Sarah Kendzior is an anthropologist who studies politics and the internet in the former Soviet Union. She has a PhD in cultural anthropology from Washington University in Saint Louis and an MA in Central Eurasian Studies from Indiana University. Her research has been published in many academic journals and media outlets, including American Ethnologist, Central Asian Survey, Demokratizatsiya and the Atlantic. She is currently an instructor at Washington University, where she teaches a course called "The Internet, Politics, and Society." Follow her on Twitter.
Sarah has written 22 articles at Registan.
by Sarah Kendzior
Today on Twitter I was followed by a new account called SodiqlarInfo. This was the Twitter account for the Islamic Jihad Union, a terrorist group originally based out of Uzbekistan who operate the website Sodiqlar. (In Uzbek, sodiq means one who is faithful or devout; -lar is plural.) I thought this was interesting, so I [...]
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by Sarah Kendzior
Imagine this: The three men sit in court, awaiting their verdict. The youngest, a experienced dissident described by the media as a “sultry sex symbol” with “Angelina Jolie lips”, glances at his colleague, an activist praised by the Associated Press for his “pre-Raphaelite looks”. Between them sits a third man, whose lack of glamour has [...]
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by Sarah Kendzior
It’s July in Uzbekistan, and Gulnara Karimova’s camera crew is trampling the city of Bukhara. There’s a man in black running on the roof of the Poi Kaylan mosque, there’s a camera crane staring down a minaret, and in the center of it all is Gulnara, the dictator’s daughter, in a black and white dress, [...]
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by Sarah Kendzior
[NOTE: This is cross-posted from my website, www.sarahkendzior.com, at Nathan's request. The original entry is here.] A lot of people have been asking me about the outbreak of violence in Tajikistan so I decided to put together a list of sources and coverage. The best writer on Tajikistan, in my view, is Christian Bleuer, a Central [...]
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by Sarah Kendzior
On July 23, the website Uznews.net reported that 2000 people had taken to the streets in Andijon, Uzbekistan – the site of a massive May 2005 protest in which the Uzbek government shot to death over 700 people. Uznews claimed that this was the second demonstration in two weeks, and that Andijon authorities were working [...]
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by Sarah Kendzior
Last week Google Translate announced that it now has over 200 million monthly users. As Alexis Madrigal noted in the Atlantic, this means that Google is now translating as much in a day as a human being would in a year – an amount of text equivalent to a million books. Google Translate is far [...]
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by Sarah Kendzior
Uzbekistan’s ban on Wikipedia is censorship as performance art. The ban, enacted late last month, blocks all articles written in Uzbek while leaving articles in other languages accessible. Unlike earlier acts of online censorship, the ban on Uzbek Wikipedia articles does not prevent citizens from accessing political information. On the contrary, it blocks a prime [...]
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by Sarah Kendzior
“In a system of ubiquitous spying,” the philosopher Hannah Arendt once wrote, “everybody may be a police agent and each individual feels himself under constant surveillance.” Arendt was writing about Stalin’s totalitarian regime, but her description is equally apt for authoritarian post-Soviet states like Uzbekistan, whose national security services (SNB) are the literal and figurative [...]
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by Sarah Kendzior
On Thursday, Twitter announced that it would begin to selectively block tweets on a country by country basis. The decision prompted an immediate outcry from free speech advocates as well as a more measured response from scholars of social media, several of whom praised Twitter’s relative transparency while noting that it has no choice but [...]
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by Sarah Kendzior
In 1978, Edward Said defined orientalism as “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” The Muslim world, he argued, is rarely seen as significant and complex in its own right, but derives its significance from its relationship with the West: a comparative framework that guarantees a delusory bias. The Orient [...]
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