Research Update

My mother suggested that I post an update on how my research is going. Perhaps she thinks that I am not working hard enough, or wanted to distract me from complaining about my living conditions. In any case...

For those of you who don't know, I am working on a dissertation on political protests in non-democratic regimes. In particular, I am interested in how these regimes respond to protests, what laws are in place regarding mass demonstrations, when protests are allowed to occur, etc. And I'm looking at this question in 3 post-Soviet countries: Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Belarus.

In a nutshell, research is going well. It was slow to start off, because it took a while to identify who I might want to interview, how to contact them, and what institutes and libraries are available. I have made a lot of progress on that front. Last week, I had four interviews with journalists, people involved in protest issues, people who know people, etc. And they all gave me the names and numbers of other people to contact. So by Friday afternoon, I was reading the newspaper and realized that I have the cell phone numbers of several important people they were quoting. Score one for Jody. I also attended a press conference/round table on the subject of fraudulent contractors. Last year, hundreds of people invested money in the construction of new apartment buildings (and for new apartments) that never ended up being built. It has been a major issue in Kazakhstan recently and the subject of several protests. The meeting was attended by some of the defrauded investors, lawyers, representatives of the government, some of the investment agencies, and members of the press. It didn't resolve anything, but was interesting no less. They ran out of extra seats, so I sat in the place reserved for the tax police. I was a bit worried about doing that, because no one wants to get on the bad side of the tax police, but luckily they never showed up.

This week I plan to do more of the same. I will call the people who were suggested to me in last week's interviews and try to set up meetings. I also want to hit up the National Library and to see what types of resources they have. And in the meantime, I am doing background research (online, newspapers, etc) to get more information on the protests and issues that have been mentioned to me as important. I am still trying to track down the key people for my research (government officials, protest organizers) but I am getting closer to them and should be able to pinpoint and contact them within another week or two.