Rerouting Geopolitics: Narratives and the Political Power of Communications

This think-piece provides an African lens on global communications developments in the context of new and dynamic geopolitical formations. Through this lens and in the context of the global crisis brought by the Covid-19 pandemic, the chapter reflects on the progress made towards achieving a more just world information order that would enable citizens of the world to mitigate the negative effects of the pandemic and lockdowns that governments around the world have introduced to contain its spread. Using a conceptualisation based on narratives, this think-piece explores the intersections between geopolitics and communications. This chapter reflects on the dimensions that a novel research agenda should include to allow the rerouting of geopolitics. This is no easy task. More than 40 years after the publication of the MacBride Report, the vision of a New World Information Order (NWIO) with more balanced information flows, enabling people to exercise their rights, seems as far off as it did then. Information and power asymmetries are greater than ever with the intensifying global processes of digitalisation and datafication. Ownership and control of data and information is concentrated in a handful of global giant corporations concentrated predominantly in the United States and in China, under tight state control. Those with access to information through the Internet or who are unable to exercise their rights online are concentrated in the majority world. The humanitarian crises in countries of the global South are either fleetingly covered or ignored in global news and as the European theatre again takes centre stage. The infringements of their citizens’ human rights through Internet shutdowns and surveillance online are seldom condemned in global relations. Elections are underminded through online disinformation and disorder. Digital infrastructure investments are parts of grander geopolitical designs or trade wars in which they have no say or control.