In the summer of 2011, residents of the Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan were living in the aftermath of the political violence of 2010. The events of the previous year had included the violent removal of the authoritarian regime and an ethnic conflict that irrupted from the political uncertainty that the fall of the regime had elicited. I had previously spent over two years living and working in Kyrgyzstan's capital Bishkek, largely as a lecturer at the American University in Central Asia (AUCA) over most of the period from 2001–05. AUCA is a private university that was launched in 1997 not long after the end of the Soviet Union and situated – until it moved to a new campus in 2015 – in the former building of the republican Soviet (council) in the centre of the capital.

In 2011, having recently been appointed to a senior lectureship and granted a six-month period of academic leave by my UK institution, I returned to study the new settlements surrounding Bishkek. While AUCA was at the centre of the city, the new settlements were at its margins. Residents of the settlements were dismissed as ‘land-grabbers’ by many city dwellers and officials, a familiar refrain to a familiar problem in urban centres throughout the world. They had purchased land from brokers who had occupied public and private land in the aftermath of the 2010 ‘revolution’, but found their right to settle either contested or wholly denied. Such places lacked clear property rights and public goods such as roads, utilities, school provision and access to other basic services.

In my research, I was interested in the many protests that were being undertaken by settlers in order to demand legal recognition of their property rights. The literature of the dominant ‘resource mobilisation’ and ‘political opportunity structure’ approaches suggested that such protests were typically elite-led and, where they took place in unstable political environments of chronically weak states like Kyrgyzstan, tended to turn violent (Tarrow, 2011). Kyrgyzstan's protests, some of which had turned violent and had led to deaths in 2010 in the settlement of Maevka, seems to bear witness to these theoretical propositions (McGlinchey, 2009; Radnitz, 2010). Few specialists on the region dissented from this view (cf Sanghera and Satybaldieva, 2012).