivalry: China vs the U.S. (Cambridge, MA: Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School, 2021).

43 David Abdulai, Chinese Investment in Africa: How African Countries Can Position Themselves to Benefit from China’s Foray into Africa (London: Taylor & Francis, 2016).

44 Nadège Rolland, “China’s Southern Strategy: Beijing Is Using the Global South to Constrain America,” Foreign Affairs, 9 June 2022, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2022-06-09/chinas-southern-strategy (accessed 1 July 2022).

45 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, “China Will Work with Africa to Formulate and Implement a China-Africa Partnership Plan on Digital Innovation,” 24 August 2021, https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/wjbxw/202108/t20210825_9134687.html

46 Xi Jinping, “Work Together to Build the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, 14 May 2017, https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjdt_665385/zyjh_665391/201705/t20170527_678618.html

47 Ekman, China’s Smart Cities.

48 Stephen Olson, “Are Private Chinese Companies Really Private?” The Diplomat (2020), https://thediplomat.com/2020/09/are-private-chinese-companies-really-private/

49 Ekman, China’s Smart Cities; Sheena Chestnut Greitens, Dealing with Demand for China’s Global Surveillance Exports (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2020). https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/FP_20200428_china_surveillance_greitens_v3.pdf

50 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, “Forum on China-Africa Cooperation Beijing Action Plan (2019–2021),” 9 December 2018, http://focacsummit.mfa.gov.cn/eng/hyqk_1/201809/t20180912_5858585.htm

51 da Vinha and Liang, “China vis-à-vis the EU.”

52 State Council Information Office of China, China: Democracy That Works, Consulate General of the People’s Republic of China in New York (2021), http://newyork.china-consulate.gov.cn/eng/xw/202112/t20211207_10463265.htm

53 Greitens, Dealing with Demand for China’s Global Surveillance Exports; Charles Edel and David Schullman, “How China Exports Authoritarianism: Beijing’s Money and Technology Is Fueling Repression Worldwide,” Foreign Affairs, 16 September 2021, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2021-09-16/how-china-exports-authoritarianism

54 Yujia He and Angela Tritto, “Urban Utopia or Pipe Dream? Examining Chinese-Invested Smart City Development in Southeast Asia,” Third World Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 9 (2022), pp. 2244–2268; Rahul Karan Reddy, Mapping China’s Presence in Africa’s Digital Economy, Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, 15 July 2021, http://www.ipcs.org/comm_select.php?articleNo=5776

55 Reddy, Mapping China’s Presence in Africa’s Digital Economy.

56 There is debate as to whether China’s model of digital development actively promotes authoritarianism or whether the misuse of the technologies is dependent on how countries that purchase the technologies use them. Mamoudou Gazibo, “Is Democracy Declining in Africa and What Role for China?,” in Revisisting EU-Africa Relations in a Changing World, edited by Valeria Fargion and Mamoudou Gazibo (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publshing, 2021), pp. 252–266; He and Tritto, “Urban Utopia or Pipe Dream?”; Bulelani Jili, “The Spread of Chinese Surveillance Tools in Africa: A Focus on Ethiopia and Kenya,” in Africa-Europe Cooperation and Digital Transformation, edited by Chux Daniels, Benedikt Erforth, and Chloe Teevan (New York: Routledge, 2023), pp. 32–49.

57 Ogala Emmanuel, “How Governors Dickson, Okowa Spend Billions on High Tech Spying on Opponents, Others,” Premium Times, 9 June 2016, https://www.premiumtimesng.com/investigationspecial-reports/204987-investigation-governors-dickson-okowa-spend-billions-high-tech-spying-opponents-others.html; Jili, “The Spread of Chinese Surveillance Tools in Africa.”

58 Kali Robinson, “How Israel’s Pegasus Spyware Stoked the Surveillance Debate,” Council on Foreign Relations, 8 March 2022, https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/how-israels-pegasus-spyware-stoked-surveillance-debate

59 Steven Feldstein, “Surveillance in the Illiberal State,” in Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism, edited by András Sajó, Renáta Uitz, and Stephen Holmes (New York: Routledge, 2022), p. 353.

60 Ibid.

61 Laurence Côté-Roy and Sarah Moser, “‘Does Africa Not Deserve Shiny New Cities?’ The Power of Seductive Rhetoric around New Cities in Africa,” Urban Studies, Vol. 56, No. 12 (2019), pp. 2391–2407.

