The implications of the Covid-19 crisis for smart city technologies in Central Asia

In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, we are witnessing an unprecedented proliferation of smart city technologies to tackle the spread of infectious diseases. While some governments in post-Soviet Central Asia (defined as including Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) already use smart city innovations to assist in policing urban areas (Marat and Sutton 2020), some of these technologies have been adapted to tackle the spread of Covid-19 and enforce quarantine measures.While surveillance systems are valuable tools to combat the virus, regional security scholars are worried about the extent to which smart city technologies deployed against the virus are becoming normalized and part of everyday law enforcement and governmental practices (Marat 2020). They fear that some autocrats will use the war on Covid-19 as an excuse to silence dissidents and extend their personal rule. As the example of China shows, advanced facial recognition software in smart cameras can be misused for racial profiling of ethnic minorities, such as the Uighurs (Deibert 2020).There is little research to date assessing and documenting the extent to which the current pandemic is fueling the spread of smart city technologies across Central Asian countries. Nor is there any research so far addressing the question as to if and how authoritarian regimes in Central Asia make use of smart city innovations to suppress political opponents, nor any studies into the wider Central Asian public's attitudes towards smart city technologies. My postdoc project is designed to address these deficiencies for Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.Methodologically, this project will evaluate WVS 7 survey data, expert interviews, analysis of local smart city policies, along with digital city maps in ArcGIS, mapping the scale of smart city installations in the Central Asian cities of Almaty, Bishkek, Dushanbe and Tashkent. The study will make an innovative interdisciplinary contribution to both political science and surveillance studies and will set the framework for a more extensive research programme investigating how pandemics affect governance worldwide.