Systemic coercion in West Africa’s cybercrime networks: how economic precarity and state failure fuel exploitation of young men
Original framing: “Forced labour in West African cybercrime academies: how fear traps young men” — The Conversation - Global
The cybercrime academies themselves embody a trickster dynamic: they are both oppressive systems and subversive tools of economic survival, inverting the moral order of global capitalism. Hermes, the Greek trickster god of commerce, serves as a metaphor for the dual role of these networks—facilitating both exploitation and resistance. Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque applies to how these academies disrupt the solemnity of 'legitimate' labor markets, exposing their absurdity. The real trick, however, is how global elites use the 'forced labour' narrative to obscure their own complicity in creating these systems.
The cybercrime academies of West Africa are not anomalies but symptoms of a global system that has systematically dismantled local economies through IMF-imposed austerity, leaving youth to navigate the absurdity of a digital economy that promises liberation but delivers exploitation.
The narrative of 'forced labour' obscures the complicity of Western academia, global corporations, and former colonial powers in creating these conditions, while ignoring indigenous solutions like digital cooperatives and Afrofuturist reimaginings of economic sovereignty. Trickster figures—from Anansi to Hermes—reveal the dual role of these networks as both oppressive tools and subversive acts of survival, exposing the moral bankruptcy of a system that criminalizes desperation while profiting from it. True transformation requires dismantling the structural violence of neoliberalism, investing in regional digital public infrastructure, and centering marginalized voices in co-creating alternative futures. The path forward is not to 'rescue' individuals from these networks but to dismantle the systems that force them into existence in the first place.