#Technology – Looking back, going forward: LSE Academics reflect on 2015 and look ahead to 2016

LSE academics reflect on a key story of 2015 along with what they expect from 2016

Wasta! The long-term implications of education expansion and economic liberalisation on Politics in Sudan.

While there has been much discussion of political violence in Sudan’s peripheries, less attention has been paid to Khartoum, the country’s capital and its historic locus of civic mobilisation. Student protests, union strikes, controversies within the National Congress Party, and an alliance between oppositional parties and rebel groups all signal mounting instability. This paper argues that a more grounded sociological perspective is needed to understand this instability. The Islamists did not merely use military power to seize control, but long-term economic and ideological power to upset sectarian control over politics and reconfigure state-society relations. Specifically, they pursued financial Islamisation, higher education expansion and liberalisation. In the process, they destroyed any semblance of a public, institutionalised system of governance, creating a more private, decentralised and transnational one. The Islamists have thus far demonstrated considerable talents in retaining control over this system, but it will become more difficult as oil revenue dwindles

Jim Murphy and Padraig Carmody, Africa's ICT revolution: technical regimes and production networks in South Africa and Tanzania.

The concept of disintermediation posits that information and communications technology (ICTs) weaken intermediaries and flatten global markets. In global debates about this idea, a handful of studies, notably Jensen's 2007 work on South Indian fishermen and Aker's 2010 work on Niger farmers, are repeatedly cited to argue for a broad applicability. However, by tracking the impacts of ICTs on small-scale producers in the tourism and wood product industries of South Africa and Tanzania, Jim Murphy and Padraig Carmody paint a much more nuanced picture of ICT-enabled economic change in contemporary Africa

‘We do our bit in our own space’: DAL Group and the development of a curiously Sudanese enclave economy

The family firm, DAL group, is Sudan’s largest and most diversified company. Its growth has concentrated on consumer goods, rather than on state concessions or exports. It has developed its own training programs, construction units, transportation networks and market research departments to manage the unstable environment outside its business walls. This paper focuses on the company’s recruitment policies, demonstrating how the firm relies on its own internal family structure and a transnational network of Sudanese professionals in order to grow and prosper. Such self-reliance contributes to growing political frustration among young unemployed people. Graduates from ‘marginal’ areas rely more heavily on public advertisements and on information obtained from state bodies, not the private channels of wasta (personal intermediation) that cut through contemporary business. The paper concludes by comparing DAL with similar business networks in Ethiopia and Rwanda arguing that DAL is a unique and interesting form of ‘enclave economy,’ shaped by a displaced transnational elite operating in a hostile political environment. Within the wider political context of Sudan, there is a limit to what similar businesses can achieve

Book Review: business politics and the state in Africa: challenging the orthodoxies on growth and transformation,by Tim Kelsall

Arguing that much of Africa’s recent economic boom has been confined to unsustainable growth in primary commodities, this book contends that African economies need structural transformation into higher-­‐value manufacturing and services. While evidence from other regions emphasizes state action to overcome collective action problems and create the‘predictability’ necessary for structural transformation, conventional wisdom has deemed Africa’s neo-­‐patrimonial political culture too insalubrious an environment for the state to act effectively. This book challenges this view: there can be such a thing as developmental patrimonialism and it mobilizes an array of historical and contemporary material to lobby for stronger and smarter support for industrial policies

At the intersection of digital economy and industrial policy in Africa

To coincide with the upcoming day-long workshop on Industrialisation in Africa on May 3 2016, Laura Mann, from LSE’s International Development department offers her vision of what a more strategic approach to digital innovation might look like in African economies

The platformisation of rural Kenya is reshaping the balance of power within agricultural production networks

In recent years, digital developers have shifted away from stand-alone apps towards more integrated and centralised platforms. Focussed on Kenya, LSE’s Dr Laura Mann draws on new research to explain why policy-makers should take notice of profound re-organisations taking place in global agriculture networks, and the balance of power between public and private actors