Arzuu Sheranova

In October 2020 the world witnessed the third sudden change of power in Kyrgyzstan since its independence. In 2005, 2010 and 2020 repeated mass protests led to the violent fall of the political regimes of Akaev, Bakiev and Zheenbekov. Although these events were more or less similar in terms of the conditions contributing to the protests, they were different in the way the political elites were viewed by the protesters. The aim of this contribution is to critically analyse the role of political elites during these three revolutions. This piece underlines the declining role of these elites on the one hand, namely in terms of the decline of the political capital of the leaders, and points out the rise in public grievances and worsening of socio-economic life on the other hand. These latter processes have led to an increase in distrust toward the political establishment and the emergence of populist leadership after October 2020. In contrast with the previous Kyrgyz revolutions, the Oct...

Kyrgyzstan, famously the only “island of democracy” in Central Asia, has fallen to the rise of the nationalist and populist regime of Sadyr Zhaparov following the mass protests in October 2020. Since the adoption of the Law on Protection from False Information (aka the law against the spread of fake news) in Kyrgyzstan in August 2021, the legal persecution
and detention of critics and bloggers because of their posts on social media has become possible. The number of Facebook or other social media users censored and interrogated by the Kyrgyz security services for their criticism towards the president and the incumbent government is skyrocketing. Seven bloggers, including those related to media channels
critical of the state, were censored and interrogated by the security services just between January and June 2022 (Kadyrov). More than 30 critics of the regime — civil society activists, opposition politicians, independent journalists, bloggers and human rights activists — were
detained between October and December 2022 for their social media criticism (mainly on Facebook) of the government’s decision to transfer the Kempir-Abad water reservoir to Uzbekistan in a border deal. The detainees were accused of an attempt to overthrow the government after the security services released audio recordings of conversations between
opposition politicians and civil society activists. Very soon, the authorities also shut down the website of Radio Free Europe affiliate Azattyk in Kyrgyzstan for two months for “biased reporting”; in December 2022 the term was extended indefinitely. Prominent investigative journalist Bolot Temirov was expelled from Kyrgyzstan to Russia by a judicial decision in
November 2022. The Kyrgyz authorities intend to adopt a law on non-commercial non-state organisations (aka law on foreign agents) which is currently under public consideration.
Finally, in January 2023, the Apparatus of the President of the Kyrgyz Republic released a draft Law on Mass Media according to which the state will oversee bloggers, internet outlets and social media accounts with more than 5,000 followers. The state intends to register them in a unified system in order to track and to monitor their activity.

In October 2020 the world witnessed the third sudden change of power in Kyrgyzstan since its independence. In 2005, 2010 and 2020 repeated mass protests led to the violent fall of the political regimes of Akaev, Bakiev and Zheenbekov. Although these events were more or less similar in terms of the conditions contributing to the protests, they were different in the way the political elites were viewed by the protesters. The aim of this contribution is to critically analyse the role of political elites during these three revolutions. This piece underlines the declining role of these elites on the one hand, namely in terms of the decline of the political capital of the leaders, and points out the rise in public grievances and worsening of socioeconomic life on the other hand. These latter processes have led to an increase in distrust toward the political establishment and the emergence of populist leadership after October 2020. In contrast with the previous Kyrgyz revolutions, the October 2020 revolution failed to establish clear leadership from among the established elites and was chaotic. In the paper we challenge the existing scholarship on protests in Central Asia as elitist and reductionist, as they completely ignore the roles of society and social grievances. Instead, we suggest central asian affairs 10 (2023) 183-208 that the role of the political elites in protests and their political capital are diminishing, and they are not the rigid and powerful actors that they seem. The study is based on 20 in-depth interviews with Kyrgyz political elites and leaders of three revolutions, 10 interviews with representatives of society, online ethnography (online observation of three Kyrgyz revolutions, including available live-streams) and news sources.

This article tackles the fraught relationship between security discourse, on the theoretical level, and security experience and practice on the ground. It argues that the efforts of the Kyrgyzstani authorities to reform and thus create sustainable and needs-based community security and law enforcement structures have so far largely been performative or even "virtual", meaning that they have focused on governing, but not producing security. The argument is first developed out of literature on state building, the security sector and police reform from a global perspective and in the context of Central Asia and Kyrgyzstan, more specifically. In a second step, we draw on insights from fieldwork, professional experience and grey literature to examine Local Crime Prevention Centres (LCPCs), which are communal-level public bodies where local administrations and residents potentially co-produce needs-based forms of security. However, we also show that the work of these bodies is s...

