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.