ABSTRACT
My study of Central Asia’s crisis communication is rounded off by Chapter 5, which studies the repertoires of disinformation and repression implemented in Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan to ensure the solidity of Central Asia’s information flows at the time of COVID-19. In this chapter, I argue that the data component of Central Asia’s crisis communication frameworks came to be systematically manipulated by the three regimes in question. This argument challenges empirically the reliability of Central Asia’s COVID-19 data—infections, hospitalisations, deaths, and vaccination rates—probing the link between public health and disinformation. The chapter also catalogues and contextualises the instances of repression whereby Central Asia’s regimes silenced independent media operators, health personnel, and everyday citizens who disseminated information diverging from the official line or challenged the statistical picture of the pandemic painted by the three governments in question. In this sense, I demonstrate here that emergency politics presented Central Asia’s authoritarian regimes with a premium opportunity to settle scores with long-term opponents operating in the media sector, while eroding further the freedom of expression of everyday Central Asians.
