Sideways Concessions: Protest and Resource Management in Central Asia

• In Event: Politics of Natural Resources in Developing Countries

Abstract

Sideways concessions are policy accommodations, unrelated to the demands of a protest, that nonetheless demobilize potential protesters and make them harder for activists to recruit. For example, decreasing the price of state-owned utilities could be used as a sideways concession to protests over labor reforms. By lowering overall levels of grievance among possible joiners of a protest, sideways concessions decrease their mobilization potential and make it more costly, in terms of time and effort, for protest activists to recruit them to join the ongoing movement. This can significantly slow the growth of protests at the aggregate level and help deescalate volatile situations. Furthermore, sideways concessions are attractive because their indirect nature helps avoid the potential escalatory effects of both conventional (direct) concessions and repression.

Despite their potential impact, sideways concessions are easy to overlook because they are, by definition, unrelated to the issues being protested about. However, potential sideways concessions share certain characteristics: they benefit possible joiners of the ongoing protest, are quick and easy to implement and, in many instances, are flexible enough that they can be turned off after the threat of mobilization dissipates. Focusing on policies with these characteristics makes it easier to identify sideways concessions in practice.

This article develops the concept of sideways concessions theoretically and illustrates how they are used in practice. To do so, I use the case of international resource management in Central Asia in the 2000s. During this period, the Central Asian countries cycled between cooperation and noncooperation over this issue with remarkable frequency. This presents a puzzle: why would countries keep signing cooperative agreements if they did not expect them to last? An important reason, is that transitioning to cooperative resource management was an effective way to grant sideways concessions to protest, even if the cooperation did not last in the long-term. Using original data on the occurrence of protest and the relationships between the Central Asian countries on the issue of water and energy management, I find that transitioning to cooperative management was more likely when doing so benefited protesting regions; that is, when it was effective as a sideways concession. In contrast, when protests occurred in regions that did not benefit from cooperation, signing an agreement was not an effective sideways concession and the likelihood of it occurring decreased.

Author

• Sarah Hummel, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign