Abstract
From a Mongolian ‘super mine’ to China’s One Belt One Road, rapid infrastructural development is reforging Central Asia as an economic pivot of the future. Such development offers enticing economic benefits, but threatens fragile environments and local livelihoods. Due to the weakness of the state, the emphasis will be on citizens to hold developers accountable to their social and environmental pledges. Reports of political elites influencing the demands of popular protests call into question the ability of citizens to fulfil this function. This paper examines protest authenticity in Kyrgyzstan, focusing on an environmental social movement against Kumtor gold mine. We trace the emergence and evolution of the social movement, identifying the flexible discursive and scalar strategies it uses to achieve emphasis of the local level and relevance on the national scale. The discussion focuses on how national political saliency may incentivise elite involvement with social movements. This involvement can mask the local demands of the social movement, fixing the environmental problem as a national issue. It is crucial to understand the scalar dynamics of elite-protest interaction if Central Asian civil society is to hold future infrastructural developments to account.
Highlights
In 1904, Halford Mackinder identified Central Asia as the geographic “pivot of history” [1](p. 1)
Local social movements are often trapped in a scalar bind; they must choose between emphasising local demands or appealing to national or global sympathies
Tracing the trajectory of anti-Kumtor protests in Kyrgyzstan shows that environmental activists often engage with both of these framings, relating to theories that social movements must simultaneously legitimise the local level as the ‘scale of meaning’ while scale-jumping local claims to supralocal relevance through advocacy networks
Summary
In 1904, Halford Mackinder identified Central Asia as the geographic “pivot of history” [1]. Scholars have identified infrastructure as a tool of nation-building [4,13,14], a question of sovereignty [15,16,17] and a source of rent-seeking [18] From this state-centric viewpoint, the emergence of environmental social movements opposing infrastructural developments in Central Asia occurs due to the absence of the state. The contrast between the financial strength of foreign investors and the perceived weakness of the state can lead to questions of sovereignty, with the potential to trigger social movements demanding resource nationalisation [15] In these theoretical discourses, the local scale is subordinate to the national scale, with local people’s actions dictated by political elites. The majority of the academic literature suggests that these local and scale-jumping strategies are complementary [25,26], but this paper will argue that once social movements scale-jump to the national level they are more vulnerable to being co-opted by national actors to achieve alternate political ends
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