Promoting a Stable and Multiethnic Kyrgyzstan: Overcoming the Causes and Legacies of Violence

In June 2010, southern Kyrgyzstan erupted in a series of extremely violent confrontations involving Kyrgyz and Uzbeks groups. Within three days the clashes claimed the lives of at least 400 people, left more than 2,500 injured and created a refugee disaster with 400,000 displaced persons, a large number of which crossed the nearby border to Uzbekistan.

After the violence had subsided, large parts of two key urban centers in southern Kyrgyzstan, Osh and Jalalabad, were left in ruins. The violence came on the heels of the April 2010 overthrow of the government under President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, which installed an interim government headed by Roza Otunbayeva.

The interim government, widely regarded as progressive, succeeded in installing the first parliamentary democracy in post-Soviet Central Asia, but the general situation in the country remains tense, and the key political, economic, and societal challenges that drove the outbreak of violence in June 2010 have yet to be overcome.

Promoting a Stable and Multiethnic Kyrgyzstan: Overcoming the Causes and Legacies of Violence, the third edition of the Occasional Paper Series of the Open Society Central Eurasia Project, looks into causes and legacies of violence in southern Kyrgyzstan and offers recommendations for actions that should be taken by institutions and groups within Kyrgyzstan, neighboring states, and the international community.

View all the papers in this series.

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