ABSTRACT
Kyrgyzstan is often characterized as a “failing” or “failed” state, revealing conflict potential for further disintegration along territorial and clan lines. In 1990, social and economic development in the Kyrgyz SSR was not sufficient to meet the challenge of increased rural migration into the cities, causing social deprivation. Against such a background of a collapsing economy and social deprivation, ethnic diversity was exploited to divide rather than consolidate several communities living in the country, and bloody clashes occurred among Uzbek, Kyrgyz and Slavic populations living in the south of the republic, specifically in Osh and its surrounding territories. Despite a number of pessimistic prognoses, further escalation of ethnic conflict did not take place, although the drastic systemic change that came with the USSR's disintegration and dismantling of socialism in December 1991 caused disorientation and apathy among the people, and the socio-economic ground for conflict escalation remained acute and even deepened throughout the 1990s. Against this background and the sharp competition for resources, institutional voids and coup d'états became typical for Kyrgyzstan's political life in the first decade of the new millennium. In June 2010, violence again erupted in the cities of Osh, Jalalabad and Bishkek. Ethnicization of the conflict was encouraged by major input from various international and local media agents, who suggested that ethnic differentiation had been the main cause of the conflict. 2 The subsequent alarming predictions of a further increase in bloody clashes “on an ethnic basis” proved to be baseless, as the legitimizing process of the new government went ahead peacefully. However, the large of number of deaths and victims and the brutality of the conflict deepened polarization between the Uzbek and the Kyrgyz, the two major groups in Osh, and increased the probabilities of the continuously discussed and imagined disintegration of the country. In people's narratives, the massacre of June 2010 is imaged as the “war” and is often dangerously justified by one side of the conflict against the other as a struggle for social space. 3 As long as three specific conditions continue to exist in Kyrgyzstan, the possibilities for further escalation of the conflict remain acute: (1) Kyrgyzstan's current situation in the middle of a complex multi-level competition among various global, trans-regional and trans-local actors, (2) persistence of social polarization and deprivation and (3) the reproduction of memories of the “war”.
