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Paper Short Abstract:

This paper presents preliminary findings and an emerging research agenda that interrogates the socio-economic, security and governance implications of established, proliferating and largely unregulated 'mobile money' innovations in the Somali Horn of Africa.

Paper Abstract:

This paper presents preliminary findings and an emerging research agenda that interrogates the socio-economic, security and governance implications of established and proliferating 'mobile money' innovations in the Somali Horn of Africa. The region has long been a global hub for the development of mobile money infrastructures that operate across and within its contested and conflicted borders. Somali telecommunications companies have emerged as some of the most powerful economic actors in a setting where decades of 'limited statehood' render boundaries between formal/informal and legitimate/illegitimate activity in the digital economy both highly ambiguous and analytically problematic. Synthesizing various research strands of the authors, the paper argues that commercial digital infrastructure needs to be conceptualized within ethnographic and political economy analyses of contested statehood in conflict-affected contexts. Legally ambiguous (or 'shadow') innovations with mobile money in the Somali Horn of Africa underpin established cross border trading networks that have been identified as being crucial to state-making in the region. Interrogation of how a largely unregulated digital economy is affecting relations between (multiple) state-like authorities and citizens in the Horn of Africa can help broaden notions of 'virtual sovereignty' and varieties of 'platform capitalism' outside of contexts that are traditionally viewed as global centres of technology production.