Global Voices Online: Middle east, north africa

Far-right activists are trying to dismantle global protections for LGBTQ+ people under the guise of ‘family values’

Originally published on Global Voices

US President Trump speaking at the U.N. General Assembly. Photo by The White House. Fair use.

This article by Hope Pisoni was originally published by Uncloseted Media, an LGBTQ+ focused investigative news outlet, on October 1, 2026. An edited version is being republished on Global Voices as part of a content partnership agreement. It has been edited for length and style.

On September 17, while the United Nations (U.N.) was hosting its annual General Assembly for diplomats and leaders from all over the world, several key figures filled a room across the street at the Millennium Hilton in Midtown Manhattan. Attendees included Trump administration officials, leaders of anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups, far-right politicians from Latin America and reporters from far-right media.

These people were meeting for the Global Forum for Life, Family and Freedoms, a two-day summit of right-wing leaders with an ambitious goal to create a new “pro-life and pro-family” Core Group at the U.N.

Since 2008, the U.N. has had an LGBTI Core Group with 42 member states whose mission is to advocate for LGBTQ+ rights on a global stage. But the organizers of this new group hope to create an opposing organization to push for policies that undermine reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights around the globe.

Aarón Lara, the Mexico-based conservative activist who came up with the idea for the group, said in an August article that the existing LGBTI Core Group has only been successful because there has not been organized conservative opposition, which a new core group would provide.

Lara (left) speaking with a reporter in the Dominican Republic in March. Screenshot via Central Noticias YouTube.

“[The LGBTI Core Group] has successfully established victimhood narratives and incorporated observances with global impact. … I always use this example: If it were a soccer match and one team failed to show up, the winner by default would be the team that was present,” Lara said.

Lara and other supporters of the group agreed at the forum to draw up plans for its creation in the coming months. They may be encouraged to move quickly because the group’s leaders have said they want to use the U.S.’s global influence and capitalize on the current administration’s anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion stance to do it. The U.S. recently left the LGBTI Core Group, an early move by Trump in his second term.

What is a Core Group?

The LGBTI Core Group describes itself as “an informal cross-regional group of United Nations Member States.” While it is not an official U.N. body, its work includes ensuring that LGBTQ+ people are considered and protected across all of the U.N.’s activities, from humanitarian aid to human rights resolutions.

For example, one of the first U.N. resolutions to reference LGBTQ+ people was one protecting civilians against extrajudicial executions. When some members tried to remove LGBTQ people from those protections, advocates and allies fought to keep them in place. Maria Sjödin, executive director of Outright International, an NGO that focuses on supporting LGBTQ rights worldwide, told Uncloseted Media that work like this could be in jeopardy should the new core group come to fruition.

“We’re talking about the protection of some very basic human rights, and that the opposition to that is trying to organize to make it even more difficult to pass such a thing is really quite horrible,” she says.

Core groups are not official U.N. bodies, so there is no strictly required procedure for their creation. While there have been other core groups established at the U.N., the LGBTI group is unique in that it is designed for continuous operation on multiple issues rather than as a response to a specific conflict or crisis. The “pro-life, pro-family” core group would change that, threatening to shift the balance of power at the U.N.

Ipas, an international NGO that seeks to increase access to safe abortions and contraception, shared a briefing paper, “The Pro-Life and Pro-Family Core Group: The Evangelical Architecture Supporting Anti-Gender Initiatives at the United Nations,” with Uncloseted Media. It explains that this core group would allow anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-abortion governments to collaborate on “coordinated voting” to “dilute, block, or impose conditions on language regarding sexual and reproductive health and rights.” The briefing also predicts that the core group would accelerate existing efforts to portray anti-LGBTQ+ politics as “sovereign resistance” against “globalism” in the public eye.

“This discourse … asserts national sovereignty over agreed-upon international human rights, reframing sexual and reproductive rights as an external imposition rather than as already recognized human rights standards,” the briefing reads.

How did we get here?

The first CIVF, held in Mexico City in 2017. Image from CIVF via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Lara is the founder and president of the Ibero-American Congress for Life and Family (CIVF). Founded in Mexico City in 2017, CIVF describes itself as “Un movimiento de reforma moral, educativa, social y jurídica por la vida y la familia” (a movement for moral, educational, social, and legal reform for life and family) and is best known for holding an annual congress for leaders, primarily from Latin America and Spain, to discuss the promotion of socially conservative policies.

