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she organises into three groups by the geographical regions they come from: South East Asians (from Cambodia, Burma and Thailand), Africans and the third group, comprising Iraqis, Iranians and Afghans. She discovers differences in their ability to use telecommunications technology (e.g. telephones, fax machines and mobile phones), depending on their countries of origin, suggesting that conflict, war or government surveillance hindered their abilities. Leung also observes that exposure to new
communication can be difficult to sustain – this is especially so in conflict-affected places where access to technology or telecommunications may be inconsistent. Working on a mutual project where each partner and individual has their own stake in the work can cultivate a space of collaborative learning, comradery and energy to create meaningful work together. Our initial successful creative production formed the basis upon which subsequent collaborations could flourish. In
underpin increased insecurity for aid organisations are mostly seen as beyond the remit of the ‘apolitical’ provision of security for ‘apolitical’ aid actors. Aid installations’ often superior telecommunications, private transport and security practices position them as sovereign, state-like presences within host countries, further entrenching the colonial relationship between aid actors and beneficiaries ( Edkins, 2003 ). Alongside the
roundups in Nairobi ( ‘Petition 19 of 2013 – Kenya Law’, 2013 ). At the time of our study, refugees were allowed to apply for work permits, but our key informants and respondents told us that such permit applications were nearly universally rejected or simply never even processed. Refugees’ access to telecommunications and mainstream financial services was also restricted. In 2015, Kenya implemented a new national identity card
For thirty years, the British economy has repeated the same old experiment of subjecting everything to competition and market because that is what works in the imagination of central government. This book demonstrates the repeated failure of the 30 year policy experiments by examining three sectors: broadband, food supply and retail banking. It argues against naïve metaphors of national disease, highlights the imaginary (or cosmology) that frames those metaphors, and draws out the implications of the experiment. Discussing the role of the experiments in post-1945 Britain, the book's overview on telecommunications, supermarkets and retail banking, reveals the limits of treatment by competition. Privatisation of fixed line telecoms in the UK delivered a system in which the private and public interests are only partially aligned in relation to provision of broadband. Individual supermarket chains may struggle but the four big UK supermarket chains are generally presented as exemplars because they have for a generation combined adequate profits with low price, choice and quality to deliver shareholder value. The many inquiries into retail banking after the financial crisis have concluded that the sector's problem was not enough competition. In a devolved experiment, socially-licensed policies and priorities vary from place to place and context to context. However, meaningful political engagement with the specifics in the economy will need to avoid losing sight of four principles: contestation, judgement, discussion, and tinkering. While others can be blamed for the failure of the experiments, the political responsibility for the ending and starting another is collectively peoples'.
Globalized urban precarity in Berlin and Abidjan examines urban youth’s practices of making do in digital economies, to understand how precarious working conditions reverberate in the coming of age in contemporary cities. Through a comparative analysis of the perspectives of young men working as airtime sellers in Abidjan and food delivery riders in Berlin, the book provides innovative analytical lenses to understand urban inequalities against the backdrop of current digital urban developments. Essentially, this ethnography challenges the easy conflation of instability with insecurity, and overcomes the centrality of wage labour in research on urban livelihood, by looking at a broader set of economic practices and relational mechanisms. The analysis shows how accruing symbolic capital, a feel for the game in contexts of ambiguity, and access to care are fundamental for explaining the unequal distribution of risks for socio-material insecurities in unstable work settings.
This chapter looks at how personal and corporate greed creates corruption in many sub-Saharan African countries, the extent of it and frameworks for understanding it. It looks at the different categories of corruption specifically found in the telecommunications industry, including: how to obtain a telecoms licence; bribing to get equipment contracts; using fraud to steal from the government and the private sector; and predatory corruption used to threaten individuals. The opening section looks at the most high-profile telecoms corruption case
privatisation of a state corporation monopoly had a significant impact on the telecommunications market. The former monopoly company (NTT)1 has remained dominant, yet this position has been challenged by emergent new entrants (new common carriers: NCCs). Regulatory functions were not assigned to a newly created independent regulator but to a government ministry, the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications (MPT), which lacked experience and expertise in implementing this new task in its early stage (Tsuchiya 2003: 77). This chapter analyses the impact of this liberalisation
zombie 2 that has sprung to life recently. It is a policy of Internet 3 non-discrimination based on innovation, free speech, privacy and content provider commercial self-interest, imposed on the technocratic economic regulation of telecommunications (telco) local access networks. The regulators, telcos and governments don’t like it one bit. The laws and regulations are formally ‘Open Internet’ not
This chapter looks at the opening up of communications markets to privately owned companies (known as liberalisation) and the privatisation of state-owned monopoly telecommunications companies that brought large-scale investment into Africa to create mobile voice networks. This was both a political and a legal challenge. What follows describes how market liberalisation and privatisation pitted the inefficient state telecoms behemoths against new mobile market challengers, with the latter introducing innovations like pre-paid calling. It