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

In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, we witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of smart city tools to tackle the spread of infectious diseases. Whereas facemasks have disappeared, smart surveillance technologies, such as CCTV cameras with integrated facial recognition software have become part of everyday law enforcement and governmental practices everywhere. As such the preliminary fear among surveillance scholars that the global health crisis has been used by governments around the world - and authoritarian-leaning regimes in particular - to normalise mass surveillance and expand their control over the population has proven to be spot on.Thus far we know little about how the pandemic has shaped the use of smart city technology by non-democratic regimes to monitor their citizenry. My SNSF project seeks to fill this void by examining the implications of the Covid-19 crisis for smart city initiatives in the authoritarian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.With respect to methodology, the project is carried out through the combined use and analysis of survey data, individual and focus group interviews with the wider Central Asia public, and local smart city policies, along with visual documentation of smart city installations in the Central Asian cities of Almaty, Bishkek, Dushanbe and Tashkent. The research makes an innovative interdisciplinary contribution to both political science and surveillance studies.