‘Awash with weapons’?

The case of small arms proliferation in Kyrgyzstan is a good starting point for assessing the Central Asian discourse of danger. The Small Arms Survey was motivated to do a report on Kyrgyzstan because of often stated conflict potential in the region. Weak state structures, the history of ethnic tensions, inequality and poverty are all factors that in other areas, such as Georgia, have been accompanied by wide-scale proliferation of arms. There are strict rules governing legal possession and number of legally registered arms in civilian possession is low: approximately 15,000 weapons. In order to ascertain public perceptions of small arms in Kyrgyzstan, we designed and implemented household survey, focusing on the South, where political tension and criminality have been high. Trafficking was a particularly interesting topic for us, as there had been much attention directed to arms trafficking in Central Asia. For ordinary Kyrgyz citizens, the arms caches and past arms trafficking have had little impact on their lives.