Navigating the Multiplexity of Africa’s Digital Partnerships amidst Global Rivalry

Abstract Digital development has progressively become a public policy priority for many African governments and occupies an increasingly important place in the continent’s relations with its strategic partners. Despite challenging local contexts and constrained budgets, several African governments are maneuvering to achieve ambitious national priorities in relation to digital transformation. At the local level, private sector actors and national governments are adopting a range of techniques to engage and negotiate different digital collaborations in order to fulfill their objectives despite global geopolitical tensions in the digital sphere, especially between the US and China. As in several other parts of the world, digital rivalries or geopolitics are manifested in Africa by competing partners making rival offers to digitize African economies. Yet the landscape of Africa’s digital partners is marked by the absence of hegemony by a single or a small set of countries or actors. Instead, Africa’s digital partners include a large variety of actors, among which are large and small nations, international and regional organizations, private corporations, and non-state actors. By using multiplexity (instead of multipolarity) as a conceptual framework, this article aims to describe and analyze the dynamic ways in which African governments organize their digital partnerships in a context of global power rivalry and how, despite the persistence of various dependencies, the pluralization of choice allows for the exercise of agency.