States have a legitimate mandate to protect national security. However, on a global scale, the concept of national security has increasingly become a problematic framework for state approaches to cyberspace and digital technology law. In many countries, the state frequently invokes the rhetoric of national security to justify authoritarian repression and human rights violations. In the context of cyberspace and digital technologies, these repressive actions and violations are often carried out through cybersecurity and cybercrime-related laws and enforcement mechanisms.
In this first episode we look at problematic African state narratives around national security and how these narratives are used to undermine human rights.
To unpack this issue, IPPR research associate Frederico Links interviewed Professor Jane Duncan. Jane Duncan is a Professor of Digital Society at the University of Glasgow and a visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg (UJ).
In 2018, she was appointed by President Cyril Ramaphosa to a panel to investigate abuses in the South African State Security Agency (SSA).
Jane Duncan comes from a civil society background, having worked for the Freedom of Expression Institute (FXI) for 15 years and having served as its Executive Director for eight of those years. The FXI dealt with some of the earliest post-apartheid cases of freedom of expression violations, including violations of the right to protest and state harassment of activists.
She is author of The rise of the Securocrats (Jacana, 2014), Protest Nation (2016), Stopping the Spies (2018) and National Security Surveillance in Southern Africa (2022) and is a regular contributor to a range of journalistic publications.
For more on this topic please read our complementary primer on the impact of problematic African national security narratives on Namibian cybersecurity and cybercrime law-making. You can find the primer on the IPPR website, at https://ippr.org.na/publication/problematic-influences/
This work was carried out in the context of the Africa Digital Rights Fund with support from the Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa (CIPESA).
