Navigation as Agency: Women's Activism in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan

How do women's activists in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan navigate the complex political, social and economic environment towards change concerning women's lives?

Central Asian women's activism is increasingly explored across a vibrant body of research. While earlier scholarship tended to emphasise the role of external forces in shaping activism, there has been a turn in the literature toward focusing on activists' agency. Contemporary research moves beyond dichotomies of local and global, traditional and modern, by approaching Central Asian women's activism as a dynamic, contextually responsive process. My thesis expands on the latter body of work, by developing a multi-directional and multi-dimensional understanding of agency as navigation to women's activism.

This piece is based on a reflexive thematic analysis of 36 in-depth interviews conducted in 2021 and 2022.

As a result of the study, I found that in Kyrgyzstan, activists traverse a complex and evolving landscape by: navigating repression whilst maintaining practices of assembly; drawing on community and safe spaces; and engaging with feminist theory, including by fostering Kyrgyz-language feminist discourse. Activists in Tajikistan work through constraining conditions by: drawing on their identity and lived experience; turning to personal and collective relationships; and drawing on cross-border practices. In both countries, women weave together often contradictory narratives of feminism and gender. They shape an orienting framework for navigating a complex context they perceive and experience in diverse, shifting ways.

This study advances theoretical discussions on women's agency and adds a further empirical account to the growing tapestry of narratives on women's activism in Central Asia. In so doing, it responds to the transnational feminist invitation for increased representation and engagement with perspectives on progressing women's rights from regions often marginalised on the global stage. Crucially, this piece highlights activist resilience and adaptability by exploring the strategies of making change in complex and constrained settings. This thesis shows that to navigate a complex context, activists practice in a variety of directions and at many levels, simultaneously pausing at, negotiating and resisting the borders of their space for activism.