In a 2021 article in an evangelical publication, Lara said that his group had applied to become a core group at the U.N.

“We have the conviction that it is our responsibility as believers to be a light in the midst of darkness, this is why [we] are making this big effort,” he said.

The third CIVF, held in Panama in 2019. Image from CIVF via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

While that application never came to fruition, Lara remained interested in starting a U.N. core group, and announced in July 2026 that CIVF — which did not respond to Uncloseted Media’s request for comment — was launching a new plan to do so.

How did the US get involved?

The following month, Lara shared more details of the plan with The Washington Stand, a news outlet owned by Family Research Council, a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated anti-LGBTQ hate group closely affiliated with Focus on the Family. In the article, Lara says the goal is for the U.S. to sponsor the new group because of its powerful position on the world stage.

Sjödin is concerned about U.S. involvement in a group like this. “[It] already has an outsized influence on the world, so the U.S. potentially taking on a leadership role in a coalition like this also risks the effects being outsized and makes this an initiative that is going to be more difficult to challenge,” she says.

Valerie Huber speaking at CPAC Hungary in 2022. Image by Elekes Andor via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

To that end, CIVF enlisted Valerie Huber, an influential American ally based in Washington, D.C., in their fight. Huber, who co-led the September 17th forum alongside Lara, is an American right-wing activist who held multiple leadership roles at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) during Trump’s first term. She has consistently promoted the exclusion of LGBTQ+ people in her work — the organization she led before getting her HHS appointment released a guideline that said “it would be inappropriate and unethical to assert or affirm” trans kids’ genders.

“Valerie Huber is internationally recognized in the anti-rights space,” Wendy Via, co-founder and president of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told Uncloseted Media. “She is bringing some credibility [and] influence to the idea of creating a separate core group, so she’s gonna be able to get people to join with her.”

During her tenure at HHS, Huber helped craft the Geneva Consensus Declaration on Promoting Women’s Health and Strengthening the Family (GCD), an agreement between 46 countries, including the U.S. under both Trump administrations, affirming a commitment to hardline opposition to abortion and promoting the heteronormative nuclear family “as foundational to society.”

Critics have noted that many of the agreement’s signatories are led by notoriously authoritarian governments with harsh restrictions on LGBTQ+ people. For example, Saudi Arabia’s maximum penalty for gay sex is death, and Russia classifies the “international LGBT movement” as an extremist group.

During his first week in office, former president Joe Biden withdrew the U.S. from the GCD just months after its launch, stating, “It is the policy of my Administration to support women’s and girls’ sexual and reproductive health and rights in the United States, as well as globally.”

But Huber, now out of her government job and leading the anti-abortion NGO Institute for Women’s Health (IWH), continued to champion the agreement. She’s traveled around the world meeting heads of state, including in Burundi and Argentina, who would quickly go on to join the GCD, while developing more concrete plans to carry out its goals. IWH did not respond to a request for comment.

Within the first week of Trump’s second term, the U.S. rejoined the agreement, and in June, the U.S. assumed the leading secretariat position among its signatories. Via says pushing the core group initiative while the U.S. is the secretariat is likely strategic timing.

“The U.N. is seen as the boogeyman for far-right and Christian Nationalist groups, because their definition of human rights is expansive and inclusive, which is not what these organizations want,” Via says. “But they’re gonna work within the system because it looks like they have an opportunity.”

Huber has advocated in favor of the core group since August and has said that the GCD is “the substantive basis” for the work ahead.

“What has not yet been built is the intentional, sustained coordination that turns a shared commitment into shared strategy at the international negotiating table,” she told The Washington Stand. “A nation that arrives at a negotiation alone is outmatched. A nation that arrives having strategized with 40 others is not.”

The who’s who of the far right are on board

Faith leaders praying over Donald Trump in March 2025. Image via The White House. Fair use.

The September 17th forum was held in the hopes of creating a roadmap to execute the plans for the core group. The event was sponsored by Well Versed, an evangelical NGO whose mission is to bring “biblical principles of governance to government leaders and the people who elect them.”

The forum attracted a number of noteworthy guests. There were three representatives from the Trump administration, including Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, Director of HHS Global Affairs Bethany Kozma, and Ellie Cohanim, the senior policy advisor at the U.S. mission to the U.N.

Leaders from several U.S.-based right-wing organizations also made appearances, including Turning Point USA Faith, C-Fam — which holds special consultative status at the U.N. — and Salt and Light Council, a group focused on getting churches involved in right-wing politics.

