Student online protests in Uzbekistan: democratization of higher education as concomitant to the COVID-19 crisis?

ABSTRACT

The democratization of higher education (HE) has been interpreted from various perspectives in many country-specific case studies. Yet, it has been overlooked that in authoritarian regimes the democratization of HE may involve the development of freedom of expression, an element taken for granted in democratic societies. Growing research on the implications of COVID-19 on HE fails to cover the emergence of democratization of HE in the form of freedom of expression practiced by university students. This research examines post-Soviet Uzbekistan to analyse how the practising of freedom of expression emerged among the student body during the pandemic era in the country and how the Uzbek government responded to and resolved the matter. Based on this case, it is argued that in authoritarian states the HE democratization framework can include the development of freedom of expression in the form of student protests that, in this article’s case, emerge as concomitant to the pandemic.

KEYWORDS:

• higher education
• democratization
• student online protests
• implications of pandemic
• Uzbekistan

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the editor of the journal for their valuable comments on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 For the purpose of this paper, freedom of expression is the right of people to freely express their opinions as well as engaging in peaceful protests to ‘agree or disagree with those on power’ (Amnesty International 2020).

2 In his recent speech, President Mirziyoyev mentioned that the efforts of his government ‘to liberalise media and press, to deepen the principles of openness and transparency … have become irreversible’ (Xalq so’zi 2020).

3 Though official narratives encouraged local journalists to bring up critical issues in the society, not all topics were open for such coverage and criticism (Putz 2018).

4 The critical news on the low quality of distance education and lack of infrastructure in the Uzbek HE system to suddenly transition to online learning came only from anonymous students and were spread by independent bloggers. Those students have been cautious to identify the exact university they were referring too. They did not name any particular HE institution due to fear of consequences they might face in their HE institution. No official media covered the issues of this nature in HE institutions.

5 The first and the only non-online student protest took place once in 1992 in the student town of Tashkent. The student-protesters were forced to stop by the military; several students were injured. Many students studying in the capital were sent back to their hometowns. The protests were framed as the works of ‘dark forces’ who used the naïve student body to achieve their goal of bringing down the regime (for further details, see BBC Uzbek 2016). After the 1992 student movement there were no peaceful or other student protests in the country.

6 The ministry’s Telegram channel is the only place where some official data on the country’s HE can be found. For example, the existence and number of private HE institutions are mentioned only on the official channel of the MHSSE.

7 For the use of HE as nation-building tool, see Luckett (2016), Chowdhury (2017) and Dedze and Rubene (2016).

8 For the practices of teacher and senior superiority in educational settings in Uzbekistan, see Schmoller (2017).

9 Eduuz_online, the official Telegram channel for online learning for HE institution students in Uzbekistan, was created on 19 March 2020. Retrieved March 20, 2020, from https://web.telegram.org/#/im?p=@eduuz_online.

10 After the raised matter was resolved, many of those groups were closed. However, a large Telegram channel under the name of ‘Talabalar Kanali’ with more than 108,000 members has the same logo that the student movements channels had. This channel does not engage in critical discussion of HE matters as did the channels discussed in this paper.

11 The name of the blogger is intentionally not mentioned for privacy purposes.

12 ‘Iron book’ refers to the list of families in need of financial and social assistance.

13 4 million so'm = approximately US$400.