IKD seminar series: Digital Silk Road - Digital Roads of Kazakhstan: Technological Lock-ins and Local Agency

MS Teams

Much of the discourse on US-China tech decoupling has centered on trade and geostrategic analysis, while often overlooking ground-level realities of countries in the Global South, their positioning within the global technological landscape, and their strategic digital choices. To bridge this gap, in this presentation we discuss how Kazakhstan is (re)shaping its own digital eco-system while balancing historical legacies and challenging geopolitical constraints. Drawing from primary sources, secondary literature, and eight months of fieldwork in Almaty and Astana conducted in 2022 and 2023, we focus on decision-making in three key areas (networks, data storage, and applications), and identify four constraints that influence decision-making related to them: historical legacies, geopolitical considerations, financial factors, and institutional frameworks. Within these constraints, we uncover pockets of local agency and contingency, and highlight the ability of different actors – from state officers to tech companies - to carve their own independent path in a tech field seemingly dominated by US and Chinese companies. We argue that in a digital world predominantly shaped by the competition between US and Chinese tech giants, Kazakhstan's unique digital ecosystem showcases the potential for the Global South countries to craft their own trajectories. By understanding and harnessing their unique historical, geopolitical, financial, and institutional contexts, these nations can assert their agency and shape their digital futures. 

Speakers

Chair: Dr Lorena Lombardozzi (Lecturer in Economics at The Open University). 

Lorena is a Senior Lecturer in Economics at the School of Social Sciences & Global Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) at the Open University. She is Co-Director of IKD: Innovation, Knowledge and Development Research Centre. She completed her PhD thesis in Economics at SOAS, University of London (fully funded by SOAS Economics dpt.) with a title ‘A nexus between the role of the state, market transition and food consumption: The case of Uzbekistan’. Lorena holds a MSc from SOAS in Political Economy of Development (fully-funded).  She received a previous Masters in Development Economics from University La Sapienza of Rome, Italy.