Power, Resistance and the Experience of Digital Surveillance in Ghana

Under Ghana’s Fourth Republic (1993–present), governments have invested at least $184 million in digital surveillance technologies from China, Greece, Israel, Taiwan, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom (Oladapo and Appiah-Adjei, in Roberts et al. 2023). This chapter focuses on the implications for citizens’ rights of the rapid expansion of digital surveillance in Ghana and explores the forms of civic agency being used to resist state use of rights-violating surveillance and the contestation of power in digital spaces. The chapter considers the surveillance experiences of victims targeted by government investments in surveillance technologies and the enactment of statutes that support and expand government’s surveillance power. Specifically, it examines power and resistance in the context of rights-violating digital surveillance. Through interviews with purposively selected journalists and human right activists, data was gathered and analysed through the lens of a powercube framework to answer the following questions: What are the experiences of victims of rights-violating digital surveillance in Ghana? Who are the architects behind the acts of surveillance and what are their motivations? What strategies do victims adopt to cope with rights-violating digital surveillance? This chapter begins with the historical experience of surveillance to provide the context for the description of Ghana’s current digital surveillance landscape. After a review of the existing literature, we present our framework for analysing the case study and answering our research questions. We use 34Gaventa’s powercube model to analyse how government surveillance power affects citizens’ rights and the experiences of victims and their agency in resisting rights-violating surveillance.