Month: September 2022

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Government Digital Surveillance in Sub-Saharan Africa

PI: Karol Czuba, Assistant Professor, Nazarbayev University

Grant Amount and Grant Fund: $2,500, Alma Ostrom and Leah Hopkins Civic Education Fund

Project Abstract: Government adoption of digital surveillance technologies, from facial recognition to mobile device hacking software, in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has increased substantially in the wake of improved internet access on the continent. While a growing literature in Political Science has explored the effects of such surveillance on repression, cooptation, and public goods provision in other parts of the world, few scholars have studied the phenomenon in the African context; as a result, available evidence is limited, unsystematic, and largely descriptive. This project expands our knowledge of the phenomenon by providing more systematic evidence of government digital surveillance in SSA and explaining the adoption of the technologies that make surveillance possible. The project involves the collation of an original dataset that details instances of digital surveillance undertaken by African governments for political purposes as well as field research in several countries, starting with Kenya.

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From Resistance to Cooperation: The Conditional Effect of Land Reform in Mexico

PI: Manuel Cabal, Teaching Fellow, University of Chicago

Grant Amount and Grant Fund: $2,500,Alma Ostrom and Leah Hopkins Civic Education Fund

Project Abstract: I specialize in comparative politics with a regional focus on Latin America. My research interests are in state-building, authoritarianism, and the political economy of development. Methodologically, I combine comparative-historical approaches with quantitative data analysis. My research asks when and how state institutions emerge and why they persist for long periods, using insights from the research tradition on historical institutionalism. I am especially interested in state institutions to provide public goods that foster economic development, such as public education and other human services.

My book project addresses a comparative politics puzzle: revolutionary regimes are among the most durable autocracies despite seldom having capable state organizations. In contrast to the conventional wisdom, I argue that revolutions do not provide by themselves the conditions conducive to building “state capacity,” as they are prone to elite factionalism and state-society conflict. Through the study of the geography of public education access after the Mexican Revolution, I highlight an understudied source of institutional dysfunctionality: the strength of territorially-based interests and identities. 

More broadly, my research agenda leverages diverse aspects of public education to investigate the construction and consolidation of authoritarian states. I also study the different channels through which the economic elites in unequal societies, such as Latin America, shape public policy and institutions.

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New World Racial Orders: Transnational Racial Formation and Charting a Space for Afro-Latinos

PI: Michelle Bueno Vasquez, Ph.D. Candidate, Northwestern University

Grant Amount and Grant Fund: $1,548, Marguerite Ross Bennett Fund

Project Abstract: U.S.  political language around Black and Latino minority groups has historically excluded those who exist at the intersection of these seemingly disparate groups. This erasure of Afro-Latinos has dire consequences: their double vulnerability to race-based discrimination, lack of government recognition and assistance, and political disenfranchisement. I argue that this erasure is not coincidental and has historical and contemporary links to imperialism, minority activism, and Census administration.

Through my dissertation, I pursue the questions: How did U.S. military interventions export U.S. racism and Black erasure to Latin American nations? How did adding the “Hispanic” category erase Afro-Latino presence in data and Latino politics? Can diaspora change notions of race and restore Black empowerment across borders?

I answer these queries over time. Using archival methods and process tracing, I demonstrate how the U.S. occupations of the Dominican Republic contributed to the creation of a Dominican racial rhetoric of Black denial during the early 20th century. I analyze the development of the U.S. and Dominican Census from the 1980s to the 2010s and how they continue the work of invisibilizing Afro-Latinos through a theory I call minority essentialization. Finally, I study how Black Lives Matter activism in 2020 sprouted Black consciousness throughout the Afro-Latino diaspora through a digital ethnography of the movement’s spread through Twitter.

This interdisciplinary project can be located within diverse literature on race and ethnicity in the humanities and social sciences. Beyond academia, my work advances the study of intersectionality, the pursuit of equity for the minorities within minorities, and the power of activism in restoring lost roots and unifying communities across borders.