Digital Citizen Activism in Central Asia: Beyond Contestation and Cooperation

Abstract

AbstractThe rise of digital activism in the Arab Spring and Euromaidan demonstrated the significance of social media and new technologies in mobilizing civil society activists in authoritarian regimes. Digital citizen activism has also been on the rise in post-Soviet Central Asia, with evidence that the October events in Kyrgyzstan in 2020 and the January riots in Kazakhstan in 2022 were fueled by heightened tension and the mobilization of citizens on social media. This chapter investigates how digital activism evolves and engages with authoritarian states in autocratic post-Soviet Central Asia. It is critical to understand how digital activists negotiate their roles of cooperation, contestation, and legitimation discourse (using the ( Lewis, D. (2013). Civil society and the authoritarian state: cooperation. contestation and discourse. Journal of Civil Society, 9(3), 325–340. https://DOI:10.1080/17448689.2013.818767) framework) in the region's evolving autocracies and whether this leads to democratization.This chapter aims to answer these questions by uncovering the activities of the digital activist communities through in-depth interviews with activists in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. Such a broad selection of cases widens the scope of this chapter and contributes to the understanding of digital citizen activism in non-Western settings. Ultimately, this chapter reveals the limits of digital activism in autocracies and how the authoritarian state manages to impose legitimation discourse on such activism.