In the 20th century, sovereignty was visible. It was measured in tanks, borders, and flags. A state was sovereign if it could defend its territory and issue its own currency. But in the 21st century, sovereignty has moved into the invisible. It now lives in code, platforms, and the digital scaffolding of daily life. A nation may guard its borders, but if its citizens depend on WhatsApp to communicate, Amazon to shop, YouTube to learn, and Apple or Google to pay—how sovereign is it, really? When a single app update abroad can disrupt millions of lives at home, sovereignty has already shifted into the cloud.
This dependency is not theoretical.
- In 2021, when Facebook went down for six hours, businesses across the Middle East lost days of income because they relied on Instagram and WhatsApp to sell.
- In Nigeria, when Twitter was banned, thousands of entrepreneurs saw their lifeline to customers vanish overnight.
These platforms don’t optimize for Tashkent, Cairo, or Lagos. They optimize for Menlo Park and Shenzhen. And with a line of code, they can switch off entire economies. Sovereignty today is not about who controls the land. It’s about who controls the platforms your people rely on.
Governments understand this shift, but they are rarely the ones who solve it. Ministries can buy servers, but they don’t invent TikTok. State-owned firms can run telecom monopolies, but they don’t build super-apps.
Innovation doesn’t come from bureaucracy. It comes from small, obsessed teams moving fast. It comes from startups.
- Indonesia’s Gojek didn’t just create a ride-hailing app. It built a payments platform that now underpins parts of the Indonesian economy.
- Nigeria’s Flutterwave isn’t just a fintech company. It’s infrastructure for cross-border trade across Africa.
- Egypt’s Fawry digitized payments for tens of millions, bringing visibility to the informal economy.
These companies are as critical to sovereignty today as ports, pipelines, or highways once were.
Too many developing economies remain renters. We rent technology from Silicon Valley, rent capital from global funds, and rent expertise from abroad.
Startups flip this equation. They make us builders.
One homegrown startup can do more for sovereignty than an oilfield. Oilfields deplete. Startups multiply. They scale, evolve, and spawn ecosystems. Look at Israel’s Yozma program in the 1990s: a relatively small government-backed venture fund seeded an ecosystem that now exports billions in ICT. That’s what digital sovereignty looks like.
Uzbekistan, like many developing nations, stands at a crossroads. With its young population, entrepreneurial spirit, and strategic location, it has the raw ingredients to leapfrog into the digital future. Instead of being just a consumer market for foreign platforms, Uzbekistan can become a producer of its own platforms—fintech, EdTech, logistics, AI tools.
- A startup-led payments network can power commerce across Central Asia.
- Local EdTech platforms can prepare millions of students for the jobs of tomorrow.
- AI-driven tools can digitize agriculture, logistics, and healthcare.
Each startup is not just a company. It is an independence project. Together, they can form the backbone of a trillion-dollar economy by 2050.
In the 1960s, nations fought for political independence. In the 2020s, the struggle is for digital independence.
- Who owns the platforms your kids use to learn?
- Who controls the payment rails your traders depend on?
- Who sets the algorithms that shape your public discourse?
If the answer is always “someone else,” you are not sovereign. But when you build your own, you reclaim independence. Startups don’t just create wealth. They create sovereignty. The old wars have ended, but the new struggle has begun. And the frontlines run not through borders, but through code, servers, and startups.
For Uzbekistan and other developing nations, the mission is clear:
Stop being consumers. Start being builders. Because in the 21st century, sovereignty doesn’t come from armies. It comes from founders. The question is no longer how many barrels of oil you own. It is: how many startups do you own?
Muhammad Khalil
