Abstract

Join us for a pre-book launch with Nanjala Nyabola, the author of the forthcoming ”Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics: How the Internet Era is Transforming Kenya” (ZED books/African Arguments, 2018).

From the upheavals of recent national elections to the success of the #MyDressMyChoice feminist movement, digital platforms have already had a dramatic impact on political life in Kenya – one of the most electronically advanced countries in Africa. While the impact of the Digital Age on Western politics has been extensively debated, there is still little appreciation of how it has been felt in developing countries such as Kenya. Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics explores the drastic efforts being made by elites to contain online activism, as well as how ‘fake news’, a failed digital vote-counting system and the incumbent president’s recruitment of Cambridge Analytica contributed to tensions around the 2017 elections. Reframing digital democracy from the African perspective, Nyabola’s ground-breaking work opens up new ways of understanding our current global online era.

Nanjala Nyabola is a writer, independent re-searcher and political analyst currently based in Nairobi, Kenya. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, Al Jazeera, World Politics Review, as well as chapters in edited collections. Nanjala holds a BA in African Studies and Political Science from the University of Birmingham, an MSc in Forced Migration and an MSc in African Studies, both from the University of Oxford, which she attended as a Rhodes Scholar, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.