Via called these groups “the usual suspects” when it comes to work like this, but noted that their power has grown in recent years.

In addition to the power players from the U.S., there was a stacked lineup of folks from the global right. Lawmakers from Peru, Uruguay, and Guatemala, all countries where CIVF has been active, were present. Also in attendance was Artur Pawlowski, a Canadian far-right pastor known for his role in the Alberta Separatist movement; Armenian evangelical activist and former politician Stepan Sargsyan; and Dutch lobbyist Henk Jan van Schothorst.

What this lineup indicates, Via says, is that the Christian far-right is interested in wielding its outsized influence in the Trump administration to impact the global stage.

“It is the traction that the Christian nationalists have gained since Trump has been in office,” she says. “Because of the administration’s willingness to wield power and influence in other countries based on this Biblical worldview … you have had some political leaders be more accepting of the idea.”

What could this mean?

In her interview for The Washington Stand, Huber said that the point of the core group is to organize concrete action towards the goals of the GCD, which on its own is a non-binding agreement with no mechanism to enforce or ensure compliance among its signatories.

One way the core group should achieve that, Huber says, is through Protego, a project launched in 2023 by IWH that creates a road map for countries to follow in their policymaking on issues of women’s health. Outlined in their Women’s Optimal Health Framework, IWH advocates against abortion and promotes sex education that prioritizes abstinence and “prepar[ing] for a healthy marriage and future family.”

While the 62-page guide makes no explicit mention of LGBTQ people, Sjödin says that this kind of sex education, which has been widely criticized as ineffective, “is focused on promoting heterosexuality as the only form of acceptable sexuality.”

“It is used to push these binary norms that are harmful for anyone who doesn’t live up to it or doesn’t agree with it, and it limits access to education for young people who need to know both about themselves, especially if they don’t think of themselves as heterosexual, but also about everyone else so that they have an understanding that humans are different.”

Giammattei speaking at an IWH conference in 2021. Screenshot via the Government of Guatemala YouTube.

A few countries have already adopted Protego’s framework. Guatemala was the first, establishing a partnership with Huber and the IWH in June 2023 under the leadership of far-right then-president Alejandro Giammattei. The Protego project worked with the country’s Ministries of Health, Education and Social Development and developed a “Parent Child Communication Guide” that would promote IWH’s narratives on sex and family planning to Guatemalans.

Huber claims the guide, which was spread throughout the country via partnerships with influencers and faith and business leaders, has reached 3 million school-aged children in Guatemala.

Huber and Ugandan First Lady Janet Museveni signing the agreement of their partnership on Protego in 2024. Screenshot via UBC Television Uganda YouTube.

Uganda, where gay sex is punishable by death, was the next country to adopt the framework in early 2024. Unlike in Guatemala, specific details have been difficult to access and not publicly shared, but promoting abstinence-only sex education has been a publicly stated priority.

Other countries, including Hungary and Burundi, have also signaled their support for Protego, but less is known about their actions on the matter.

What happens now?

While the new core group has not yet been officially established, statements by Lara and Huber suggest an intention to do so in the near future.

“[It will take] less time than people assume, because the hardest part is already done,” Huber said in her Washington Stand interview. “The coalition exists. The shared commitments are on paper and have held through changes of government in multiple countries.”

Ipas, in its briefing, emphasizes that there is still a way to go before the core group’s establishment and cautions advocates to “avoid overstating [its] legitimacy and power.”

However, Sjödin warns that the plans, and the danger they present, must be taken seriously.

“Currently, we are seeing quite an extensive and horrendous backlash against LGBTQ+ people,” she says. “What they potentially want to do here is to actually make inclusion of everyone more difficult.”

Written by Uncloseted MEdia

The main danger of AI in authoritarian regimes is the ability to suppress any protest

Originally published on Global Voices

Moscow subway cameras are connected to a facial recognition system. Screenshot taken from the YouTube video “Facial recognition cameras help detain dissidents in the Moscow metro” by the DW YouTube channel; fair use.

This post is part of Global Voices’ October 2026 Spotlight series, “Big Tech and Authoritarianism.” In this Spotlight, we explore how Big Tech facilitates and hinders authoritarian governments and practices, and how these choices influence the Global South. You can support this coverage by donating here.

