Paper short abstract:

Drawing on a database of protest events and government responses to them in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, this paper explores why the regimes sometimes chose to respond to protests with concessions and why protests in Uzbekistan were the most likely to win concessions.

Paper long abstract:

The assumption that nondemocratic governments are unresponsive to protest remains widely held, but rarely investigated. My doctoral research challenges prevailing assumptions through an investigation of the response of Central Asian governments to street protest and seeks to understand why these governments sometimes respond to protest with concessions.

Using Protest Event Analysis (PEA), I have constructed a dataset of protest events and government responses to them in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, between 2015 and 2019. This data generates two key findings. Firstly, protests were sometimes met with concessions in all three cases. Whilst these concessions were almost always minor and never involved significant systemic reform, protestors could secure real, tangible benefits from their governments. Secondly, whilst protest events were less frequent in Uzbekistan, when they did occur, they were substantially more likely to win concessions than protests in either Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan.

My research tests the plausibility of a novel theoretical framework to account for these findings. When responding to protests, governments consider two timeframes simultaneously. In the short term, protests are a potential crisis that need to be brought to an end as quickly as possible, either through repression or the granting of concessions or a combination of the two. In the long term, governments seek to generate and maintain support from both the political elite and the population in general. Concessions can be a means to achieve this whilst open repression risks creating the appearance of incompetence (Guriev and Treisman, 2019).

With a long timeframe, protests can function as a mechanism of communication between state and society, allowing the government to identify and respond to popular demands as part of a long-term survival strategy. I hypothesise that Uzbekistan was more likely to offer concessions because it had fewer alternative information mechanisms. This echoes the findings of work on the response to rural protest in mainland China (Lorentzen, 2013).

Popular mobilisation has the potential to bring down presidents, as it has three times in Kyrgyzstan, but it also presents them with an opportunity to monitor and respond to popular opinion. Protest may thus, somewhat paradoxically, play a stabilising function whilst representing an immediate crisis.