Digital transitions, involving the widespread adoption of biometric, algorithmic, and AI systems across public and private sectors, are often framed as inevitable and necessary for progress. However, these transitions are not neutral. They are shaped by coercive data extraction practices of digitalization, which consolidate corporate power, and reproduce colonial social relations. At the center of this process is the erosion of meaningful consent, alongside the expansion of surveillance infrastructures that restructure subjectivity without recognition or accountability. Dominant rights frameworks, including liberal notions of personhood and existing legal protections, fail to confront these harms. Regulatory frameworks overlook relational dynamics, systemic misrecognition, and the asymmetries of digital colonialism. Coercion is overtaking consent in the digital realm. A new political struggle is needed to reclaim subjectivity and argue for a manifesto of digital rights from the left.

This paper uses and expands the concept of a 'political moral economy' to better understand elite attempts to justify and promote capitalist development strategies linked to the proliferation of 'smart technologies' such as big data, mobile communications, and the construction of hi-tech cities. Drawing on an Ideology and Discourse analysis perspective on hegemony introduced by Ernesto Laclau and Chantel Mouffe, it aims to show how market-based 'smart development' across the African continent has discursively incorporated resistance moralities associated with popular critiques of elite corruption, foreign exploitation, and local economic marginalization for its overall political success. To do so, it will focus on the case of 'Leapfrogging development' discourses and the planned construction of the Technopolis Konza in Kenya. The key advance of this article is showing how dominant ideologies - and the domestic and foreign regimes of elite power they support - can be strengthened through processes of 'moral legitimisation' and 'moral disciplining'. Specifically, this moral dimension of hegemony involves the ongoing incorporation and strategic redeployment of existing and emergent normative discourses for the purpose of providing political legitimacy to these governing ideologies and further attempting to normatively regulate populations in accordance with their core values and interests - even in the face of their practical and ongoing failures as policies. Cet article utilise et elargit le concept d'& DLANGBRAC; economie morale politique & drangbrac; pour mieux comprendre les tentatives des elites de justifier et de promouvoir les strategies de developpement capitalistes liees a la proliferation des & DLANGBRAC; technologies intelligentes & drangbrac; telles que les megadonnees, les communications mobiles et la construction de villes de technologies de pointe. Il s'appuie sur une perspective d'analyse de l'ideologie et du discours sur l'hegemonie introduite par Ernesto Laclau et Chantel Mouffe, et vise a montrer comment le & DLANGBRAC; developpement intelligent & drangbrac; fonde sur le marche dans l'ensemble du continent africain a integre de maniere discursive les morales de resistance associees aux critiques populaires de la corruption des elites, de l'exploitation etrangere, et la marginalisation economique locale pour son succes politique global. Pour ce faire, il s'interessera au cas des discours du & DLANGBRAC; Developpement de depassement & drangbrac; et du projet de construction de la Technopolis Konza au Kenya. L'avance principale de cet article est de montrer comment les ideologies dominantes - et les regimes nationaux et etrangers de pouvoir des elites qu'elles soutiennent - peuvent etre renforcees par des processus de & DLANGBRAC; legitimation morale & drangbrac; et de & DLANGBRAC; discipline morale & drangbrac;. Plus precisement, cette dimension morale de l'hegemonie implique l'incorporation continue et le redeploiement strategique des discours normatifs existants et emergents dans le but de donner une legitimite politique a ces ideologies gouvernantes et de tenter davantage de reguler normativement les populations conformement a leurs valeurs et interets fondamentaux - malgre les echecs pratiques et persistants des politiques.

Chapter 2: This chapter looks specifically at how economic globalization is helping to produce a similarly globalizing political authoritarianism. What are the specific discourses associated with contemporary globalization that creates the conditions for wide-ranging forms of despotism and political repression? Specifically, how are these processes producing rather appealing capitalist fantasies of political authoritarianism nationally. It investigates these concerns through providing a theoretical and historical overview of this relationship of capitalism to authoritarianism.

Chapter 9: The ninth and final chapter concludes with an analysis of the common connection between these various forms of authoritarian capitalism. It will highlight how this analysis reveals the positive and dangerous relationship between economic capitalism and political authoritarianism. It will discuss, in this respect, how corporate globalization is historically, politically, affectively and structurally producing authoritarian capitalism. However, it will also explore the possibilities for reinventing democracy around principles of equality, sustainability, and justice and in doing so moving beyond authoritarian capitalism.

