Tichenor, DanKenney, Katlyn2024-08-302024-08-302024https://hdl.handle.net/1794/2995156 pagesPrivacy is a basic human right that all human beings are entitled to under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). For those living in the United States, privacy is further protected by solid positive and negative rights built into the framework of government. The value is widely regarded as ‘American’ and has caused significant political and social uproar when violated. The judicial system in America has seen thousands of privacy cases, protecting a value that the citizens believe, and know, they are entitled to. In the international political system, the United States is grouped in a category known as the West, the Global North, or the Occident. This complex naming system seems dauting for an outsider of the political realm, but as this thesis will show, it essentially means the dominant international political group, a category that defines the Other to help characterize itself. This group is made up of a substantial number of historic colonizers, a relationship which this thesis will explore by using a postcolonial lens to analyze surveillance and privacy today. This thesis uses a literature review section, two cases studies and the interviews from two scholars in the field to analyze how the state of privacy in locations around the world has been degraded by surveillance coming from foreign powers, largely the Global North/West/Occident. In this analysis this thesis finds that by using their historic and current place in the international power hierarchy, this category of nations infringes upon the privacy rights of people living in the 3 Global South/East/Orient. This degradation of privacy rights serves to not only reinforce and remind the international community of the position of the alternate group at the top, and to maintain some aspect of colonial control.en-USCC BY-NC-ND 4.0International RelationsPrivacyPolitical ScienceSurveillancePostcolonial TheoryThesis/Dissertation0009-0006-4941-6623