Listening to the Streets?: Government Responses to Protest in Central Asia

• In Event: Poster Session: Comparative Politics of Developing Countries I

Abstract

My research seeks to understand how and why nondemocratic governments in former Soviet Central Asia respond to street protest, and to explore the implications of these findings for our understanding of the relationship between state and society in non-democratic contexts.

Using an innovative Protest Event Analysis (PEA) methodology incorporating data from the Lexis Nexis news aggregator, I am constructing an original dataset of protest events and government responses in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. So far, I have a complete dataset for Kyrgyzstan, 1991-2010.

I have found that protest in Kyrgyzstan was much more frequent than previously recognised. Far from being unusual, mass protest was part of ‘everyday’ politics. Contrary to dominant assumptions, the government frequently responded to protests with concessions and communication, as well as repression and co-optation. Concessions were offered to protests that did not present a significant threat to the regime, posing a particular puzzle for the existing literature.

On the basis of these findings, I hypothesise that protest functioned as a mechanism of communication between state and society, allowing the government to identify and respond to popular demands, thus paradoxically playing a stabilising function, whilst also representing an immediate crisis. This echoes the findings of work on the response to rural protest in mainland China (Lorentzen, 2013; Huerlin, 2016).

On the basis of preliminary research and the literature on protest in China, I expect similar findings for Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan (though with fewer protest incidents overall). My data collection will be complete by Summer 2020.

My findings have important implications for understandings of democratisation in nondemocratic contexts, suggesting that increasing regime responsiveness may serve to stabilise nondemocratic regimes. Developments that are often read as democratisation, including but going beyond responsiveness to protest, may in fact be part of an effective authoritarian survival strategy.

Author

• Katherine Geneya Crofts-Gibbons, King's College London