By Scott Abel, researcher from the Estonian Business School
I am Scott Abel, a PhD student and lecturer at the Estonian Business. I had just arrived in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, in November 2024 for my secondment at the OSCE Academy, and the taxi that picked me off at the airport had just dropped me off at the flat I had rented for my month’s stay about a block away from the university.
It turned out that my first taste of corruption in Central Asia for the MOCCA project wasn’t going to be theoretical.
Although I had booked my flat through Booking.com and was supposed to have my credit card billed, my landlord, a Russian, demanded cash in broken English instead for the month’s payment. He seemed surprised that I thought it would be taken by Booking.com instead. Fighting jet lag after a 12-hour door-to-door flight overnight from Tallinn I finally convinced him to give me a day, and I would pay him the rent in cash.
I should have gone to a bank, but not knowing my way around, I instead drained an ATM with multiple withdrawals to get the correct amount of Kyrgyzstani som. However, the largest note was 1,000 som out of the machine (1 euro is about 90 som), so the stack of bills for the rent took two hands to hold onto.
This became an issue when the landlord returned the next night. I had sent him an agreement by email that I typed up stating that I had paid him the agreed amount, converted with the official exchange rate. Not only had he not read it, but he showed up drunk and, with that, had lost any ability to speak English. So we carried on a terse conversation on my phone through Google Translate. He signed the document, and I counted the cash out in front of him. He then wanted to count it himself, but he couldn’t do the math in his current state. Then, after trying several times and giving up, he then wanted to question the exchange rate on the document he had already signed.
At some point, as the landlord, who had the body of a basketball player and at least 10 centimeters on me, got more agitated, I slipped a kitchen knife into my back pocket, as I was getting very concerned that this meeting would go sideways.
But all of a sudden, he decided it wasn’t worth it anymore and departed. So, in the end, it worked out, with just a little stress and drama added on for me so he didn’t have to pay a 10% state tax. I did shut off my credit card as a precaution, however, and made sure that was the last time I saw him during my month’s stay.
My intent in my research project was to essentially duplicate a study that I had just finished in Estonia, where I interviewed a couple of dozen veteran journalists and managing editors at local media houses about how they think about their profession. The questions I asked were built on a hierarchy of topics, from micro (individual perspectives) to macro (the legal and ideological underpinnings of media practice), and the result ended up collecting an enormous amount on their perceptions of corruption and how to combat it. After figuring out the process in my Estonian study, I thought it would be a good way to approach the topic in Bishkek.
But as the American boxer Mike Tyson once famously said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”
Initially, I couldn’t get anyone to talk to me. With Estonian journalists, that was no problem. However, in Kyrgyzstan, several journalists and society activists had been jailed by the government in the months leading up to my secondment, and the journalists I reached out to didn’t respond to my inquiries.
By the end of my second week, I was seriously concerned I would be leaving the country without any research being done, so I started to re-evaluate my approach. Before coming to Kyrgyzstan, I had looked at a research article where the author had gone to the Ashgabat market in Turkmenistan and interviewed vendors about their day-to-day encounters with corrupt officials and police. I thought that was a very elegant way of getting around governmental restrictions.
So, I started looking for my own local advantages, and I found them first at the OSCE Academy. The school is more than 20 years old and has students from all over Central Asia and beyond for its programs in economics, politics and security, and human rights. In my first couple of weeks, I participated in a couple of the courses, met some of the students, and started formulating an alternative research agenda.
Instead, I decided to work with what I had, which was a collection of Gen Z-aged students that I could interact with face-to-face. I started asking a few of them for interviews about what kinds of corruption they have faced in their lives in their home countries, from education, governmental administration, the private sector, and even in sectors like sports. Once I got rolling, I was able to expand to other local universities (there are between 20 and 40 institutes of higher learning in the city, depending on your criteria, and several major ones within easy walking distance of the Academy). Once I had done a few interviews, snowball sampling, where you get interviewees to recommend other people, had me doing multiple interviews a day lasting between an hour and 90 minutes each.
But in week three, I caught a lucky break on my original concept with Kyrgyzstani journalists. The OSCE Academy held a two-day Security Conference in December, and the friendly and gregarious interim director of the Academy, Pal Dunay, asked me to moderate a panel on cybersecurity. After the panel session was over, two local journalists who were in attendance introduced themselves and chatted me up. After consenting to be interviewed, they introduced me to others, so my final week was full of meetings with local media figures.
When I left in late December, I had been able to gather roughly half of the interviews that I needed for the study I intended (which I still want to complete this year), and all the interviews I need for the study that I came up with on the fly.
What did I learn that I wish I had known going in my experience? When using people as your source of data in Central Asia, it’s paramount that you describe in detail how you are going to use their data and how it will be reported upfront. Most would generally talk about their country and their hometown, but some, for example, from Turkmenistan, were in real fear of anything they said blowing back on them or their families back home, so I drew up a contract that stated specifically how the data would be used (for example, a transcript would be created from a voice recording, and then the audio would be erased; no personal demographic information, like age or sex, would be collected). In my case, I didn’t even write down their names and gave them anonymity aside from an interview number.
Second, I never got an interview with either of my target topics only through email, but only with personal interaction and referrals. Assuaging their concerns about privacy and having others vouch for my process was the only way for my interpersonal research process to succeed.
In a broader context, the sooner you figure out transport, the more efficiently you can use your time in Bishkek. Google Maps is useless there; 2GIS is the standard, and once you have that you can use the bus system efficiently. Yandex is the standard taxi app, but it was blocked on my phone, but there is an alternative called inDrive, in which you submit bids for a ride, and once I had that, that opened up the city for me. Azamat Satarov in the main office was my go-to person in addressing my tech problems, and Aiganysh Niyazalieva answered all of my other ones about the town, and helped me get set up in the Academy.
The one regret I have is the time of year I went. Kyrgyzstan is a lovely, mountainous country, and Bishkek sits at the base of the Kyrgz Ala-Too range. However, during the winter months, the combination of low-octane petrol, coal burning, and a lack of wind circulation at the base of the range can make the air pollution terrible. Even though the mountains are only a few kilometers away, on bad days, I simply couldn’t see them, and the stench was … something. On my last day, Bishkek had the worst air quality of any city in the world. I hope to go again soon, but it won’t be in winter.
The best part of my secondment was parachuting as a stranger into a strange land, and thrusting myself into a situation where I had to adjust my tactics to make my strategies work. The OSCE Academy personnel were gracious hosts, and the students I got to know were some of the best the countries of Central Asia have to offer. I hope some of you reading this choose this option for your secondment. Please feel free to drop me an email at the Estonian Business School if you’d like me to answer your own questions.