Asel Doolotkeldieva

Asel received her PhD in Politics from the University of Exeter (UK) and her MA in Political Sociology from Sciences Po Paris (France). Asel is a critical political scientist and political sociologist whose work sits at the intersection of political theory, sociology and political ethnography. She previously served as a Senior Lecturer at the OSCE Academy in Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan) and a Nonresidential Fellow of George Washington University, based in Almaty, Kazakhstan. She studies populist mobilizations and revolutionary praxis in authoritarian contexts in conversation with discourses and practices of democracy, equality and social justice. Asel wrote extensively on regime transformations, contemporary popular uprisings, social protests and anti-neoliberal resistance with an empirical focus on Central Asia. Asel’s current research project proposes to investigate a relational production of authoritarian neoliberal spaces away from binary frames employed in conventional approaches. The project identifies the historical trajectories of authoritarian neoliberal regimes in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan and examines different societal reactions to them, which range from “grassroots” populism and anti-neoliberal resistance, to depoliticization among other. It seeks to draw attention to subjective experience-making in late authoritarian neoliberalism and salience of societal participation in the emergence and transformation of authoritarian “social contracts.”