sufficient level of stability, even though the current economic stagnation presents a significant challenge. These characteristics make Russia a difficult international actor to deal with, as external conflicts, including ‘small victorious wars’ (p. 240), are increasingly becoming an alternative source of legitimacy for the regime. After such a worrying diagnosis, the urge to conclude with something positive is understandable. Åslund solves this by laying out an extensive plan for ‘a new generation of Russian reformers’ (p. 251) after the collapse of the current regime. Whether such a new reform process is feasible and whether it can really be more successful than the one in the 1990s, however, remains to be seen. Russia’s Crony Capitalism is certainly not the first book to cover the corrupt nature of Putin’s regime or the many institutional shortcomings of the Russian economy. Recent publications such as Karen Dawisha’s Putin’s Kleptocracy or Chris Miller’s Putinomics have already provided important insights. Nonetheless, Åslund offers an excellent overview and presents an impressive amount of empirical information, including unique personal accounts. It is thus a must-read for everyone interested in Russia, though it is probably intended for the more advanced reader.

Nation-building as a process is never complete and issues related to identity, nation, state and regime-building are recurrent in the post-Soviet region. This comparative, inter-disciplinary volume explores how nation-building tools emerged and evolved over the last twenty years. Featuring in-depth case studies from countries throughout the post-Soviet space it compares various aspects of nation-building and identity formation projects. Approaching the issue from a variety of disciplines, and geographical areas, contributors illustrate chapter by chapter how different state and non-state actors utilise traditional instruments of nation-construction in new ways while also developing non-traditional tools and strategies to provide a contemporary account of how nation-formation efforts evolve and diverg

This paper examines ‘invention’ of a new ‘tradition’, that is of nomadic games in Kyrgyzstan blessed by its prehistoric past of nomadism. Since 2012 the Kyrgyz government had introduced the World Nomad Games (the WNGs) in Kyrgyzstan. The country hosted three spectacular games in the northern oblast of the country – Yssyk-Kul. Hundreds of sportsmen worldwide took part in these events and thousands of tourists rushed into the country to watch the games. In fact, Kyrgyz nomadic games are more than just a revival of old nomadic traditions, but they are political inventions. Using Hobsbawm’s framework of ‘invented traditions’ (1983), I examine the World Nomad Games as invented tradition. I argue that the Kyrgyz leadership invented tradition of nomadic games to tackle with contemporary issues, such as a need for attraction of foreign investment and promotion of tourism. As I illustrate the WNGs project was a timely response to improve the country image after a series of political instabil...

In post-independence Kyrgyzstan, the role of the informal institutions of aksakals and imams remains strong even during an era of transformation and development of the region with international support. This research notes the importance of informal local institutions in international aid and argues for a complementary interplay between formal and informal institutions in weak democracies. In contrast to existing studies, this research states that the role of informal institutions in young democracies should not be treated only as detrimental. A gap that this work aims to fill in the existing literature is a contribution to the understudied topic of how and why formal institutions exploit/use informal institutions for own purposes. The contribution discusses how the Local Crime Prevention Center (LCPC)—a formal institution—engages with informal institutions, such as imams and aksakals, for its everyday duties and tasks, starting from information dissemination activities and informat...

Traditional pre-tsarist institutions in Central Asia (CA) are viewed as being crucial in domestic politics, democratisation, transition and nation-building. Political scientists have focused on clan identities and clan politics, whereas anthropologists have proposed kinship and patronage as alternative analytical frameworks. Each side of the debate, however, has not adequately explained or portrayed traditional institutions that affect political voting and mobilisation simply because it is a combination of both proposed frameworks at the same time. This article suggests using Elinor Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis framework (IAD) to gain a more comprehensive analysis of the issue. Ostrom’s IAD is particularly useful to frame and explain this phenomenon because it was designed as an instrument to understand complex situations for which individuals set rules. Due to difficulty in terming the phenomenon found in the literature, this article favours using the local terms “uruu/uruk” tha...

This paper analyses the e-voting experience of the local elections undertaken by Osh city Council in 2016. The process was introduced to ensure fair and democratic elections in Kyrgyzstan after continuous and repeated violent political uprising. The e-system, based on biometrics registration, biometric identification of voters and automated vote counting, was designed to help to avoid the most common election frauds: vote buying, carousel voting and group/family voting. The case study, mainly based on interviews, illustrates the adaptation and modernization of strategies to resist and cheat within the e-voting system. The analysis outlines three widely practised cheating strategies: procedural violations, such as avoiding cross-checking of manual and automated counting and allowing voting without biometrical identification; transformation of bribery into ‘vote auctioning’; and strengthening of kinship-based/regional support and tribal/regional identity under conditions of e-voting.

