ABSTRACT
This chapter devotes its core attention to defining the praxis of crisis management consolidated in Central Asia before the eruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. To this end, I look at the key dynamics regulating emergency politics in the region before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Intended as a contribution to recent debates in the emerging field of critical disaster studies, the chapter looks initially at how officials in Soviet Central Asia addressed a series of emergency situations, including the earthquakes that destroyed Aşgabat and Tashkent in 1948 and 1966, respectively. Reconstructing the crisis management praxis of the Soviet era is conducive to the operationalisation of the chapter’s second analytical prong, which, in turn, looks at the repertoire of emergency responses more recently framed in Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.
