NCID-3158
Bulelani Jili
PhD candidate
Harvard University
Education/Degree:
1 African studies African studies (Harvard University)
About
Bulelani Jili is a Meta Research Ph.D. Fellow at Harvard University. His research interests include Africa-China relations, cybersecurity, ICT development, African political economy, internet policy, Chinese business law, law and development, and privacy law. He is also a Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School, a Fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Cybersecurity Fellow at the Belfer Center, and is conducting research with the China, Law, Development project at Oxford University. The project, funded by the European Research Council, is a 5-year, interdisciplinary, and multi-sited research project that aims to understand the nature of the order that underlies China’s new globalism. He has also advised leading think tanks, governments, and watchdogs like the American Bar Association, Atlantic Council, Freedom House, the UK's Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, US state department, and United Nations.
Current Work
The project, based on ethnographic, documentary, and archival research, will investigate the spread of Chinese surveillance technology in Africa, specifically in Kenya. Its primary goal is to explore the effects of new digital infrastructures on (i) state sovereignty and the governance of local populations, including the management of crime and the enforcement of economic regulation; (ii) civil society, with respect to the sense of in/security, and of un/freedom, it instills in citizens; and (iii) patterns of social and material inequality. What, further, are its hidden, unintended consequences in Kenya, and what differences, if any, flow from their differences of political regime? And, finally, what does the spread of Chinese digital infrastructure, exemplified by the case study here, augur for the future of China in Africa, a question with significant implications for Africa and the global order at large.
Research Area Keyword(s)
surveillance, Africa-China, Postcolonial Thought, Sovereignty, World Systems Theory