This chapter sheds light on the authoritarianism crucial to the contemporary international spread and maintenance of capitalism. Rather than a weakened state or merely trans-national forms of sovereignty, it illuminates the continued reliance of the free market on an emboldened governmental force for its protection. The promise of “good governance” exists as an affective discourse for increasing the scope of national governments to broaden the limits of its coercive power in order to “secure” marketization domestically against popular threats. In this respect, corporate globalization has produced “self-disciplining” neoliberal states. It additionally has dramatically expanded the authority and subsequent authoritarianism of international actors to influence and directly determine a country’s politics to reflect these neoliberal values. Present, as will be shown, is a multi-level global authoritarian fantasy of capitalist good governance.

This chapter looks more in depth at how economic discourses of globalization are catalyzing popular desires for political authoritarianism. Specifically, it contends that the portrayal of corporate globalization as "inevitable" and "necessary" creates an intensified desire for individual and collective sovereignty. Rather than simply be a "subjectless" part of the inexorable and unavoidable spread of an international financial regime, people affectively embrace their right and ability to shape this process to their own advantage – to be, in this sense, a subject of globalization instead of merely being subjected to it. As will be shown, this fantasy of sovereignty associated with globalization is quite conducive to conventional authoritarianism, and ironically serves to provide a popular legitimacy to capitalism's ongoing structural necessity of a regulative state for its survival and growth.

This chapter highlights how authoritarian capitalism is not limited to “developing countries” or newly economically and politically “modern” ones. It is also found within established liberal democracies. Significantly, such authoritarianism is not counter to liberal democratic values but rather expands upon them in quite coercive ways. More precisely, it channels desires for democratic sovereignty and power as well as liberal notions of the state as a “protector” of rights, into a political fantasy in which governments must be illiberally empowered to safeguard freedom, understood as the simultaneous presence of liberalism, democracy and the market. The need to shape and discipline individuals to become “responsible” neoliberal subjects is transformed into the duty of the state to control the population for the same ends.

Management has long concerned itself with controlling workers’ bodies, with organisational wellness discourses being its latest fixation. This article’s purpose is to introduce and understand ‘whose body counts’ – a discourse of bodily exceptionalism in performative organisational cultures. Using ethnographic methods, this article presents an analysis of a CrossFit workplace health promotion at an underperforming US corporation, to identify a complex process of empowerment, self-exploitation and disciplinary regulation to produce performative outcomes. This research illustrates how the workplace health promotion generates a pervasive discourse of exceptionalism underpinned by workers’ reflexive exploitation, overarched by peer-surveillance and reflexively embraced through extreme individualised performativities. Critically, it is revealed how individuals competitively engage in communicative labour to demonstrate devotion to self-care that is translated into organisational commitment. Specifically, unquestioned discursive ambiguities are shown to cunningly empower limitlessness meritocratic striving that pits workers against each other, creating constant negotiation of ‘whose body counts’ by subjugating others.

This chapter introduces the main aims and themes of the book. It desires to better understand why the more economically liberal a country becomes the greater its reliance on political authoritarianism seems to be across contexts. It asks what are the underlying dynamics driving this diverse “authoritarian capitalism” in the twenty-first century? How to explain the rise of authoritarian capitalism in the age of globalization? What does this reveal about the more fundamental relationship between political authoritarianism and economic capitalism? To answer this question it links the contemporary global spread of the free market to affective authoritarian political fantasies.

This chapter examines the rise of a new and increasingly attractive form of authoritarian capitalism nationally. The demand for national sovereignty, intimately associated with a sense of lacking individual and collective agency, is transposed onto a strong state actor. The personal dictator or the “Party” resonates with a yearning to feel once more in control. These authoritarian regimes supposedly are unbound by strictures of globalization while still secure in their promise of delivering future capitalist progress. Such longings are readily witnessed in rising powers such as Russia and China. In each of these cases, an economics of marketization is matched by a politics of explicit and implicit authoritarianism. Reflected is the broader appeal and rise of market despots.

Chapter 8: This chapter will explicitly explore the evolution of authoritarian capitalism into new forms of far-Right populism and increasingly repressive forms of democracy. In particular, it will focus on the transformation of fantasies of “state-led market progress” into political discourses embracing either ethno-capitalism or an illiberal democratic status quo. It explores the emergence of the “global native”, reflecting those who feel “left behind” by globalization and are seeking to protect their culture (and ultimately privilege) through investing in demagogic leaders. It also reveals the ways existing political and economic elites have sought to repress the further democratization and possibility of systemic change in the name of protecting democracy against this far-Right resurgence