Illegal settlements and city registration in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan: Implications for legal empowerment, politics and ethnic tensions

This paper examines the scale and significance of illegal and unregistered residents in

major cities in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, and then considers the implications for the

strategy of legal empowerment of the poor. In the context of a shortage of urban housing,

a fragile rural economy, an expanding urban population, and weak state capacity, land

seizures and sales of illegal land plots have been seen as an economic necessity for many

years and are likely to continue until structural conditions are addressed. City administrations

have started to legalize settlements partly to defuse political and social tensions, and

partly to respond to a depressed property market. Illegal and new settlements lack adequate

physical and social infrastructure, making residents angry and frustrated and prompting

them to block roads and to demonstrate outside government offices.Most poor internal

migrants live in cramped and sparse housing conditions and have often responded by

seizing farm land to raise their families. The negative results of these seizures are compounded

by the fact that land often belongs to richer minority ethnic groups, resulting in

an increase of ethnic tensions and clashes mostly in Kyrgyzstan. City administrations do

not have the capacity to meet the protesters’ aspirational needs, often resorting to rhetorical

promises to placate them. Empty rhetoric, however, has often only fuelled a cycle of

further anger, resentment, distrust, and protests. Illegal and poor migrants also use the

political opportunity of elections to extract promissory concessions from elected officials