Global digital political economy and its concerns: is digital imperialism the elephant in the room?

Digitalisation has become so pervasive in contemporary life as to almost define it. Digitalisation is underlined by the myriad ways in which daily life and living in the last 30 years has become decidedly entangled in digital artefacts, infrastructure and networks. The latest COVID-19 pandemic provides the most recent empirical, incontrovertibly global and demonstrable snapshot of this reality. This commentary concerns itself with what all of this means for Africa’s and, by extension, the Global South’s place in the scheme of global power mediated by the era of digitalisation by focusing on the idea of digital imperialism. While the idea of digital imperialism has been introduced in the burgeoning literature on digitalisation, it has been undertheorised and therefore egregiously neglected. Drawing insights from the fields of techno-politics, science and technology studies (STS), development studies and international relations, the commentary offers some conceptual building blocks wound around the idea of digital imperialism as a starting point for catalysing understanding about Africa and the power dynamics of the digitalisation turn in the global political economy.