I’m not arguing that there isn’t a regional divide, and you’re absolutely right that it’s nothing new - not in Kyrgyzstan, and not here in the UK, either. What I am against is this essentialist approach, i.e. “northerners and southerners just don’t get on”, rather than looking at the reasons for tensions and what might be done to address them in “real” terms. Throwing more ideology at people who’ve had a belly-full of ideas and promises is, as you conclude, likely to lead to more unrest, and will also help propagate essentialist reasoning and regional factionalism and government inaction - but then to be fair, unrest puts the brakes on governing anyway in favour of crisis management.

WRT core-periphery dynamics in the USSR, don’t forget that Central Asia was a net beneficiary - one of the reasons the “catapult to independence”, to use Brill Olcott’s phrase, resulted in such catastrophic economic decline.

This dynamic, in my opinion, has escalated as Central Asia, like so many other developing regions, witnesses a mass migration from rural to urban areas. No work, no prospects, no service outside the large cities, and so the cities are inundated with poor people.

A recipe for civil unrest, it seems.

In my view the north-south divide has been hugely overplayed. It’s a convenient primordialist argument that allows people to shrug and say there’s little that can be done as it’s just who people are. If we called it a core-periphery issue, then maybe there’d be a little more focus on economic and infrastructure development issues.

Of course, there’d still be no quick fixes, but getting rid of entirely essentialist arguments might encourage some more practical approaches - even if, as you suggest in your post, for your average Kyrgyz, “The only immediate option visible to me is to vote for that deputy who’ll partially redistribute resources, while fighting for his share of limited resources/power in Parliament.”

Thanks for the comments and for your post.

I’ve posted further on the same issue with some translated material from an informative interview with a French anthropologist on the North-South divide.