Yet we also need to ask: how successful is AI-enabled digital authoritarianism in practice? Does it deliver the control regimes hope for, or does its effectiveness vary depending on institutional strength, digital infrastructure, and the resilience of civil society?
"More AI. More surveillance. More control. The Chinese Communist Party has never had more powerful tools at its disposal — and yet 2025 has seen a record wave of protests. Beijing's playbook is being copied across Asia and beyond, but big questions remain: where does digital authoritarianism actually work, where does it backfire, and does it hit democracies, autocracies, and hybrid regimes differently? These are the questions we're setting out to answer", says project leader Carrozza.
This week, the research team gathered in Oslo to kick off a new PRIO project titled "Understanding and countering the advance of AI-enabled digital authoritarianism in Asia (AsiaTech) " that tackles all of this — examining not just the threat, but also the resistance, and the conditions that make the difference, and what we can do to win the battle against (digital) authoritarianism.
