Paper short abstract:

What power-knowledge distribution determines the Central Asian governments' measures related to COVID-19 and the population's attitude toward them? The paper argues that despite the modernization of these countries, they are dominated by a disciplinary mechanism, but not by a dispositif of security.

Paper long abstract:

Measures taken by governments over the world in relation to COVID-19 is considered by many researchers through the prism of biopolitics. The heuristic potential of this concept has made it possible to analyze the power relations emerging within the pandemic quite effectively. However, attention to the relationship between power and knowledge, to which discourses underpin power relations in this situation, has been rather low. Considering this question as key, I explore what distribution of power and knowledge determines the Central Asian governments' measures taken in connection with COVID-19 and attitudes of the population toward them. Specifically, why have the populations adopted quarantine measures, but, at the same time, a large part of the population has been critical of the need for vaccination? Given the wide range of definitions of biopolitics, I draw on Foucault’s understanding of the term as a form of governance that “is not typical of the legal code or the disciplinary mechanism, but of the apparatus (dispositif) of security” (Foucault 2007: 6). I argue that despite the “modernization” of Central Asian countries, they continue to be dominated by a disciplinary mechanism within a knowledge-power framework rather than a “dispositif of security”. Governments are willing to offer only disciplinary practices that rigidly separate what is allowed and what is forbidden, and the population is willing to accept them. At the same time, both governments and population are critical of security practices built on the idea of aleatory.