Internet Shutdowns in 2021
Rethinking advocacy strategies
It’s that time of the year again when expert analysts take a gaze into the future and proffer an outlook for the year ahead. In international affairs perhaps there is none as eminent as The Economist magazine’s “The world in 2021’’ — insights that leaders in politics, business, and finance draw from to shape personal, institutional, and national agendas for the incoming year.
In digital rights, it is perhaps also apt to take a look at the incoming year to prepare for whatever it might throw up. An important trend to anticipate in the coming year is Internet shutdowns, and their impact on freedom of expression, political participation, and societal development, particularly in the global south.
Internet shutdowns have become a common tactic deployed in the past decade by authoritarian regimes to restrict human rights and citizen mobilization, particularly around political events such as elections and mass protests. The digital rights organization AccessNow documented at least 213 shutdowns in the year 2019 across 33 countries. In 2020 some of the countries that shut down the Internet include Ethiopia, Bangladesh, India, and Myanmar. For the year 2021, we get the sense it is simply a question of when, rather than if there will be Internet shutdowns. However, there is no escaping the fact that this blunt tool of human rights repression is largely a feature of countries in the global south. In Africa, research by the digital rights organization CIPESA revealed a correlation between government styles and the incidence of Internet shutdowns. Internet shutdowns occur less frequently in real, functioning democracies, and more in authoritarian regimes, the research noted.
The persistence of Internet shutdowns in authoritarian regimes despite perennial advocacy efforts by civil society organizations perhaps suggests the need for a shift in advocacy strategies to combat it. The first evolution of advocacy strategies to combat Internet shutdowns focused on the human rights angle — appealing to the governments and corporate actors who implemented shutdowns to see that shutdowns amounted to trampling on human rights of freedom of opinion, expression, and association. No other document encapsulates this approach as the resolution by the UN Human Rights Council stating that human rights enjoyed offline also apply online.
This approach did not always work, necessitating the second evolution of advocacy strategies targeting shutdowns. Rather than focusing only on the human rights angle, these strategies also highlighted the economic losses shutdowns foist on economies. Examples of this approach include research by the Brookings Institution, Deloitte, and CIPESA detailing in figures the losses accruing to the economies of nations that implement shutdowns. Given that some of the countries which implement shutdowns are also among the poorest in the world, this advocacy approach held some promise. This promise was however disappointed, as it emerged that the regimes which implemented shutdowns were more swayed by the survival of their regimes than economic considerations. Occasionally there was the counter-argument proffered by some of these states that although Internet shutdowns resulted in economic losses, they were nevertheless implemented to prevent even bigger losses and the collapse of states.
All these bring us to a third way. If these two illustrious approaches to Internet shutdown advocacy have not been effective, there has to be a better way. In the observation that Internet shutdowns persist in authoritarian regimes and are rare in functioning democracies perhaps lies a path to effective advocacy strategies. As has been touted in recent years in development circles, what if the future of digital rights advocacy lies in its participation in broader advocacy efforts that target broader societal reforms in the electoral process, government accountability and transparency, and development? This can be achieved, for instance, by digital rights advocacy organizations collaborating with the broader human rights community.
Internet shutdowns and other digital rights abuses do not spring out of a vacuum. Instead, they proceed from broader dysfunctional societal systems needing reform. If, in general, societies heal and reform in the broad areas of electoral processes, accountability and transparency, and development, in time this progress will seep into better digital rights standards. This approach takes time but is sustainable. The new year 2021 is another opportunity to intensify our efforts in adopting new methods in advocating against Internet shutdowns.
