As March 24 - and with it the first anniversary of the overthrow of the Akaev regime - approaches, the international spotlight is returning to Kyrgyzstan to see what people are thinking about the changes - or lack of them - that have occured over the last 12 months.
The BBC has a collection […]

As Scott Radnitz noted in his December 2005 article published in Central Asian Survey, “Before the was the Tulip Revolution, there was Aksy.”
Today marks the fourth anniversary of the Aksy tragedy that resulted in the death of 6 people in 2002. In the Aksy region of Jalalabad oblast a day of remembrance is […]

Looks like plans to designate March 24 a public holiday as Day of the Peoples’ Revolution may have been a little premature. As Gateza.kg reports today, yesterday the Kyrgyz Parliament voted against including the reading of the law on the celebration of March 24, meaning that as yet, despite the apparent support of the […]

The elusive snow leopard is in danger of becoming even more scarce in Central Asia, with only approximately 7,000 left in the wild, and those mostly in China. While bleak, this figure is in fact an improvement from 1,000, which was the estimated number of snow leopards in the 1960s.

This increase in population […]

Understandably, and inevitably, as March 24 approaches revolution fever is once again running high, both in Kyrgyzstan, and internationally, as the recent crop of conferences and seminars such as this one at LSE on February 28, particularly in the UK and USA, broadly on the theme “Kyrgyzstan’s Tulip Revolution One Year On” testifies to. […]

Looks like the feud between Prime Minister Feliks Kulov and alledged criminal authority Ryspek Akmatbaev, which became very public following the death of Tynchybek Akmatbaev in October and then flared up again after Ryspek was acquitted on several murder charges in January, sparking a public letter from Kulov calling Akmatbaev a danger to the […]

This story’s been rumbling around in Bishkek for a while now and there’s been some interesting debate in Russian language media, so thought a quick look would be in order. Even so, it is worth noting that the issue is, alas, nothing new - as this paper by Nadezhda Romanchuk from 2002 shows. As […]