Pedagogies of Digital Sovereignty: The Un/Making Of Dependency Through Technical Education in Kenya

What the paper says

This article examines digital sovereignty initiatives in Kenya, particularly efforts to cultivate technical skills, as an aperture through which to understand how postcolonial African states perform digital sovereignty within a globally asymmetrical technological and economic order. It argues that such initiatives operate not only as practical interventions in digital development but also as figural performances of state agency. Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Nairobi, including interviews, policy analysis, and institutional observations, the study shows how programmes for cultivating technological talent serve as aspirational modalities through which the state enacts its commitment to digital sovereignty. While African policymakers and their corporate partners increasingly frame digital sovereignty as a pathway to state capacity and development, these very acts of assertion often reinscribe new forms of dependency, particularly through the legitimization of privatization and alignment with corporate interests. By centering these initiatives, the article illuminates the political life of technical capacity building programmes, revealing how the pursuit of sovereignty in the digital age is entangled with, and constrained by, enduring structures of dependency and global inequality.