Sonya, from Stavropol Krai, Russia, is 15 years old. In June 2026, she was sentenced to 70 hours of compulsory labor, connected to a February 2026 incident in which she had written the surname “Navalny” on a bus stop. That stop happened to be in a district that was being monitored by officers from the Center for Combating Extremism, commonly called Center E. Similarly, Yuri, a pensioner from Astrakhan who was also identified from surveillance footage, was given three years of restricted freedom for writing “No to War” in red marker on buildings.

Authoritarian regimes are increasingly using artificial intelligence (AI) as a technology of political survival. Cameras with facial recognition, video analytics, biometric databases, digital IDs, social media monitoring, Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) systems, and public service platforms are gradually merging into a single infrastructure of control.

Such a system makes it possible not only to observe citizens in real time, but also to reconstruct their past movements, connections, habits, communications, and political activity. The main risk is that AI and related technologies make repression faster and less visible: the state no longer needs to constantly demonstrate force if citizens know they can be identified retroactively.

Modern digital authoritarianism is not developing in isolation, but through the international exchange of technologies, standards, and practices. China, Russia, Iran, Belarus, Venezuela, countries in Africa, Western and Central Asia, and companies connected to them, sell and exchange AI infrastructure tools that are being used for the purpose of repression. Western technologies are also being bought and exchanged within authoritarian regimes. 

Large language models

In early June 2026, Sberbank Deputy Chairman Alexander Vedyakhin told Reuters that the company was offering countries in the Global South access to Russian AI models that would take “local values” into account. Vedyakhin was referring to specific large language models (LLMs) — GigaChat and YandexGPT — which Russia had been trying to develop since 2019.

However, as IT expert Alexander Isavnin told journalists at the podcast Zhivoy Gvozd, Russian generative AI models lag behind American and Chinese models and cannot even generate text in Cyrillic. Yet, new national and sovereign AI models are supposed to reflect traditional values, including patriotism, service to the Fatherland and responsibility for its fate, a strong family, historical memory and continuity between generations, and unity of the peoples of Russia. These models are expected to be trained on domestic, authentically Russian material.

It is reasonable to assume that in countries like those in Western Asia, Russian AI models will reflect adherence to Islamic traditions, while in Argentina, perhaps, they will reflect respect for football from an early age. Developers, meanwhile, do not understand how people with no idea about how any of this works can write AI laws: “In places, the document reads as if it was written by people who had only ever seen LLMs in local news.” From the perspective of global democracy, however, this illiteracy among Russian lawmakers suggests that Russia is unlikely to supply LLMs to autocracies around the world.

China, by contrast — unlike American developers — makes its language models open in principle, meaning that anyone can take the code and modify it for their own needs. In China, all LLMs are controlled and tightly regulated by the state, so party censorship is written into the code from the start — for example, you cannot get an answer about the Tiananmen Square protests. However, the models are distributed as open source, which is why more than 50 percent of Chinese model users come from developers, including those in the Global South.

At the same time, the U.S.-based ChatGPT can easily replicate AI-generated Iranian propaganda videos, in which the main characters are Lego figures. Only once, a France 24 investigation showed, did the chatbot alert the journalist that he might be inadvertently reproducing propaganda, but desisted when he said it was only satire.

Mass surveillance systems

AI also includes other tech developments, like the so-called “smart city” systems which, in the Chinese version, imply comprehensive surveillance of a state’s own citizens. This can include video surveillance, wiretapping, internet censorship, facial recognition systems, ethnic profiling, and so on. In supplying such systems to the Global South, China has overtaken Russia.

Yet, Russia is not lagging behind in the use of AI to surveil its own citizens. State media write that Moscow has long moved beyond the threshold implied by the concept of a “smart city.” Today, it includes a complex digital urban ecosystem made up of video surveillance, AI, big data, and the “internet of things.”

According to estimates by Comparitech, two of the ten cities outside China with the highest number of cameras per person are Russian: Moscow and St. Petersburg. The list also includes four Indian cities, Seoul in South Korea, Baghdad in Iraq, Kabul in Afghanistan, and Singapore. In China itself, the number of cameras has practically reached a ratio of one camera for every two people: the largest mass-surveillance system in the world.

Russia has sold, and in some cases, continues to supply  its surveillance software products to other authoritarian states, while remaining technologically dependent on China. In 2024, up to 80 percent of all cameras used in Russia were made in China and sold under Russian brands.

