Decolonising Kyrgyzstan: New Debates, New Identities
Dr Erica Marat, November 2026 15:00 GMT Online
-
-
Kyrgyzstan: Central Asia’s Shrinking Space for Media Freedom
This piece was Written by an anonymous contributor The Story of How Kyrgyzstan’s Democratic Oasis Dried Up Over the past six years, Kyrgyzstan’s media landscape has sharply deteriorated. Independent outlets have been shuttered, investigative journalists increasingly labelled extremists, and critics silenced. Human rights groups warn that the country – once seen as Central Asia’s “democratic…
-
Kyrgyzstan and the Future of Tradition
Joe Luc Barnes is an author and journalist writing on the countries of the former Soviet Union Cholpon Melisbekova rests her komuz across her lap, the carved wooden instrument worn smooth by years of practice. “When I was little, in the 2000s, I was embarrassed to carry it with me,” she tells me. “Now I…
-
Kyrgyzstan’s Wild Walnut Woods
Chris Aslan is an author who has lived and worked across Central Asia. In Kyrgyzstan, he lived in the world’s largest natural walnut wood and established a wood-carving workshop. The first time I visit the world’s largest wild walnut wood, I’m struck by how at home I feel, as if this were a woodland somewhere…
-
The silent hand: China in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
James Willsher was until recently co-publisher of the Times of Central Asia, and has lived in Bishkek. I become an acquaintance of an Uighur student in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, a decade ago; he pronounces his ethnic nomenclature as Oi-ghur, not Wee–gerr, as news reports do at the time of Uighur riots taking place in western…
