Description
This paper seeks to make an intervention in IR/IS literatures focused on the relationship between the digital and politics, arguing that Eurocentrism is being reproduced in both traditional and new ways in both traditional and critical perspectives. Mainstream IR presents “weaponised interdependence” (Farrel & Newman, 2019) as a model for understanding state relationships with digital communication platforms, but this assumes the complete hegemony of Western and Chinese technological power. Secondly, critical theorists situate the digital as a new tool of colonial and capitalist extraction, with various frameworks of “digital colonialism” (Kwet, 2019), “data colonialism” (Couldry & Mejias, 2019), “digital capitalism” (Fuchs & Mosco, 2015), “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff, 2019) gaining traction. While we are more sympathetic to these approaches, we argue they too slip into a statist understanding of global digital politics that presents the Global South as simply a site of extraction. In both cases, we identify a discourse of Global South exceptionalism in the study of digital politics that we term the “Digital South” discourse. We describe how this discourse is interlinked with successful attempts by relatively powerful Global South actors (‘regional elites’) and corporations to assert themselves as representatives of Global South agency - at times even ‘anti-colonial’ in nature - while at the same time using digital tools to engage in extractive and coercive projects of governance. This attempt to create a legible ‘Digital South’ is thus produced and reproduced in both the Global North and Global South, but cannot be read as a serious challenge to Eurocentric theories of the digital and digitisation.
