Paper abstract:

This research aims to examine how social media activists, namely bloggers operating on social media platforms, use art and humour to engage in social engineering and democratisation processes in the context of authoritarian regimes. A particular emphasis will be placed on exploring how bloggers operating in authoritarian contexts utilise art and humour on various social media platforms to avoid and bypass tight government control and unofficial censorship and to criticise government inadequacies and inefficiencies, namely, corruption and kleptocratic practices. The research project is timely given that the world is witnessing a crisis of democracy, observed by policymakers and scholars. However, grassroots strategies challenging authoritarian polities are also proliferating. Given these global tendencies, there is a need to produce a more in-depth, nuanced, and contextualized understanding of how grassroots civil society actors and institutions creatively respond to restrictions imposed by authoritarian regimes by utilizing less politically salient but socially penetrative tools (e.g., digital art and humor) that have the potential to redefine state-society relations and democratization processes in the long run. These processes will be empirically investigated in the context of Uzbekistan, an authoritarian regime in a post-Soviet context that is currently transitioning from a heavily repressive to a softer form of authoritarianism.