China has built one of the most sophisticated domestic systems of digital control; it has also turned the export of digital infrastructure into part of its foreign policy via the Digital Silk Road, launched back in 2017. Through the initiative, China promotes digital infrastructure, technological cooperation, standards, and solutions for countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Formally, these projects are described as support for the digital transformation of developing states, but they deepen partners’ dependence on Chinese technologies and create channels for the spread of AI systems, especially mass-surveillance technologies.

Experts from the Carnegie Endowment, the European Parliament, and Freedom House agree that the main danger of AI in authoritarian regimes is the ability to suppress any protest before it has even properly materialized. AI systems can help authorities detect early signals: unusual online activity, preparations, movement patterns, and links between activists.

All of this has, among other things, already been done in the digital Gulag that Moscow has built. As journalist Andrei Zakharov writes in his new book “Russian Cyberpunk,” Moscow authorities have been collecting comprehensive data on Muscovites since as early as 2014, and have been using AI to bring information from different agencies into a single database. After the 2021 protests, activists were arrested using facial recognition systems. According to Zakharov, in Moscow in 2023, there were already more than 220,000 video devices connected to a unified data storage and processing center.

Now, against the backdrop of sentences of ten-plus years for publishing an article in a foreign journal, for example, the sentences handed down in 2021 to people prosecuted after the so-called “Palace Case” seem small — but this was the first instance in which people in Russia were arrested as a result of video surveillance analysis. Police came to Yevgeny Yesenov’s apartment and arrested him the day after the rally; he became the first prisoner in the case and was sentenced to four years in a penal colony, though he was released on parole after a year and a half. While things like this happened in pre-war Russia, now, as a result of organized surveillance by the “smart city” system, anyone’s address can be found using their face.

After the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, people were arrested in the same way for anti-war graffiti or for setting fire to military enlistment offices — any forms of protest that had been captured and analyzed by the country’s AI surveillance system.

As T-Invariant writes, Russia is also developing AI for drones and cryptography at Moscow State University under the leadership of Putin’s daughter, using Chinese and American gray-market chips and open Western AI technologies. It is also sharing such technologies with China and North Korea.

China and Western Asia

Chinese participation in “smart city” projects in Western Asia is unfolding in a region where, according to the EIU Democracy Index for 2023, 16 out of 20 territories are classified as authoritarian regimes. These projects are most highly concentrated in the Gulf states: the UAE has 11 projects, while Saudi Arabia has seven. Outside this bloc, Turkey plays the most visible role with five projects, while the remaining projects are distributed among Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Morocco, and Tunisia.

The latest Chinese concept of the “smart city,” from 2022, involves real-time information monitoring across virtually all aspects of urban life. This technology makes it possible to establish continuous real-time digital monitoring of a city, giving the government the ability to multiply its control over citizens.

China and Russia’s links with Iran

In February 2026, research by the civil society organization Article 19 found that the architecture of internet control in Iran relies heavily on Chinese technologies. The report said that China supplied Iran with facial recognition technologies, internet filtering equipment, and surveillance tools from companies such as Huawei, ZTE, Hikvision, Tiandy, as well as smaller Chinese suppliers.

At the same time, an investigation by Le Monde and Forbidden Stories showed that Iran acquired the Russian facial recognition system FindFace, developed by NtechLab, through Iranian intermediary companies. The software was resold to entities linked to the Iranian state, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Ministry of Intelligence.

As early as 2019, when Iranian women began receiving fines by mail for not wearing the hijab while in a car, citizens have been talking about their government’s use of digital surveillance. In December 2025, Iran and Russia signed a cooperation agreement in the fields of AI, cybersecurity, the digital economy, blockchain, fintech, and partnerships with the private sector.

Surveillance of people in authoritarian regimes is organized by both cameras and control of internet traffic. The Russian company Protei, headquartered in Jordan but rooted in St. Petersburg, has reportedly supported Iran’s efforts to introduce systems for interception, monitoring, and traffic management, as well as to integrate DPI into network architecture. Its clients include MTN Irancell, Iran’s largest telecom provider, as well as operators and government entities in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Kenya, Namibia, Qatar, and other countries.

Taraneh M., an artist living in Iran who was detained during the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests, said that in 2022 she had prepared for the possibility of arrest by securing her devices, deleting confidential information, and setting self-destruct timers for personal chats. Nevertheless, investigators presented her with a thick dossier of her social media posts, some of which dated back five years. Although she has been released, Taraneh is now afraid to speak on the phone lest she is being monitored.

