{"title":"The development of a smart political moral economy in Africa: discourse, legitimization, disciplining, and hegemony","authors":"P. Bloom","doi":"10.1080/21681392.2023.2200012","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This paper uses and expands the concept of a ‘ political moral economy ’ to better understand elite attempts to justify and promote capitalist development strategies linked to the proliferation of ‘ smart technologies ’ such as big data, mobile communications, and the construction of hi-tech cities. Drawing on an Ideology and Discourse analysis perspective on hegemony introduced by Ernesto Laclau and Chantel Mouffe, it aims to show how market-based ‘ smart development ’ across the African continent have discursively incorporate resistance moralities associated with popular critiques of elite corruption, foreign exploitation, and local economic marginalization for its overall political success. To do so, it will focus on the case of ‘ Leapfrogging development ’ discourses and the planned construction of the Technopolis Konza in Kenya. The key advance of this article is showing how dominant ideologies – and the domestic and foreign regimes of elite power they support – can be strengthened through processes of ‘ moral legitimisation ’ and ‘ moral disciplining ’ . Speci fi cally, this moral dimension of hegemony involves the ongoing incorporation and strategic redeployment of existing and emergent normative discourses for the purpose of providing political legitimacy to these governing ideologies and further attempting to normatively regulate populations in accordance with their core values and interests – even in the face of their practical and ongoing failures as policies.","PeriodicalId":37966,"journal":{"name":"Critical African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3000,"publicationDate":"2023-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Critical African Studies","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2023.2200012","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"ANTHROPOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This paper uses and expands the concept of a ‘ political moral economy ’ to better understand elite attempts to justify and promote capitalist development strategies linked to the proliferation of ‘ smart technologies ’ such as big data, mobile communications, and the construction of hi-tech cities. Drawing on an Ideology and Discourse analysis perspective on hegemony introduced by Ernesto Laclau and Chantel Mouffe, it aims to show how market-based ‘ smart development ’ across the African continent have discursively incorporate resistance moralities associated with popular critiques of elite corruption, foreign exploitation, and local economic marginalization for its overall political success. To do so, it will focus on the case of ‘ Leapfrogging development ’ discourses and the planned construction of the Technopolis Konza in Kenya. The key advance of this article is showing how dominant ideologies – and the domestic and foreign regimes of elite power they support – can be strengthened through processes of ‘ moral legitimisation ’ and ‘ moral disciplining ’ . Speci fi cally, this moral dimension of hegemony involves the ongoing incorporation and strategic redeployment of existing and emergent normative discourses for the purpose of providing political legitimacy to these governing ideologies and further attempting to normatively regulate populations in accordance with their core values and interests – even in the face of their practical and ongoing failures as policies.
期刊介绍:
Critical African Studies seeks to return Africanist scholarship to the heart of theoretical innovation within each of its constituent disciplines, including Anthropology, Political Science, Sociology, History, Law and Economics. We offer authors a more flexible publishing platform than other journals, allowing them greater space to develop empirical discussions alongside theoretical and conceptual engagements. We aim to publish scholarly articles that offer both innovative empirical contributions, grounded in original fieldwork, and also innovative theoretical engagements. This speaks to our broader intention to promote the deployment of thorough empirical work for the purposes of sophisticated theoretical innovation. We invite contributions that meet the aims of the journal, including special issue proposals that offer fresh empirical and theoretical insights into African Studies debates.