The Oxford University Press (OUP) has published a new book, which examines the historical, political, economic, and sociocultural foundations of the Internet and challenges conventional approaches to its design, access and governance from decolonial perspectives.
Co-edited by Dr. Henna Zamurd Butt, a scholar-artist and Assistant Professor of Communication and Culture at Columbia College, Chicago, in the State of Illinois in the United States of America; and Dr. Marianne I. Franklin, a Professor and Chair of Media, Cultural Industries, and Society at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, the 272-page book brings together essays from scholars and contributors to examine how the Internet has developed as an infrastructure shaped substantially by Anglo-American and Western European interests.
Titled “Internet Decolonized”, the book released on September 30, 2026, focuses on two broad areas, namely the geopolitics and business of technological design, and the governance of the Internet as a global communications and information infrastructure.
The first area examines the Internet industry’s structures and the sociocultural conditions that influence access, use, and technical standards, while the second considers Internet and technology policymaking and regulation, including the spaces in which governments, technology companies, and civil society organisations interact to shape public policy.
The editors and contributors use the concept of “decolonizing the Internet” to examine vested interests surrounding past, present, and future technology projects, while also documenting grassroots and community-based alternatives, human-centred advocacy, and alternative models of Internet governance.
The publication contains some chapters that explore digital development and Internet governance in Africa, such as the chapter titled “Data Networks, Internet Governance, History and the Global South,” written by Daniel Oppermann, a research coordinator for the International Relations Research Center at the University of São Paulo (NUPRI-USP) in Brazil.
Another chapter titled “Towards Digital Pan-Africanism? A Nkrumahian Approach” is written by Dr. Adio-Adet Dinika, a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Media, Communication, and Information Research (ZeMKI) at the University of Bremen in Germany, and Dr. Dennis Redeker, a political scientist leading a research group at ZeMKI, principal investigator of the AI Pan-Africanism project and a co-founder of the interdisciplinary Digital Constitutionalism Network (DCN).
With a total of 14 chapters, some of them address community networks, human rights and digital futures, youth participation in Internet governance, Indigenous perspectives, language justice online, and Internet access beyond conventional measures of connectivity.
The book goes beyond the conventional framing of the digital divide as simply a question of whether people are connected to the Internet, as the editors argue that examining the Internet through decolonial perspectives can help bring into focus the interests and power relationships embedded in technological development and governance.
It gathers together a collection of practitioner and scholarly perspectives from across the spectrum of decolonial, postcolonial, and Indigenous issue areas.
The book also incorporates case studies from Indigenous communities, community network advocates and designers, women’s and feminist digital activists from the Global South, and grassroots youth networks in Africa
It emphasizes the contribution of long-serving policy advocates and activists in internet agenda-setting from beyond the mainstream spaces in which internet governance is operationalized and studied.
Examining diverse approaches to what it means to “decolonize the internet,” the book presents real-world cases to bring into focus the vested interests of past, present, and future hi-tech projects, grassroots and community-based alternatives, experiences in human-centered advocacy for internet futures, and governance models.
Contributors offer insights into longstanding and emerging controversies and research priorities as actors and voices active in shaping the next generation of sustainable, rights-respecting internet policymaking and design.
