The People Will be Observed: Thoughts on Bulelani Jili, "Africa’s Demand for and Adoption of Chinese Surveillance" (Issue Brief May 2023)

Pix Credit  Bulelani Jilin for the essay

 "Surveillance camera systems are deployed extensively within England and Wales, and these systems form part of a complex landscape of ownership, operation and accountability. Where used appropriately, these systems are valuable tools which contribute to public safety and security, and in protecting both people and property." (Surveillance Camera Code of Practice (First Published June 2013; Amended November 2021; ¶ 4).

 "African states seek out and acquire surveillance systems for a number of reasons, largely as part of a wider effort to augment state security response and capability. Africa’s significant digital infrastructure gap is being addressed through Chinese investment and state support."(Bulelani Jili, "Africa’s Demand for and Adoption of Chinese Surveillance" (Issue Brief May 2023)).

The observed society is an ancient impulse.  There is not an institution with managerial and disciplinary capacity that is not, to some extent, obsessed with the the need to observe. The observed society is an ancient impulse. In ancient times observation was built into family structures. In medieval Europe, for example, it was bound up in the system of parish organization and cultures of confession to local priests. Compelled attendance at mass gatherings (religious services, mustering of local people, even town councils, were venues where observation was possible in low tech systems, and deviation managed. More intense observation systems were reserved for such deviation--prisons, servitude and the like. Low tech requires coded marking t make observation easier.  Sumptuary rules--effectively coding individuals by what they were required to wear--was easy and about as effective as anything else in a low tech environment.  The social and political foundations were never far from the technologies of observation. As Shakespeare noted in King Lear: "Thorough tatter’d clothes small vices do appear;  Robes and furr’d gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold, And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks. Arm it in rags, a pygmy’s straw does pierce it. (Act 4 Scene 6).

Surveillance systems have no ideology. They have along history, and a technology. Ideology colors surveillance, and shapes it in the service of both its ordering presumptions and the institutions constituted to ensure the realization of ideological premises.  Where ideological premises clash, it is not the technologies of surveillance--but the signification of those technologies in context--that tend to shape the way in which such forms of observation are conceived, perceived, and judged.

Today in the great campaigns for global dominance between the ideologies of liberal democracy, of Marxist-Leninism, and of a mixed assortment of post-colonial hybridity, the signification of surveillance has become an important means of ideological differentiation. In that context, both the technologies of surveillance and the uses to which harvested surveillance data are applied have become symbolic and discursive markers of ideological allegiance.  Indeed, the advances in technology have made possible not merely a more granular operationalization of surveillance, but also the commodification of the data that is harvested in the process of observation--that is in the preservation, disaggregation and repackaging of the memory of the observed--in ways that substantially redefine the disciplinary potential of every ideological system expressed  in and through tech based governance mechanisms. One does not merely observe and respond.  One observes, records, digests and elaborates multiple systems of consequences that can extend over time and that, at its broadest, can be used to repackage the social order itself. 

Technology, though also reflects its master.  And in contests for the deployment of technology in the service of ideology, tech operationalization can be made to reflect (that is to objectify the signification) of the ideology enhanced by and managed through tech hardware and software. That, in turn, provides another field in which the manifestation of ideology on the ground can both serve a controlled population, and can, in some sense, project ideology when it is deployed beyond the home territories of an  ideological metropolis (like the U.S. or China). Tech, in a sense, and surveillance tech in particular, expresses the semiotics of social relations in the form not just of objects, but of the way that objects are used to compel meaning through use by collectives.

Pix credit here

African states serve as an important battleground for these competing imaginaries of social relations, and their realization through technology.  In the process, it serves as an quote concrete manifestation, on the ground, of the power of these more abstracted insights in the great battles for control of the way that collectives rationalize the world around them and then impose that view on their social orderings. In the everyday language of politics, the issue revolves around the use by African states of Chinese surveillance tech products. The U.S. tends to object.  And in that objection highlights the differentiating power of tech hardware and software both as a tool of domestic self-discipline and as a means of projecting power into Africa through tech. The American (though not as well as they could) have begun to elaborate a theory of Chinese post global colonialism through the exploitation of surveillance assets.  More than that, they suggest that such surveillance assets can be used to manage perception in ways that enhances influence--the currency of post global empire. In this context the possibilities, mostly unrealized to date, of AI enhancements might further these goals. Of course, these views are vigorously countered by the Chinese tech providers which argue that they are providing a service in collaboration with purchasing states, as well as enhancing tech transfer through capacity building. Still if tech reflects and insinuates ideology, then whether it is provided by the liberal democratic camp or the Marxist Leninist camp the result is always the same.  The real moral for African states is the critical need to make tech their own and detach it from their providers. That is a long terms project.

Many of these issues are approached in a quite useful way in Bulelani Jili, "Africa’s Demand for and Adoption of Chinese Surveillance" (Cyber Statecraft Initiative; Atlantic Council Issue Brief May 2023). The Executive Summary follows and the Brief may be accessed in full here.

 

Bulelani Jili, "Africa’s Demand for and Adoption of Chinese Surveillance" (Cyber Statecraft Initiative; Issue Brief May 2023)

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

When examining the proliferation of Chinese surveillance systems and cyber capabilities in Africa, research disproportionately focuses on the motivations and ambitions of the supplier. This perspective, while it highlights Chinese diplomatic ambitions and corporate opportunities, ignores local features that drive the adoption of Chinese surveillance tools. This paper discusses African demand factors through an examination of the primary case study of Kenya and examples from South Africa and Uganda. By drawing attention to local efforts to procure and collaborate with Chinese firms to establish public security systems, this work seeks to address the motivations behind the adoption of Chinese information and communication technology (ICT) systems, which include artificial intelligence (AI) surveillance tools and other biometric identification systems, and illustrates the consequences of the proliferation of digital surveillance tools for local and global communities. The paper emphasizes African volition—recognizing its salience—as a way to go beyond myopic representations of Africa as a passive recipient and partner in Africa-China relations.

This work examines the proliferation of Chinese surveillance tools as a dynamic multilateral process. To stem the proliferation of surveillance tools, US policy must understand African demand and accordingly help address local priorities. Accordingly, this paper assesses how demand factors contribute to the proliferation of surveillance technologies, addressing an underexplored facet of the proliferation process, while underscoring the risks of these tools’ buildup. Local procurement is critically driven by public security ambitions and justified as a means of achieving development and security aims. While these tools arrive on ostensibly permissible grounds, their acquisition and application come with- out public consent or robust accountability measures. It is this gap between the adoption of novel digital surveillance technologies and robust regulatory measures that inspires trepidation. Despite growing concerns over human rights violations domestically and the real risk of installed backdoors in hardware and software, African leaders continue to procure surveillance tools from the People’s Republic of China. This decision is predicated on the avail- ability and financial feasibility of Chinese platforms as well as on the technology’s supposed capacity to address infra- structure gaps and local public security threats. Discussions of African agency that fail to underscore some of the impediments to its expression only romanticize African volition.