The rise of AI surveillance in Kazakhstan

And he wrote a few weeks ago published a really interesting article on the development of surveillance technology the surveillance infrastructure in kazakhstan it's a really long article but really worth visiting and i i thought i really found it so interesting that i thought it would be good to have paula on the podcast to talk a little bit more about his article but i would obviously suggest that readers actually go and check out the article itself and i'll leave a link to that in the show notes Okay, Tlegan, let's start with this visit by Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev to Tbilisi.

Can you give us a few headlines on this?

So Shavkat Mirziyoyev landed in Tbilisi on July 2nd.

And what is interesting is it was his first state visit to Georgia.

and the very first visit of the Uzbek president to Georgia in the last 23 years, which is very interesting because diplomatic relations between two countries were actually established in 1994.

And for now, Georgia still doesn't have an embassy in Tashkent.

And Uzbekistan, as far as I know, operates its interests in Georgia through its embassy in Baku.

So this visit by Shavkat Mirziyev, who presented it, a very interesting and important case because there was a lot of on the business side, but also a big focus was on the development of the middle corridor and the infrastructure, which kind of reminds us that Georgia, just as Central Asia, is essential region to this project.

And maybe you can drive us a little bit more into details of what actually has been signed and what was discussed and what they agreed to do together.

Right.

So the culmination, as often is the case with these state visits, was the signing of a declaration of strategic partnership, which is pretty much one of the highest levels of bilateral relation you can have.

So that...

in itself, I think, is suggestive for those people who are looking for clues of symbolism and diplomacy of the fact that Uzbekistan sees its fate now increasingly bonded not just with its traditional allies, and this means, of course, countries like Russia and maybe countries in the West or its nearby neighborhood.

So as we know, President Mirzoev has really promoted the cause of regional integration.

But now it's evident that Tashkent sees the need to project these strong relations a little bit further, specifically in the interests of the middle corridor, as you said.

So...

There's that symbolic diplomatic part of the conversation of this visit.

But then the things that seem to be far more compelling to me was the actual business and all of the projections that both sides are making when it comes to actually making Middle Corridor a reality.

So, for instance, there were conversations about linking two railways, right? So there's this one railway is the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway, which crosses the Caucasus, west to east, east to west.

And the idea was that that would one day be linked to the China-Kyrgyzstan-Azbekistan railway.

So really what you see is this idea of actually creating a conversation around these two big infrastructure projects and bringing them together.

What is important to understand in the idea to link the two railways is it doesn't really move for now at least the project forward.

What they agreed on is to do the feasibility study.

So to see if and how they can actually do it.

But there are more practical solutions.