The rise of digital surveillance technologies, particularly those leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI), presents a critical challenge to the global Liberal Script of order, democracy, and human rights. This paper addresses how post-Soviet authoritarian regimes in Central Asia utilize these technologies—often procured from non-Western partners (e.g., China, Russia)—to bolster state security, suppress dissent, and ensure regime stability in an increasingly uncertain geopolitical landscape. Research Question: To what extent does the integration of AI-powered digital surveillance into state security apparatuses reshape the mechanisms of control and contestation of individual freedoms and political participation within Central Asian states? Drawing upon concepts of Digital Authoritarianism and technological diffusion, this study analyzes case studies from countries such as Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to map the institutional adoption of technologies like facial recognition, content monitoring, and data harvesting. It focuses specifically on the shift from overt, coercive control to more subtle, predictive governance that preemptively mitigates political uncertainties (like unexpected protests or online activism). Preliminary findings suggest that AI surveillance creates a new form of "calculated stability", where the constant awareness of digital monitoring leads to increased self-censorship among the politically active population, effectively substituting traditional, visible repression with pervasive, invisible control. This process fundamentally restricts the public sphere and institutionalizes a post-liberal form of governance. The paper contributes to the Ceecon26 theme of (Un)Certainties by demonstrating how authoritarian regimes attempt to eliminate political uncertainty through technological means, posing a direct contest to the fundamental principles of the Liberal Script in the Eurasian region.

What determines public support for algorithmic governance systems (AGS) in an autocracy? We investigate this question with the help of an original survey (N=3124) conducted in March 2025 in Kazakhstan. AGS are increasingly exported by China and a number of other countries, with Central Asia being a primary destination of China’s Digital Silk Road initiative. These systems can make governance more efficient, but also have the potential to establish authoritarian rule through sophisticated digital surveillance. We find a high baseline approval of 78.1% for AGS in Kazakhstan, similar to approval rates in China. Framing AGS as a solution to corruption or Islamic fundamentalism significantly increases support, while linking it to other issues like public health, security, or trust in business has no effect. Highlighting the potential of AGS for political control reduces support by 5.9%, indicating that even in autocratic contexts, concerns over political repression influence public attitudes. However, this reduction is notably smaller than a 25% reduction we identified from a similar survey conducted in Russia in October 2022, indicating variation between autocracies. By offering nuanced insights into public opinion on AGS in a Central Asian autocracy, this paper contributes to the broader literature on authoritarianism and algorithmic governance.

This paper examines how global streaming platforms, headquartered and run from Western Europe and the US, reproduce the West/CEE hierarchy while generating new inequalities within Central and Eastern Europe. It treats streaming not as diffusion but as a geographical ordering device: investment, commissioning, rights circulation, and office-location that stabilize some territories as decision-making centres and others as exploitation markets, service zones, or “content provinces.” Its conceptual anchor is the “land of bad TV” trope—an industry narrative casting post-socialist television cultures as deficient and in need of Western “missionary” upgrading. As a justificatory discourse for asymmetric valuation, it makes CEE legible as culturally backward, suited to cheap labour and captive consumption, while “quality” and creative authority remain anchored in the West. Drawing on Ivan Kalmar’s concept of Eastern Europeanism, and in dialogue with Anikó Imre’s postcolonial critiques of mediated othering, the paper reads “bad TV” not as an aesthetic judgment but as a racialized-capitalist classification that normalizes unequal inclusion. The argument is developed as a dialogue between three bodies of scholarship: postcolonial studies of CEE (Kalmar; Imre), dependency approaches to European core–periphery relations (Manuela Boatcă; Rudy Weissenbacher), and critical political economy of global entertainment media focused on platform imperialism and uneven media flows (Tanner Mirrlees; Joseph Straubhaar). Together, these traditions show how cultural hierarchies, political-economic dependency, and platform infrastructure co-produce Europe’s streaming geography. Empirically, the paper traces two intertwined mechanisms. First, extractive localization plus restricted circulation: platforms acquire inexpensive local catalog titles for national CEE libraries with limited cross-border visibility, while using CEE locations and subsidy regimes for US-origin service production without proportional reinvestment in local originals. Second, selective upgrading: Netflix and other transnational streamers concentrate original commissioning and organizational presence in Poland, elevating Warsaw as a semi-peripheral production and coordination node, while the rest of the region is treated as an exploitation market and/or a cost-efficient service belt (e.g., Prague, Budapest, Zagreb, Vilnius). Methodologically, the paper combines political-economic analysis of commissioning with a geography-of-flows perspective that follows how narratives (“bad TV”), rights, production work, and visibility travel—or fail to travel—across platform infrastructures. The contribution is a geographically explicit account of how Western platforms re-map Europe by stratifying CEE internally while keeping the region structurally peripheral to Western Europe’s streaming core.