ABSTRACT
In this chapter, my investigative gaze expands beyond the boundaries of the Central Asian states. Operationalising a research design that triangulates close engagement with local sources, interviews with key stakeholders, and meticulous data-gathering work, this chapter places its attention on the controversial role that Central Asia has played vis-à-vis the politics of international aid and its uncomfortable positioning within Asia’s complex vaccine diplomacy. Here, I will unveil two mechanisms of authoritarian consolidation pursued through pandemic politics. At first, the chapter explores how complacent international organisations—and the WHO more in particular—steered away from their rule-based mandates while sustaining Central Asia’s pandemic response, validating a series of anti–COVID-19 measures that, locally, became tools of regime consolidation. In turn, the chapter will also demonstrate that the international dimension of the COVID-19 response framed by Central Asian leaders was systematically guided by the region’s well-established logics of kleptocratic governance.
