Taking back control…

Introduction

For human rights defender Satang Nabaneh, social media and new technology have been a fast, effective way for her to reach out to other young women in The Gambia. It is what makes her different from the older generation of women's rights defenders in the small West African nation.

“Facebook is there, Twitter is there,” she says, “all of those communication tools, and this is what young people are interested in, so I can actually relate to them and talk to them and they can see what I want them to, what I am working on.”

The cat is out of the bag. With the Snowden affair, it is unequivocally clear that the network society's emancipatory potential is more or less just that: a promise in the distant horizon that is weighed down by the political-economic surveillance complex. The turn of events is deeply disturbing for global justice. And for the feminist project, it is a sobering moment.