The Limits and Potential of Authoritarian Adaptiveness in Volatile Political Orders: Elite Learning in Kyrgyzstan

The expansion of global autocracy suggests that authoritarian regimes are learning to become more resilient against democratic challenges. Because of its turbulent history, Kyrgyzstan represents an ideal case for examining whether recent governments have learned from the successes and failures of their predecessors; under what conditions learning takes place; and how to assess whether learning has occurred despite the challenges presented by a non-democratic context. Utilising narrative analysis and fieldwork interviews, this study investigates the limits and potential of regime learning and the challenges of building long-term resilience, finding that a regime’s capacity to survive is curtailed by its volatile politics.