This article tackles the fraught relationship between security discourse, on the theoretical level, and security experience and practice on the ground. It argues that the efforts of the Kyrgyzstani authorities to reform and thus create sustainable and needs-based community security and law enforcement structures have so far largely been performative or even "virtual", meaning that they have focused on governing, but not producing security. The argument is first developed out of literature on state building, the security sector and police reform from a global perspective and in the context of Central Asia and Kyrgyzstan, more specifically. In a second step, we draw on insights from fieldwork, professional experience and grey literature to examine Local Crime Prevention Centres (LCPCs), which are communal-level public bodies where local administrations and residents potentially co-produce needs-based forms of security. However, we also show that the work of these bodies is still dependent on international support while lacking the conditions and facilitation that only executive actors can provide.

Traditional pre-tsarist institutions in Central Asia (CA) are viewed as being crucial in domestic politics, democratisation, transition and nation-building. Political scientists have focused on clan identities and clan politics, whereas anthropologists have proposed kinship and patronage as alternative analytical frameworks. Each side of the debate, however, has not adequately explained or portrayed traditional institutions that affect political voting and mobilisation simply because it is a combination of both proposed frameworks at the same time. This article suggests using Elinor Ostrom's Institutional Analysis framework (IAD) to gain a more comprehensive analysis of the issue. Ostrom's IAD is particularly useful to frame and explain this phenomenon because it was designed as an instrument to understand complex situations for which individuals set rules. Due to difficulty in terming the phenomenon found in the literature, this article favours using the local terms "uruu/uruk" that denote patrilinear genealogy and "uruuchuluk" that broadly stands for patrilinear bonds identity to describe traditional pre-modern institutions that affect political voting and mobilisation. In addition, this article stresses that the uruu/uruk genealogy system is closely linked with its inhabited geographic area and generates a parallel regional identity which tends to be crucial in the political life of Kyrgyzstan. Therefore, the paper treats uruu/uruk and region together as one phenomenon. The uruu/uruk genealogy system is explained via Ostrom's IAD framework and is informed by the existing literature on contemporary elections in Kyrgyzstan along with the author's observations of elections in Kyrgyzstan since 2009. Based on the IAD, I conclude that uruu/uruk-based voting and the development of regional identity in Kyrgyzstan are attractive practices for both individual voters and political candidates because they both benefit from the situation and are committed to maintaining the "structure" of the situation.

The paper offers an analysis of a post-conflict policy document: 'The Concept on strengthening of the national unity and inter-ethnic relations in the Kyrgyz Republic', as a policy driven by values of multiculturalism based on international standards. The paper problematizes the relationship between the norms of multiculturalism and the politics of nationalism in Kyrgyzstan using field data collected in 2015. This paper will argue that the 'Concept' adopted by the Kyrgyzstani government is a top-down project, rather than a community-owned and community-shared project. It does not consider broad public opinion and does not enjoy public support for most of policy ideas contained in it. The paper critically studies the values behind the 'Concept', which were aimed at engendering inter-ethnic cohesion and observance of minority rights, against the political reality of inter-ethnic relations on the ground. Informed by key literature on nationalism in post-Soviet Central Asia, the paper concludes that Kyrgyzstan's 'uneasy' management of diversity speaks more broadly to the issue of 'titular ethnicization' in post-Soviet Central Asia, and questions the applicability of the idea of multiculturalism in the post-Westphalian nation-state reality, especially in post-conflict or conflict-prone settings.

This chapter presents empirical data demonstrating a crucial role that informal institutions play along with Local Crime Prevention Centres (LCPCs) in conflict prevention, mediation and community security provision in the south of Kyrgyzstan, based on the examples of the Saferworld UK led project on community security in Kyrgyzstan. Overall, the research draws attention to the understudied topic of exploitation/use of informal institutions by formal institutions. The study argues for a complementary interplay between formal and informal institutions in weak democracies and concludes with stressing the importance of informal local institutions in international aid. In contrast to existing studies, this research states that the role of informal institutions in young democracies should not be treated only as detrimental. As discussed below, practices in Kyrgyzstan suggest that interaction between formal and informal institutions resulted in positive outcomes in the implementation of international projects. This piece contributes to a wider literature on (in)formal institutions by defining how and why formal institutions exploit/use informal institutions for own purposes. This piece studies LCPC’s engagement with the informal institutions of imams and aksakals.

This study presents an alternative analysis of the controversial issue of clan politics in Kyrgyzstan (in Kyrgyz, uruuchuluk). I claim that research concentrates on the phenomenon of uruuchuluk politics via the prism of (top-down) elite control, while (bottom-up) non-elite control is understudied. Based on this hypothesis, this paper analyzes bottom-up clan politics, including inter-non-elite uruuchuluk politics, and tests this assumption in the field. My research shows that bottom-up uruuchuluk is an important component of clan politics in Kyrgyzstan and needs further study to enhance our understanding of its role in informal politics in the country.