Data, AI, and infrastructures of resistance under authoritarianism

Abstract

Existing studies across Geography and related fields have yet to develop a sustained account of how new and emergent digital technologies reconfigure popular resistance and dissent under authoritarianism. This article examines digital platforms as key sites of anti-establishment politics, focusing on how data-driven systems and artificial intelligence (AI) reshape the infrastructures through which protest is organized, coordinated, mediated, and governed. It argues that while datafied environments and AI tools operate as sites of power–facilitating state-, corporate-, and platform-mediated forms of control, surveillance, and repression–they simultaneously open up possibilities for coordination, amplification, and transnational visibility, enabling resistance across both street-level and networked spaces. Drawing on two East African movements and modes of organizing–the popular Digital Maandamano protests in Kenya and more diffuse forms of nonconformist digital activism and resistance in Uganda–the article shows how, under conditions of heightened authoritarian pressure, populations carve out both virtual and embodied spaces to challenge entrenched power structures and expand the scope for political action. It advances an analytical agenda that treats digitalization as locally adapted, resisted, and reconfigured, foregrounding citizens, particularly youth, as active agents shaping alternative political trajectories.