ABSTRACT
The first substantive chapter of the book introduces authoritarian pandemic management, the analytical framework that underpins my study of Central Asia’s pandemic politics. Here, I filter through the analytical lens of non-democratic politics a series of canonical scholarly discourses on crisis management, offering an ad hoc set of guidelines to make sense of state responses to emergencies, crises, and disasters in authoritarian contexts. To this end, I delineate the contours of three areas wherein to unpack this framework: crisis response, crisis communication, and crisis internationalisation. The selection of these three categories, as it will be explained in this chapter, demarcates the analytical milieu with which to scrutinise the authoritarian toolkit surfaced in Central Asia throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