62 He and Tritto, “Urban Utopia or Pipe Dream?”

63 China Academy of Information and Communications Technology and EU-China Policy Dialogues Support Facility II, Comparative Study of Smart Cities in Europe and China 2014 (Berlin: Springer, 2016).

64 Femke van Noorloos and Marjan Kloosterboer, “Africa’s New Cities: The Contested Future of Urbanisation,” Urban Studies, Vol. 55, No. 6 (2018), pp. 1223–1241.

65 China offers several advantages to African nations by providing financial and technical assistance without the “conditionality” demanded by many Western actors. Xiaojun Li, “Does Conditionality Still Work? China’s Development Assistance and Democracy in Africa,” Chinese Political Science Review, Vol. 2, No. 2 (2017), pp. 201–220; Peter Dauvergne, “Facial Recognition Technology for Policing and Surveillance in the Global South: A Call for Bans,” Third World Quarterly (2022), pp. 1–11, https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2022.2080654; Samuel Woodhams, “China, Africa, and the Private Surveillance Industry,” Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 21, No. 3 (2020), pp. 158–165. Some funding also comes from European and international institutions.

66 Dipanjan Chaudhury, “China Reportedly Investing $8.43 Bn in Africa as Part of Digital Silk Road Initiative,” Economic Times, 15 October 2021, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/world-news/china-reportedly-investing-8-43-bn-in-africa-as-part-of-digital-silk-road-initiative/articleshow/87039334.cms

67 Côté-Roy and Moser, “‘Does Africa Not Deserve Shiny New Cities?’”; van Noorloos and Kloosterboer, “Africa’s New Cities.”

68 Jonathan Hillman and Maesea McCalpin, “Watching Huawei’s ‘Safe Cities,’” Center for Strategic & International Studies (2019), https://www.csis.org/analysis/watching-huaweis-safe-cities

69 Ibid., p. 3.

70 Monitor, “Across East Africa, Big Brother Is Watching Your Every Move,” Monitor, 3 December 2022, https://www.monitor.co.ug/uganda/news/national/across-east-africa-big-brother-is-watching-your-every-move-4041896.

71 Stephen Kafeero, “Uganda Is Using Huawei’s Facial Recognition Tech to Crack Down on Dissent after Anti-Government Protests,” Quartz, 27 November 2020, https://qz.com/emails/daily-brief/1849871650/china-and-saudi-arabia-get-chummy

72 David Ehl, “Africa Embraces Huawei Tech Despite Security Concerns,” DW, 8 February 2022, https://www.dw.com/en/africa-embraces-huawei-technology-despite-security-concerns/a-60665700

73 Kafeero, “Uganda Is Using Huawei’s Facial Recognition Tech to Crack Down on Dissent after Anti-Government Protests.”

74 Joe Parkinson, Nicholas Bariyo, and Josh Chin, “Huawei Technicians Helped African Governments Spy on Political Opponents,” Wall Street Journal, 15 August 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/huawei-technicians-helped-african-governments-spy-on-political-opponents-11565793017

75 Sarah Chiumbu, “Chinese Digital Infrastructure, Smart Cities and Surveillance in Zambia,” Media Policy and Democracy Project (2021), https://www.mediaanddemocracy.com/uploads/1/6/5/7/16577624/zambia_report.pdf

76 Ibid.

77 Parkinson, Bariyo, and Chin, “Huawei Technicians Helped African Governments Spy on Political Opponents.”

78 Chiumbu, “Chinese Digital Infrastructure, Smart Cities and Surveillance in Zambia.”

79 Ghalia Kadiri and Joan Tilouine, “A Addis-Abeba, le Siège de l’Union Africaine Espionné par Pékin,” Le Monde, 27 January 2018, https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2018/01/26/a-addis-abeba-le-siege-de-l-union-africaine-espionne-par-les-chinois_5247521_3212.html

80 Paul Kagame, Address by President Kagame at Transform Africa Summit, 10 May 2017, https://www.paulkagame.com/address-by-president-paul-kagame-transform-africa-summit-2017-kigali-10-may-2017/

81 Polyakova and Meserole, Exporting Digital Authoritarianism.

82 Feldstein, “How Artificial Intelligence Is Reshaping Repression.”

83 Gravett, “Digital Coloniser?”; Greitens, Dealing with Demand for China’s Global Surveillance Exports.

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Luis Da Vinha

Luis da Vinha is a Senior Lecturer and Coordinator of the Master of International Relations at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. He is the author of Geographic Mental Maps and Foreign Policy Change and coauthor of Three Approaches to Presidential Foreign Policy-Making in the Twenty-First Century. The author can be contacted at [email protected].