This book is about security and insecurity in Kyrgyzstan. It explores perceptions of existential danger in the country– and the means employed for dealing with them, that is, for surviving. However, the stories and social practices collected here diverge from many other publications on the same issue. As has been frequently argued, security is anything but a straightforward object of inquiry. The threats in question and the ways in which they are engaged are very much a matter of perspective– or, as we argue here, always tied to the particular securityscapes of certain actors. It is for this reason that we can expect to encounter multiple accounts of security and insecurity in any given space. This also holds true for our case of Kyrgyzstan, which is the smallest country in Central Asia. Nevertheless, the vast majority of both popular and scholarly accounts on security in Kyrgyzstan focus on a number of events that construct a fairly limited narrative of what danger is ostensibly all about here. It often evokes, for instance, the ‘Tulip Revolution’ of 2005 and the ‘Rose Revolution’ of 2010– popular uprisings that were provoked by corruption and nepotism among political elites and the resulting poverty of large parts of the population (Ismailbekova, 2018a). It equally foregrounds interethnic animosities. In the summer of 2010, violent clashes between Kyrgyz and Uzbek residents in the southern cities of Osh and Jalalabad left several hundred people dead (Akiner, 2016). Kyrgyzstan's ‘National Security Concept’ from 2012 counts ‘increasing separatist tendencies, interethnic animosities [and] ethno-regionalism’ among the top domestic threats. More recently, the country has also been identified as a breeding ground for Islamic radicalization and violent extremism (Matveeva, 2018). Picking up a book on security in Kyrgyzstan, one can reasonably expect to read about some dangerous mixture of political instability, ethnic tensions and terrorism.

The point of this volume is not to contest or challenge such a viewpoint. In fact, given the empirical material at hand, these threat perceptions appear to be quite warranted. Moreover, the data compiled here certainly concur with the observation that life in Kyrgyzstan can be dangerous indeed. Yet, the argument that we want to make is that this perspective alone sheds only partial light on security and danger in the country.