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Paper short abstract

Uzbekistan is rapidly “AIfying” via biometrics, Safe City, and data-localisation. I trace how these systems reorder power—at borders, on platforms, in daily services—producing data borders and gendered harms, and sketch decolonial, feminist interventions for plural Uzbek AI futures.

Paper long abstract

Uzbekistan is rapidly institutionalising AI as state infrastructure: a national AI strategy to 2030, Digital Uzbekistan-2030 targets, and AI-friendly investment regimes—including a tax-free zone for AI and data centres in Karakalpakstan—signal accelerated “AIfication.” These sit atop earlier projects: Safe City deployments with Huawei’s video analytics/facial recognition in Tashkent and beyond, and biometric identity stacks (MyID facial/palm recognition) used across banking, metro access, and e-services, all under a 2019 data-localisation law. Efficiency is promised; surveillance, enclosure, and extractive data relations expand. This paper asks how AI’s expansion reorders power at the edge: for women navigating biometric portals; for migrants moving through “data borders” within e-government; for activists and creators whose visibility is measured, flagged, or throttled; and for communities in Karakalpakstan, where data-centre siting meets long histories of environmental harm around the Aral Sea. Methodologically, I combine policy/technical analysis (MyID architectures, data flows, model procurement), multi-sited ethnography (IT Park/start-ups, ministries, platforms, salons and streets in Tashkent), and participatory futures workshops with civil society to prototype plural, feminist, decolonial AI counter-visions. I argue that Uzbekistan’s AIfication does not merely “apply” global AI; it adopts and adapts it through specific legal, infrastructural, and moral orders (data localisation, Huawei-built Safe City, biometric rails), producing data borders that sort citizens and sensorial regimes that normalise watching. I conclude with practicable interventions—impact assessments with community veto points, red-team audits for biometric harms, and Karakalpakstan-first environmental standards—to open room for Uzbek AI futures beyond extractive instrumental rationality.