NANJALA NYABOLA

Nanjala Nyabola is a human rights lawyer turned technology commentator, political activist, based in Kenya; she is also a High Level Advisor to the U.N’s Secretary General, on their Board on Effective Multilateralism. 

Nyabola writes extensively about African society and politics, technology, international law, and feminism for academic and non-academic publications. Her first book Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics: How the Internet Era is Transforming Politics in Kenya was described as "a must read for all researchers and journalists writing about Kenya today". Reframing digital democracy from the African perspective, Nyabola’s groundbreaking work opens up new ways of understanding the current global online era. 

She explains how the digital age and social media has considerably impacted geopolitics and the consequences for democracies beyond Africa - and it can no longer be ignored. Reframing digital democracy from the African perspective, Nyabola’s ground-breaking work opens up new ways of understanding the current global online era.

The New York Times called her latest book, the critically acclaimed Travelling While Black; Essays Inspired by a Life on the Move, 'A rigorous meditation on what it means to move through the world as a Black, African woman. ... This is a thought-provoking book.' 

A highly authoritative voice, Nanjala writes for Financial Times, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, National Geographic, African Arguments, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy (magazine), New African, The New Humanitarian, The New Inquiry, New Internationalist, and World Policy Journal. She holds two MSc degrees from the University of Oxford, where she attended as a Rhodes Scholar and holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School. She was awarded the inaugural Foreign Policy Interrupted Fellowship, designed to amplify the work of women around the world in foreign policy analysis.

Selected Press links: Global Voices, Institute of Development Studies, TRT World, Digital Society Interview