ICTs for Surveillance and Suppression: The Case of the Indian Emergency 1975-1977

Information and Communications technologies (ICT) pervade society. The Internet, wireless communication, and social media are ubiquitous in and indispensable in society today. As they continue to grow and mushroom, there are new and increased calls from various segments of the society such as technologists, activists, sociologists, and legal experts, who issue warnings on the more nefarious and undesirable uses of ICTs, especially by governments. In fact, government control and surveillance using ICTs is not a new phenomenon. By looking at history, we are able to see several instances when ICTs have been used by governments to control, surveil, and infringe on basic rights of their citizens. It is useful to document and study those instances, so that we may understand what is at stake, and how such situations can be perpetrated as well as prevented or at least curtailed. In this paper, I trace the case of the “Internal Emergency” that was promulgated in (democratic) India between 1975 and 1977 by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The paper examines the use and abuse of ICTs by the Indian government against its own people, along with its ramifications

The birth of distance: communications and changing conceptions of elsewhere

The birth of distance: communications and changing conceptions of elsewher

Celling Black Bodies: Black Women in the Global Prison Industrial Complex

The 1980s and 1990s have witnessed an explosion in the population of women prisoners in Europe, North America, and Australasia, accompanied by a boom in prison construction. This article argues that this new pattern of women\u27s incarceration has been forged by three overlapping phenomena. The first is the fundamental shift in the role of the state that has occurred as a result of neo-liberal globalization. The second and related phenomenon is the emergence and subsequent global expansion of what has been labelled a \u27prison industrial complex\u27 made up of an intricate web of relations between state penal institutions, politicians and profit-driven prison corporations. The third is the emergence of a US-led global war on drugs which is symbiotically related and mutually constituted by the transnational trade in criminalized drugs. These new regimes of accumulation and discipline, I argue, build on older systems of racist and patriarchal exploitation to ensure the super-exploitation of black women within the global prison industrial complex. The article calls for a new anti-racist feminist analysis that explores how the complex matrix of race, class, gender and nationality meshes with contemporary globalized geo-political and economic realities. The prison industrial complex plays a critical role in sustaining the viability of the new global economy and black women are increasingly becoming the raw material that fuels its expansion and profitability. The article seeks to reveal the profitable synergies between drug enforcement, the prison industry, international financial institutions, media and politicians that are sending women to prison in ever increasing numbers

Postcolonial Global Health, Post-Colony Microbes and Antimicrobial Resistance

This is the final version. Available on open access from SAGE Publications via the DOI in this recordRather than ‘superbugs’ signifying recalcitrant forms of life that withstand biomedical treatment, drug resistant infections emerge within and are intricate with the exercise of social and medical power. The distinction is important, as it provides a means to understand and critique current methods employed to confront the threat of widespread antimicrobial resistance. A global health regime that seeks to extend social and medical power, through technical and market integration, risks reproducing a form of triumphalism and exceptionalism that resistance itself should have us pause to question. An alternative approach, based on a postcolonial as well as a ‘post-colony’ approach to health and microbes, provides impetus to challenge the assumptions and norms of global health. It highlights the potential contribution that vernacular approaches to human and animal health can play in altering the milieu of resistance.Wellcome TrustEconomic and Social Research Council (ESRC

Dystopian Constitutionalism

This article describes and defends the distinctive role and rich tradition of using contrastive dystopian states in constitutional theory and practice. As constitutional tradition going back to the founding, U.S. constitutional analysis was replete with arguments about what practices would lead to an undesirable state of tyranny. In more recent constitutional history, the use of contrasting examples of the “police state,” totalitarianism, or Orwellian references have been prevalent in Supreme Court opinions across doctrinal domains, most recently making a prominent appearance at oral argument in the Fourth Amendment case, United States v. Jones. In contrast to more comprehensive constitutional theories, what differentiates dystopian constitutionalism is that it does not purport to provide a comprehensive way of understanding the Constitution. Rather, in the spirit of what Judith Shklar calls the “liberalism of fear,” it provides a way of organizing constitutional argumentation in opposition to states of government Americans might wish to avoid. It helps in understanding how to better implement constitutional principles into workable rules, not by holding up an ideal, but by urging us away from the negative alternative. In this respect, dystopian constitutionalism is focused less on obtaining an ideal state of governance than on achieving a workable system of self-governance that would avoid descent into tyranny. It has been particularly salient in criminal procedure and First Amendment cases, on which this article focuses. As a mode of argumentation, dystopian constitutional analysis uses consequence avoidance arguments often taking the form of slippery slopes. It also makes use of negative exemplars and legal archetypes — the latter first developed by Jeremy Waldron as a way of organizing our understanding of more holistic bodies of law. This article also explores how consequence avoidance arguments can be turned on their head by a different ordering of priorities. Practices once thought undesirable can lose their taint, a shift reflected in the relationship between the logical argument forms of modus tollens and modus ponens. This shift in argument form is exemplified, as this article discusses, in the contrast between the Fourth Amendment reasoning found in the 1948 case Johnson v. United States and the 2011 case Kentucky v. King. Beyond describing how dystopian analysis works, I argue normatively that there are a number of positive effects in using a dystopian analysis. One of the chief virtues of which is to encourage more holistic analysis of legal rules, which has particular salience in Fourth Amendment cases. Moreover, holistic consideration of constitutional values in service of consequence avoidance arguments does not render dystopian constitutionalism into a version of irrational “tyrranaphobia,” as some scholars have argued. Rather, methodologically it is about keeping in mind negative boundaries, and providing a grammar for talking about how to construct rules that steer us away from negative consequences. Substantively, it is about affirming national agreements on core values and commitments comprising a constitutional identity. When agreement proves elusive, dystopian constitutional analysis supplements other constitutional arguments to facilitate analysis of the more comprehensive constitutional fidelity and fit we might expect from a proposed decision

The intelligence-led national security architecture of Ghana and its three pre-conditions

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonIn chronological order, this dissertation takes the reader through the story of Ghana, covering many decades of its historical and political journey to date. Whilst doing so, it also explains how such a journey helped define the evolution of the country’s intelligence-led national security architecture from the pre-colonial era to what it is today. Besides going through the decades, it also zooms in analytically on the relevance of the architecture under respective governments throughout the country’s history. The historical analysis indicated that throughout Ghana’s history, whenever a new administration assumes office and immediately puts in place an intelligence-led national security architecture to help attain and maintain domestic stability, is when the country is most stable. However, whenever there is absence of intelligence-led national security architecture, the country’s political and security landscape becomes unstable. Such trend has been consistent since independence to date, and not only that when one pushes further back into pre-independence as part of Ghana’s backstory, the trend is still applicable. This analysis helped establish that there is a relationship between the country’s domestic stability and its intelligence-led national security architecture, which embodies three pre-conditions: (1) Establish National Security Institutions, (2) Embark on Intelligence Activities, and (3) Implement Interagency Intelligence Coordination. Additionally, the age of the country’s democracy, the political and security landscape of the sub-region where Ghana is situated, and Ghana’s security sector governance, and oversight responsibilities; have all been evaluated to help argue the relationship between the role of the intelligence-led national security architecture and current domestic stability. Hence underscoring the relevance of the pivotal role being played by Ghana’s intelligence-led national security architecture in the fight to maintain stability in the country