Abstract
The present article seeks to shed light on the short-term and long-term socioeconomic repercussions stemming from COVID-19 outbreak in Kyrgyzstan. Among other things, the work demonstrates that what seemed, at the outset, a health crisis of epidemiological nature, turned in fact into a wide-scale crisis with extensive, far-reaching sociopolitical and economic effects. In this regard, the current article attempts to examine on how COVID-19 exposed a series of vulnerabilities present in Kyrgyzstan such as endemic corruption, deficit of government accountability as well as intractable economic problems which all resulted, the work argues, in a collective movement of masses that triggered the October 2020 uprising in the country. Furthermore, while various written works deployed different approaches in describing the October 2020 upheaval, the current article seeks to highlight what has been either absent or little accounted for in explaining the 2020 uprising—the role of COVID-19 as well as the profound impact stemming from the crisis within the social, economic and political fields in Kyrgyzstan.
This research was supported by a Marie Curie Research and Innovation Staff Exchange scheme within the H2020 Programme (grant acronym: New Markets, no: 824027).
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Notes
- 1.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYS8PUTuREE a Kyrgyz hip-hop song. Translation from Kyrgyz by the authors. Reference is provided by Florian Coppenrath, PhD student at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), Berlin, Germany.
- 2.
About movement and for more details, see: https://fergana.agency/articles/121106/.
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Bruley, J., Mamadiiarov, I. (2022). Contamination, Cohesion and Coercion: Essay on the COVID-19 Pandemic and the Revolution in Kyrgyzstan (2020–2021). In: Caron, JF., Thibault, H. (eds) Central Asia and the Covid-19 Pandemic. The Steppe and Beyond: Studies on Central Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7586-7_6
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