- Climate Change Communication in Africa: Emerging Trends and Practices, edited by Tendai Chari and Allen Munoriyarwa
This is a timely and authoritative contribution to scholarship on environmental communication in the Global South. Published by Routledge, the volume offers a continent-wide examination of how climate change is communicated, framed, and contested across Africa’s diverse media landscapes.
Bringing together rich case studies from all regions of the continent, the book explores the role of legacy media, digital platforms, and data-driven communication in shaping public understanding of climate change. It critically engages with themes such as climate justice, media activism, social media mobilisation, and the challenges and pitfalls of climate change communication in African contexts.
What sets this collection apart is its explicit centring of African voices, experiences, and epistemologies in global climate debates. As the first comprehensive volume dedicated to climate change communication across Africa, it makes a significant contribution to media and communication studies, environmental scholarship, and policy discourse. The book is an essential resource for researchers, academics, policymakers, journalists, communication activists, and students interested in climate change, sustainability, and media in Africa.
Access the book here: https://www.routledge.com/Climate-Change-Communication-in-Africa-Emerging-Trends-and-Practices/Chari-Munoriyarwa/p/book/9781041114826
2. Democratising Spy Watching: Public Oversight of Intelligence-Driven Surveillance in Southern Africa
Edited by Jane Duncan (University of Glasgow) and Allen Munoriyarwa (Walter Sisulu University)
As digital technologies rapidly transform the way intelligence agencies operate, surveillance in Southern Africa is expanding at an unprecedented scale. From mass data collection to sophisticated public–private surveillance partnerships, intelligence services now possess far-reaching powers to monitor, store, and analyse personal information. Yet the institutions mandated to oversee these activities often lack the authority, resources, and independence needed to hold agencies accountable.
Democratising Spy Watching: Public Oversight of Intelligence-Driven Surveillance in Southern Africa argues that where formal oversight fails, the public increasingly steps in.
Drawing on comparative case studies from eight Southern African countries, this volume explores how journalists, civil society organisations, activists, and ordinary citizens have challenged unjustified secrecy, exposed surveillance abuses, and mobilised campaigns to restrain intelligence agencies. These acts of public oversight—sometimes successful, sometimes not—have become a critical counterweight to unchecked surveillance power.
Authored by researchers and journalists working across law, communication, and media studies, the book examines key surveillance scandals and oversight struggles in the region, identifying why some interventions achieved meaningful change while others produced mixed or limited results. Crucially, it proposes that public oversight may, in practice, function more effectively than traditional institutional mechanisms, offering a viable alternative model for democratic accountability.
Although grounded in the Southern African context, the book speaks to a global crisis: surveillance technologies are advancing faster than oversight frameworks everywhere. By foregrounding public action as a form of democratic control, this volume offers timely lessons for scholars, policymakers, journalists, and digital rights activists worldwide.
🔗 Read the full publication:
https://doi.org/10.62637/sup.dasw4926
3. Legalizing Control: The Rise of Restrictive Internet Regulation in Sub-Saharan Africa
Maurice Phillip Schumann
Published online: 15 May 2025 | Pages 137–162
As debates around internet freedom intensify worldwide, governments are increasingly turning to law, not just technology, as a tool of digital control. In Legalizing Control: The Rise of Restrictive Internet Regulation in Sub-Saharan Africa, Maurice Phillip Schumann examines how states across the region are embedding restrictions on digital political and civil rights directly into national legislation.
Moving beyond the focus on overt digital repression—such as shutdowns, censorship, and online surveillance—the article reveals how conventional legal instruments are quietly expanding governments’ digital repressive toolkits. Under the stated aims of combating cybercrime or protecting user privacy, new laws are frequently used to criminalise dissent, punish anti-government expression, and legitimise state surveillance.
Drawing on original cross-national data on internet legislation in sub-Saharan Africa, the study investigates when and why governments choose to codify digital rights restrictions into law. The findings challenge assumptions that such measures are primarily reactive responses to protests or political crises. Instead, the article shows that restrictive internet regulation is often adopted preemptively, outside moments of heightened political attention.
The analysis demonstrates that illiberal governments operating in regions where legal internet controls are already common are significantly more likely to introduce restrictive legislation. This points to a powerful regional learning effect, whereby governments observe, emulate, and normalise each other’s legal approaches to digital control. Case illustrations from cybersecurity laws in Eastern Africa further show how states learn what levels of rights restriction are considered acceptable—and how to design the legal provisions needed to enforce them.
By foregrounding law as a central mechanism of digital repression, this article makes an important contribution to scholarship on democracy, authoritarianism, and digital governance, with clear implications for policymakers, civil society actors, and digital rights advocates.
🔗 Access the full article:
https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2025.2503370
4. Tracing Political Communication History via the Radio Archive:
The Case of the ANC’s Anti-Apartheid Radio Freedom in South Africa
Siyasanga M. Tyali
Collection and Curation (2026), Vol. 45 No. 1, pp. 10–13
Open Access
This article foregrounds the audio archive as a crucial—yet often underutilised—repository for understanding media history and political communication. Focusing on the anti-apartheid broadcasts of Radio Freedom, the clandestine radio voice of the African National Congress (ANC), the study revisits a pivotal but underexplored chapter in South Africa’s broadcasting history.
Beginning with its first broadcasts in 1963 and continuing through its years of exile, Radio Freedom operated at a time when the ANC’s political voice was effectively outlawed inside South Africa. Through carefully planned programming and communication strategies, the station enabled political mobilisation, countered apartheid-era propaganda, and sustained resistance communication across borders.
Using a case study approach grounded in archival analysis, the article demonstrates how Radio Freedom’s broadcasts were meticulously curated to maintain an internal presence despite repression. The findings highlight the broader value of media archives in tracing political communication histories, showing how archival audio can reveal not only content, but also strategy, intent, and institutional planning under conditions of censorship and exile.
By centring Radio Freedom, this study contributes to a deeper historical understanding of media institutions and underscores the importance of preserving and analysing broadcast archives for communication and media scholarship—particularly in contexts shaped by struggle, resistance, and silenced voices.
🔗 Access the full open-access article:
https://doi.org/10.1108/CC-07-2024-0034