Paper long abstract:

Protests have been at the center of major political developments across Central Asia. In Tajikistan, rival protests in the center of Dushanbe in the Spring of 1992 sparked a bloody civil war which lasted until 1997. In Uzbekistan, the deadly 2005 government crackdown on protesters in Andijon resulted in hundreds being killed, growing hostility to the West, and the closure of strategic U.S. facilities used for the Global War on Terror. In 2011, striking oil workers in Zhanaozen were brutally shot down by government forces, precipitating a shift toward a more ruthlessly authoritarian approach to Kazakh politics. Kyrgyzstan, until recently the least authoritarian state in the region, has seen three violent revolutionary transitions over the past 15 years - 2005, 2010, and 2020. Yet, thus far no research project has collected a comprehensive dataset on protests in the region.

The paper is based on the Central Asia Protest Tracker, a new event dataset of protest activities in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan which currently logs 1,577 protests since 2018; Kazakhstan (780 protests), Kyrgyzstan (603 protests), Tajikistan (29 protests), Turkmenistan (18 protests), and Uzbekistan (147 protests). The data are derived from protests which took place physically and collected using local language media reports from the region. The coded variables range from protest type and protest issue to protest target and target response, among others. Using the data from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, the paper will use regression analysis to demonstrate how the Central Asia Protest Tracker (CAPT) can be used to examine the variables that determine whether the target of a protest action engages in behavior to repress or address the issues raised by protesters. Independent variables include protest location (rural versus urban), groups linked to the protest, issues around which people mobilized and the size of the protest.

Paper long abstract:

The Kazakhstani society has witnessed the growth of civic activism. This growth is not limited to the more visible and political protests that took place across the country, particularly so following the fraudulent presidential elections in 2019, but also included various civic initiatives that focus on changes in urban environment. In my contribution to the conference, I focus on urban grassroots mobilisations in the city of Almaty that have emerged and grown increasingly active in reaction against the transformation of the urban environment. As a rule, the activity of such groups remained unaccounted in former analyses of protest mobilization in the country. In particular, I inquire into factors that move the city dwellers to engage in grassroot mobilization and the challenges they face. By focusing on urban grassroot mobilization the study sheds new light on prospects of collective action in a country that has been notorious for the shrinking of public space over the last three decades. It is argued that collective action should not be understood only in terms of overt forms of political protests, which have grown over the last decade, but also manifest itself in rather hidden or discreet forms of civic mobilization. Ultimately, it is argued that the various and numerous accounts of civic grassroot mobilizations revitalize new forms of citizenship.

Paper long abstract:

Social protests are expressions of popular grievances, citizens’ disagreement, and indignation. They present a social critique of the status quo and struggle for public interests. Post-soviet literature offers an alternative account in which protests are sponsored by the government and/or elites. In this reading, protests are not an expression of genuine grievances and selfless representation of public interests, but are orchestrated interests of a narrow group of people. However, patronage politics is based on the ontic understanding of politics which treat money and power as the main political resources. Following Philipp Aerni’s proposal to introduce public trust as a third political resource, I criticize the regional literature first for mis conceptualizing political economy of instrumentalized protests and second for missing out on the wider implications of such contentious politics for state-society relationships, public attitudes towards politics and power, and even for the group formation on the level of grassroots mobilizations. In Kyrgyzstan, the issue of selflessness became at the core of distrust towards protesters who claim to act on behalf of the selfless social. Based on ethnographic research of various protest movements (rural, labor, and urban), the paper investigates the nature of collective action in times of crisis of credibility. The study looks at the process of erosion of distinction between social contention and the politics as usual, and how protests became its continuation through the loss of authenticity.