The China-Russia relationship

Although AI development in China has surpassed Russia’s, cooperation exists in the supply of Chinese technologies, as well as scientific development.

In January 2025, on the heels of Russia’s attempts to create a network of AI alliances with BRICS and other non-Western partners, Vladimir Putin instructed the Russian government and Sberbank to deepen cooperation with China, especially with regard to AI “technological research and development.”

The immediate stimulus was sanctions, Russia’s access to advanced chips and AI equipment was restricted after its invasion of Ukraine, but its dependence on China has persisted in recent years. Supplies for new servers, for example, which Russia does not manufacture, came from China through intermediary firms.

As T-Invariant discovered, however, joint developments are being conducted in two areas: training AI for drones and mass surveillance of people. In November 2025, the creation of two joint laboratories was announced: one for nano-structured optoelectronic materials and devices, and another for AI algorithms and their applications.

North Korea gets involved

Russia and North Korea are cooperating in testing AI in military operations: North Korea supplies weapons that are tested in Russia’s war on Ukraine, and data that may improve North Korean systems, including AI-guided systems, is passed back to North Korea. In May 2026, North Korea tested high-precision cruise missiles and artillery systems with AI guidance.

According to analysts, “AI” likely refers to automatic target recognition and terminal-stage guidance, although the level of technological sophistication remains unclear.

Since late 2023, North Korea has supplied Russia with ballistic missiles and artillery rockets, and their use on the battlefield in Ukraine is believed to have given Pyongyang, and likely Russia, valuable operational data.

The China-Venezuela-Belarus triangle

In Venezuela, authoritarian digital control is being built through international supply chains. Regimes do not necessarily create such systems themselves. Instead, they buy cameras, servers, video analytics platforms, DPI systems, algorithms, and software, often from countries also experiencing digital authoritarianism.

China’s Dahua, despite being added to the U.S. Entity List in 2019 because of its involvement in repression in Xinjiang, retained access to the Venezuelan market and discussed the integration of AI into surveillance systems with the authorities. Possible participation by Huawei, ZTE, and China CAMC in projects is also mentioned, although their role remains unspecified.

Between 2021 and 2023, the Venezuelan interior ministry also held talks with the Belarusian company Synesis, which is under U.S. sanctions for technologies that Belarusian authorities used to identify and arrest protesters. The Kipod software offered to Venezuela included facial recognition; searches for specific people and routes; license plate recognition; detection of weapons, abandoned objects, smoke, and crowds; perimeter control; and monitoring of traffic violations.

Countries on the African continent

A 2026 Institute of Development Studies (IDS) report on surveillance in “smart cities” in Africa showed the spread of Chinese AI-surveillance systems in 11 countries, including Algeria, Egypt, Kenya, Rwanda, Senegal, and Zimbabwe.

Carnegie’s study on the global use of AI in human surveillance predicted that the adoption of such technologies in Africa is likely to grow. Chinese exports of surveillance systems are being used in authoritarian contexts — including in Uganda and Myanmar, often through companies such as Huawei, Hikvision, and Dahua.

As in Western Asia, China-Africa cooperation in AI may look like assistance in developing “smart cities,” but its repressive use is connected with control over citizens.

Central Asia included

Governments in Central Asia have actively purchased Chinese digital public-security systems. A report by the Caspian Policy Center says that in 2013, Tajikistan cooperated with Huawei to create a safe city surveillance system in Dushanbe worth about 22 million USD, largely financed by a Chinese loan.

Other publications note that Chinese companies occupy leading positions in “safe” and “smart city” projects across Eurasia, especially because the region offers relatively open markets for Chinese technologies.

Chinese censorship systems and related tools have also appeared in Kazakhstan, Pakistan, and Ethiopia, but cooperation between China and Central Asia mainly represents the export of AI surveillance technologies under the rhetoric of crime prevention.

What can be done?

Even supposedly democratic states have employed surveillance technologies to spy on their citizens. One of the most functional proposals to hinder the development of such authoritarian digital tools is to make Western technologies open source, and move digital strategies away from sovereignty and towards inclusion of the majority world : not as territories of extraction for the energy and water to run powerful data centers that serving Western AI models, but as actual participants in digital strategies and AI governance.

Such an approach would include sustainable development and practical concerns like agriculture, healthcare, education, transport, urban planning, adaptation to climate change, and many more human-centered priorities.

Written by Daria Dergacheva