Kyrgyzstan is a country now marked by the “broader Central Asian trend of authoritarian consolidation”, according to the newly released Freedom House report Nations in Transit: A Region Reordered by Autocracy and Democracy. The country, like big neighbour Kazakhstan, previously scored on the less repressive end of the authoritarian range, but “the regimes in these two countries worked to extinguish local autonomy and civil society activity, continuing a broader reduction in opportunities for public dissent”, according to the report. Kyrgyzstan’s populist authoritarian Japarov regime is under f…
