Conclusion Back to contents 76 We conducted this research to shed light on the visible structures and potential impacts of Mandalay’s smart cities projects on human rights. In particular, we identified that CCTV projects in Myanmar’s cities – whether they are under smart city projects or general city development – should be scrutinised to uncover possible risk areas. Our approach to this research is based on the axiom that surveillance technology can curb freedom of expression, privacy of movement, civil liberty, and civic participation, which is harmful for a democratic society. As there has been little prior public scrutiny on smart city projects in Myanmar, their surveillance systems, justified for ‘crime reduction’, are obscure under the umbrella of ‘smart city’ plans. A few important threads emerged from our research which should be explicitly mentioned as a way of signposting future work to build on our report: In Myanmar, particularly since the coup, CCTV cameras have become a kind of weapon that repressive forces have seized and are using to silence dissent. While the narrative of ‘safety’ encourages the purchase of these technologies, it is the ambition of surveillance and control that currently sustains it. The exact ways in which this power is wielded is an important question for civil society to explore, as is the question of how this impacts dissent across the country. Private companies increasingly find cunning ways to obscure the extent of their involvement – or their involvement in smart cities altogether. This is an important pattern for civil society to look into for future work, particularly as it helps draw an accurate picture of the financial and technological concentration of power within smart cities.