Understanding Conflict and Ethnic Violence in Kyrgyzstan

with Neil Melvin, Director of Program Armed Conflict and Conflict Management, SIPRI

Over the last two decades, Kyrgyzstan has experienced two major outbreaks of violence involving the main ethnic communities in the country: the Kyrgyz and the Uzbeks. These violent incidentshave generally been viewed as ethnic conflicts and much of the response to the violence from thegovernment, local communities, and the international community has been framed within thisunderstanding. At the same time, Kyrgyzstan has also experienced other, less significant violent events and political crises that have often been linked temporally to the “ethnic conflicts”. This suggests that a full understanding of the nature of armed conflict in Kyrgyzstan and the involvement of ethnic communities in violence at a minimum requires a broader examination of the context of the violence. Neil Melvin is director of Program Armed Conflict and Conflict Management at the StockholmInternational Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), and has also worked at a variety of leading policy institutes in Europe.