Telegram messenger, created by an exiled Russian entrepreneur Pavel Durov, brands itself as a non-mainstream and non-Western guarantor of privacy in messaging. This paper offers an in-depth analysis of the challenges faced by the platform in Iran, with 59.5% of the population using its services, and in Russia, where Telegram is popular among the urban dissent. Both governments demanded access to the platform’s encrypted content and, with Durov’s refusal, took measures to ban it. Relying on the concept of surveillant assemblage (Haggerty and Ericson 2000), this paper portrays how authoritarian states disrupt, block, and police platforms that do not comply with their intrusive surveillance. Additionally, we consider the tools and actors that make up internet control assemblages as well as the resistance assemblages that take shape in response to such control.

Despite the prevalence of smart city discourse across many disciplines, governance systems, and policy-making bodies, its conceptual foundations are based either on semi-/democratic political constellations or deemed apolitical. This research agenda highlights the embeddedness of any smart city agenda within a more extensive political regime. Furthermore, the research agenda focuses on the authoritarian socio-technical imaginaries and their role in shaping smart city policies, implementation, and governance. The research agenda also highlights the research on authoritarian surveillance and its interconnection with authoritarian smart city conceptualisation. Furthermore, it offers three research areas for authoritarian surveillance: authoritarian practices in democratic contexts, the use of surveillance technologies for maintaining autocratic power, and authoritarian structure and governance of platform corporations. Finally, similar to critical voices in critical data studies and the field of information and communication technology for development, the research agenda aims to demystify the prevalent assumption of the good smart city that fixes all injustices that socio-political endeavours have not achieved. It argues that every technologically enabled tool or platform reflects the political constellations in which it is embedded and affects and produces new socio-technical interlinkages that could never be apolitical.

This research starts its journey from a video that failed to be published during the 2009 uprising in Iran. By following data outside the common trajectories of data circulation in the global North, this paper offers new geographical and data imaginations neglected by the universalised understandings of data and its political economy. Consequently, data’s behaviour as a thing is thoroughly investigated in the “follow the thing tradition” by scrutinising data as a commodity, its meanings and its associations. Using actor‐network‐theory, the paper highlights data’s open and contested character as well as the breakdowns throughout its journey. Following an uncirculated video via its traces sheds light on data’s agency in evoking different assemblages and spatialities. It also reflects on the epistemological importance of not treating the Southern data as exceptional and calls for a theoretical landscape that does not leave many realities of data out in its homogenised universal narrative.

As the world seemed undecided in praising China’s crisis management through what was formerly called networked authoritarianism (MacKinnon 2011), countries such as Iran showed no interest in extending its notorious political surveillance practices into the public health arena. Consequently, this paper asks if the umbrella term “authoritarian surveillance” used by many Western and non-Western scholars (including myself) can do justice to the practices witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic in countries such as Iran? Could any act of arbitrary or oppressive surveillance be categorised as authoritarian surveillance? Does authoritarian surveillance necessarily correspond to an authoritarian state form? This paper summarily reviews the political theories of authoritarianism and the current discussions on authoritarian surveillance. By scrutinising Iran’s inability to apply its political surveillance tools during a public health crisis, the paper argues for an analytical integration of other socio-political concepts, such as state legitimacy, and economic potentialities, such as infrastructural capacities, into discussions of authoritarian surveillance. Consequently, the paper proposes a situated understanding of authoritarian surveillance contextualised within social, political, economic, and historical interrelations.

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