The Computational Homeland: Epistemic Sovereignty for Small States in the AI Age

Abstract

When a government ministry drafts a policy brief with a foreign large language model, when a schoolchild receives homework explanations shaped by training data collected far from home, and when a public portal answers citizens in a dialect filtered through someone else's alignment rules, something more than convenience is at stake. The question is not only whether the answers are accurate. It is whose horizon of meaning is being installed as the default infrastructure of thought. This essay names that stake the computational homeland: the capacity of a state, especially a small or middle power, to host, train, govern, and culturally ground the models that increasingly mediate public knowledge, administration, and economic life.

The Arab world sits in a distinctive position. It is neither a bystander nor a primary seat of the current United States–China technology rivalry, yet it is already a dense user of AI systems designed elsewhere. The United Arab Emirates offers a useful case, not as a finished template for every Arab capital, and not as a claim that sovereignty is a product one can buy, but as evidence that a small state can refuse the false choice between closed autarky and uncritical import. The argument that follows draws on Martin Heidegger's account of modern technology as Gestell, Yuk Hui's cosmotechnics, Jürgen Habermas's critique of technocratic consciousness, and Ibn Khaldun's concepts of 'asabiyya and 'umran, and then turns to concrete UAE initiatives that can be independently verified.