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.