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Paper abstract:

Universities are generally called after the town or city in which they were founded. This pattern reflects the development in Europe of communities of teachers and scholars, often monks, that sought to share resources and exchange ideas by collecting in a particular location from the 11th century onwards. Since then, universities have become more like businesses than monasteries and have sought to create ‘markets’ in their own countries and internationally. Indeed, the range of methods for their expansion reflects those adopted by commercial organisations, including franchising, branding and expansion. In this article, the methods used to create universities with foreign origins are examined in the context of post-Soviet Central Asia. It looks, in particular, at how the processes of expansion are reflected in the adoption of ethical research framework.

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Paper abstract:

Until recently, the Kyrgyz Republic was rated as “partly free” by Freedom House (2020) and in comparison to other Central Asian republics, it was considered a relatively democratic country with moderate level of civil liberties and political rights. Due to volatile nature of Kyrgyzstan’s domestic politics, the studies on political developments in this nation tend to examine the manifestation of certain aspects of democracy in the functioning of institutions and in organization of political processes (Fumagali 2021, Schmitz 2021, Montgomery 2021, Somfalvy 2021). However, there is no significant literature on public perception of democracy and the level of civic engagement in Kyrgyzstan. The Freedom House report, for instance, evaluates different indicators of democracy such as political pluralism, civil liberties, and electoral process etc, but due to its methodological approach, this study does not tell how people participate in political processes and how they personally perceive the concept of democracy.

This research addresses the existing gap in the literature by examining the public attitude toward democracy and the level of civic engagement. The study is guided by the question of how the society in Kyrgyzstan perceives democracy and how people participate in political processes. The study is based on nationwide survey (N=1650) carried out between 2019-2022, which examines public attitude toward various dimensions of democracy to learn the degree of civic engagement, and perception of democratic values and its aspects. The results The preliminary findings demonstrate that the majority of people have distorted or incomplete knowledge about democracy as a concept and have little understanding about mechanisms of civic participation. The empirical findings of this study will make several contributions to understanding the issue of how democracy is perceived by the public – whether and how people understand or support various aspects of democracy, and how people actually participate in democratic processes in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan.

Literature cited

Fumagalli, M. (2021). Challenges amid Kyrgyzstan’s return to presidential politics. East Asia Forum (ANU).

Schmitz, A. (2021). Revolution Again in Kyrgyzstan: Forward to the Past? Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik. doi:10.18449/2021C08.

Montgomery, D. W. (2021). Building Pluralism in Central Asia: Outlining an Experiential Approach in Kyrgyzstan. The Review of Faith & International Affairs, 2021, Volume 19, Number 4, Page 98. DOI: 10.1080/15570274.2021.1989823.

Somfalvy, E. (2021). The Challenges to De-localising Constituencies through Electoral Reform in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Europe-Asia Studies, 73:3, 533 558, DOI: 10.1080/09668136.2020.1840518

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Paper abstract:

A human rights lawyer reads testimonies of state violence and abuse with a certain focus. She looks for elements that meet legally defined criteria for violations of laws and international conventions. A psychologist looks for other elements. A journalist or an activist for other again. From the view of an anthropologist testimonies are stories about places that have been a part of the interlocutor's life that entail rich details about the environment and how this person experienced it. It can be a very thick description of a place not or no longer accessible to the researcher. This is the case for the Uyghur and Kazakh testimonies about incarcerations in the vast camp system of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region between 2017–2020 that I have collected over the last three years. The interviews with camp survivors, employees and relatives often lasted several hours a piece and were full of details about interactions and places, about morality and judgement and about meaning and lack thereof – within and without the camps. I am now analysing and reading them as thick descriptions in regard to what they tell us about life in XUAR in the years of 2017-2020 where access was extremely scarce and the lives of minority people in the region changed radically and painfully. This paper presents some of my important findings from the testimonies as well as methodological and epistemological reflections on the process and the development of a Remote Ethnography of XUAR – the latter being a project I have recently received funding for from the European Union.

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Paper abstract:

Patrimonial economic regimes and state capture continue to pose theoretical and analytical challenges both in political economy and area studies. In the political economy literature, both analyses of state-led capitalism and earlier proponents of the ‘developmental state’ model have argued that under certain conditions, a higher level of state control and centralization can be beneficial for economic and political stability. However, these findings are still contested by advocates of liberal policies and remain to be corroborated by in-depth and comparative analyses.

This paper tackles this proposal in the context of Central Asia which, given the significant divergence in economic and political development paths between its five republics, is a key site for further unpacking such dynamics. Focusing on the cases of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, it asks why liberal-democratic reform leads to political conflict and instability in some countries and not in others, and it zooms in on the interplay between economic development and institutional transformation and degradation (and particularly state capture) in effecting such outcomes. In particular, we aim to shed light on how political instability and (violent) conflict can be linked to different economic models and the welfare distributions they produce on the one hand, and the dynamics of institutional frameworks in both formal and informal perspectives, with their varying levels of authoritarianism and state capture, on the other. The paper is based on a mixed-methods approach research combining a (primarily) quantitative political economy perspective with a qualitative approach to capturing the way in which competition and is dealt with by political regimes. [With this analysis, we seek to generate insights that corroborate observations on recent conflicts and political turmoil in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan that stand in contrast with the relative stability exhibited by Uzbekistan recent reform path.]

The ‘state capitalism’-oriented model of Uzbekistan, initially one of the most authoritarian regimes of the region, brought higher economic growth and prosperity, and more social equality and stability along with it.

Kazakhstan's been more market-oriented and open to Western policies. It's experienced quite significant economic growth, but the split between rich and poor and the level of authoritarianism and state capture have become more pronounced in recent years, leading to numerous protests and discontent among wide groups of population.

The situation of Kyrgyzstan, initially ‘the best student of IMF’ in pushing through the neoliberal reforms, has not significantly improved from high rates of poverty, poor institutions, instability and state capture.