n Conflict Trends - The Internet and democracy in Africa

Abstract

In the very first issue of Conflict Trends, in 1998, I wrote an article on the impact of technology in general - and the Internet specifically - on Africa's increasingly marginalised place in the global community at the start of the 'Internet age'. I said that we had entered a new global paradigm with information as the new currency - afast-moving, increasingly virtual world where access to and control of information was necessary to participate in the new economy; a world that Africa's connection with was tenuous at best. I asked whether the 'information divide' would fuel conflict in Africa, and whether we could leverage the Internet to have a constructive impact on the direction conflicts would take on the continent?