Information and communications technology (ICT) has played a catalytic role in shaping political outcomes in the developing world. Calls for protests over social media and text messages aided activists to organize anti-government action against authoritarian regimes during the Arab Spring. In emerging democracies, online platforms and smartphone apps increasingly allow citizens to mobilize get-out-the-vote efforts and send reports on bribe-paying or the quality of public services with a text or tweet. The potential of ICT to strengthen the accountability, transparency, and quality of governance in developing countries has also captured the attention of donors, who advocate for the use of ICT as a component to aid programming, and private investors (increasingly from China), who hope to capitalize on an expanding base of consumers. But what do governments in transitioning societies think of all this? In his new book, Iginio Gagliardone addresses this question with a trenchant and timely examination of the relationship between political and technological development in Ethiopia—one of Africa’s most populous countries and its largest recipient of aid, but about which very little has been written regarding its contemporary politics.

Primarily, Gagliardone’s goal is to understand how governments in the developing world deploy ICT to further their political aims and consolidate state institutions. At first glance, Ethiopia is one of the least obvious cases to study this topic. As the author notes, the country both has one of the lowest global internet and mobile phone penetration rates, and the government filters media and internet content. At the same time, the government has tried to push ICT as part of its development agenda over the past few decades. Wresting power in 1991 from the Marxist Derg, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) government recognized early the potential power of ICT for development (more recently termed “ICT4Dev” in many policy circles). Faced with governing one of the least-developed countries in the world after decades of civil conflict, the EPRDF needed to build infrastructure and a national identity over an expansive territory with diverse populations. The core of Gagliardone’s study is then to trace how the government employed ICT in this endeavor.

Gagliardone shows how Ethiopia provides a fascinating case by tracing the historical roots of the regime’s policies and use of ICT from the early 1990s to the present. He credits the EPRDF with pursuing a number of ambitious ICT projects in its early days to improve public services. However, he challenges the rosy—and by his account prevailing—view of many scholars, entrepreneurs, and activists that ICT4Dev necessarily constitutes either a positive, or at worst, benign tool. Instead, the author advances a theoretical framework around the concept of “technopolitics” to examine how the government has used technology to consolidate its “vision of the state and nation” (p. 22), one that the EPRDF considers developmentalist, democratic, and multi-ethnic, and one that Gagliardone views (appropriately) with a more nuanced and critical eye.

Primarily for the EPRDF, developing Ethiopia required governing peripheral areas while at the same time facilitating control over information and squashing political opposition. Gagliardone studies how they advanced state-building objectives by focusing on two government programs. “Woredanet” allowed government officials in Addis Ababa to teleconference with administrators in local district offices to train, monitor, and build capacity of civil servants. Ostensibly, the purpose of the program was to improve the performance and service delivery outcomes of government workers, but the author contends its real effect was to help the regime at the center control its cadre of bureaucrats. “Schoolnet” was designed to raise the learning standards of rural secondary schools with pre-recorded instructional videos that allowed one-way communication from creators to students. While the government advocated the program to improve education quality and access, Gagliardone interprets the program as a means of indoctrination.

Impressively, the author draws on over a decade of field research, supported by participant observation and over 100 interviews with stakeholders, including the designers and implementers of both programs. This is a remarkable achievement given the regime’s notorious lack of openness to research on governance, putting this important book at the core of studying Ethiopia’s modern politics. However, the author is short on details describing these programs, why he chose them, and how they relate to other similar initiatives adopted by the government across sectors. Moreover, while his conclusions are that both programs were ultimately unsuccessful in improving bureaucratic monitoring or education but successful in advancing the regime’s political agenda, the study seems to lack direct evidence regarding the logic and aims of Woredanet or Schoolnet to test his claims.

Gagliardone notes that these programs also had little direct effect on citizens’ ICT adoption more broadly, making the second topic of his empirical investigation relevant and important: the government’s “resistance to alternative technopolitical regimes.” In the 2005 elections, opposition supporters used traditional and new media to voice criticism of the government, aided by communications from the diaspora. The regime’s attempts to curtail these activities and the opposition’s “media relays” between technologies would not only set the pace of further government surveillance and censoring of media down the line (which continues to this day), but would also prove eerily prescient about governments’ reaction to ICT in the Arab Spring.

Gagliardone’s study will provide significant contributions to studies on the role of technology in politics, democratization, and development. The global excitement for ICT has been tempered by the authoritarian tendencies of the Ethiopian government, which has recently attempted to further shape laws to control information even as it loses its grip over ICT usage. But while adopting a theoretical framework around “technopolitics” properly locates the role of ICT in the political development of Ethiopia under the EPRDF, it perhaps obscures the larger question of the potential range of democratizing and authoritarian strategies available to development-oriented governments and how ICT fits into that context. Modern governments want to gain a population’s compliance, but is technology a complement, or substitute, to other means of consolidating political authority? It is hard to assess whether the EPRDF’s ICT policies ultimately served or undermined its broader goals and therefore what we should expect about the dynamic effects of ICT in the contemporary period (where the book ends). The government increasingly tries to play darling to international development agencies while at the same time attracting more investment from China. What are the implications of technopolitics for the EPRDF’s political survival and the country’s current economic trajectory?

By tracing the historical development of politics and technology in Ethiopia, Gagliardone provides critical and mixed lessons about the potential of ICT4Dev in Africa, and elsewhere. The study shows that governments can easily deploy technological tools to control information in furtherance of authoritarian aims even as they proclaim developmental goals. Yet a government’s ability to influence how these tools are ultimately used must be balanced against its desires to seek aid and revenue. Whether, and how, ICT therefore actually contributes to improved welfare may be a function as much or more from how citizens adopt these tools than from how governments attempt to control the process. Perhaps politicians should stop worrying and learn to love the app.