Quotidian Forms of Resistance to Surveillance

Abstract

With surveillance practices growing in a quotidian basis, civic resistance to it now constitutes an important part of people’s daily lives. As technologies of surveillance and its tactics shift every day, most people, not only in southern Africa but also in many countries in the world over, have to be participants in a multitude of rituals that serve the purpose of resisting surveillance. These include legal avenues of resistance and technology-based approaches. In this chapter, which is largely based on interviews with CSOs’ activists, we examine emerging forms of resistance to surveillance in the southern African region. The chapter is organized as follows. In the first section, we find the logic of resistance to surveillance. In the second section, we examine how civic societies and other vulnerable constituencies coalesce and mobilize against mass and unregulated surveillance practices. This is followed by a section that explores the everyday forms of surveillance resistance in parts of the region. We follow this section with a closer look at the South African case to reveal how litigation has been successfully used to fend off encroaching non-transparent surveillance practices. We demonstrate that litigation often works in contexts where the judiciary is relatively free of political interference. In the next section, we demonstrate that in (semi) authoritarian contexts, fraught with judicial capture and court packing practices, litigation is not on the menu of options available to actors involved in resisting surveillance. We conclude the chapter by assessing existing possibilities of surveillance resistance and the challenges to surveillance resistance in the region.