How Has Kyrgyzstan’s Civil Society Been Studied? Systematic Literature Review

Senior Research Fellow of GSD-CSI Medet Tiulegenov presents the working paper “How Has Kyrgyzstan’s Civil Society Been Studied? Systematic Literature Review”

This paper reviews how the international scholarly community studied during more than two decades civil society in Kyrgyzstan. It used a systematic literature review attempting to cover comprehensively academic literature. After filtering results from a variety of databases 66 texts in English and Russian languages were analysed. A few themes emerged in this set of texts which appeared following the prominence of social and political developments in the country during the post-Soviet period. Some themes were dominant describing generally what is civil society, or its relations with the state, or in the context of development, others were rarer. Some themes emerged earlier such as the context of democratization, others, such as security context came much later. Among the findings of the review are definitional and conceptual fuzziness as well as insufficient contextualization of the notion of civil society. Also, there is a thematic and methodological gap between papers in English and Russian languages.