Digitalization, Marketization and Authoritarianism in Ethiopia: Towards New Political Economy of Power [védés előtt]

Abstract

The dissertation demonstrates that in Ethiopia, digitalization and marketization are integral mechanisms reinforcing authoritarian resilience rather than harbingers of democratic progress. The findings reveal how digital connectivity and economic liberalization have commodified not only labor and land but also information and behavior. As the state aggressively promotes market-oriented reforms and technological modernization, commodification of information continues to subordinate society to market and surveillance logic without social safeguards, enhancing authoritarian consolidation, blocking democratic prospects. As the macro-level analysis indicated, the strong negative relationship between trade openness, capital formation, and mobile subscription with democracy scores suggests how economic liberalization and digitalization serve as a vector for authoritarian durability, not democratic transition. The inverse association between mobile connectivity, security sector spending, and democratic outcomes reflects the regime’s constant incentive to prevent dissent and preserve the appearance of order. As noted in Xu’s informational theory of co-optation and repression, these policies are not reactive but calculated efforts to maintain economic stability and rent extraction by containing unrest through information control and coercion. Although physical force as a tool of repression is often justified by various political rationales such as law and order, the incumbent regime usually evades overt violence to avoid domestic and international criticisms that undermine legitimacy. As Guriev and Treisman’s model of informational autocracy unmasks, the digital state produces tailored narratives, blurs reality through misinformation, and maintains a façade of democracy and responsiveness, especially in rural areas of Ethiopia, where government narratives remain largely uncontested. Hence, Ethiopia’s digital transformation, though framed as developmental, permeates infinite extraction of citizens’ behavioral data through algorithmic surveillance, aligning with Zuboff’s theory of surveillance capitalism. Moreover, the commodification of digital behavior enables predictive control, transforming citizens into sources of surveillance value and self-disciplining subjects as articulated via Foucault’s notion of panopticism, where visibility becomes a technique of control. The widespread fear of surveillance and lower perceptions of political freedoms captured in the survey data, particularly among mobile phone users, educated respondents and urban residents, demonstrates how the panoptic gaze of the digital state shapes political behavior through internalized repression, sharpening authoritarian penetration into everyday life rather than empowering citizens. Meanwhile, differential in perceptions of the state of human rights and freedoms, when filtered through structured state propaganda, produces fragmented political consciousness leading to fractionalization of opposition.