Gulnara Ibraeva, Anara Moldosheva
Male political unconsciousness and the future of nationalism in Kyrgyzstan
a) Main theme/problem
The background to this article begins with the anonymous placing of video materials on UTube during 2012, showing violent acts against Kyrgyz women migrants in Russia. In the
video groups of male vigilantes torture a female victim, demanding an answer as to why she is
“bringing shame on the nation” and engaging in prostitution with men of another nationality.
The pleas of their victim to trust her innocence and virtue have no effect. The men force their
victims to make a “confession of guilt and repentance” for what they have done and turn their
passport towards the video camera, showing their name and home address in Kyrgyzstan. An
important detail: the victims are always naked and this fact is emphasized in the videos, all
attempts by the women to cover their face from the camera leading to further blows being
inflicted on them.
Investigations by journalists from Radio “Azattyk” showed that similar violent acts have
happened before and that the video itself appeared on social networks back in 2011, indeed,
staff at the Kyrgyzstan Consulate in Moscow had been sent it by mobile phone. However,
public discussion of the case only began when Russian human rights activists made a court
application in which the “patriots” were described as an extremist organized criminal group.
Media comment in Kyrgyzstan used very different terms, focusing on gender (men and
women), nationality (Kyrgyz and other nationalities), religion (true Muslims and others), and
sexual norms (fallen or corrupted women versus wise women) and “justice”.
The analysis of gaps the scenes of violence shown in the video and the content of the
discussion about it, between the information by official and the public, between the intense
interest shown at the start of the discussion and the speed with which interest in the
perpetrators of violence disappeared from sight – all this spurred the authors of the article to
ask the following questions:

Why did media discourse not go beyond the topics of patriotism and national pride in
discussing these acts of violence? How was it possible to give an ethically positive assessment
of “perverted justice” and the criminals who committed it, when one considers that it was
carried out against female compatriots (whom the traditional nationalist project usually
“protects”)?

What led criminal groups of male migrants from Kyrgyzstan to claim the symbolic status of
national patriots? What kind of phenomenon do these radical groups represent?

What political significance and impact do video materials showing violence against female
migrants have?
b) Methodology
The article uses critical discourse analysis to examine media materials around the case and
tries to analyze mechanisms of violent group radicalization as an instance of political
collective male unconsciousness, interpreted as a structured illogicality of acts by groups of
men carrying out symbolic acts of struggle for the purity of the nation.
c) Results of research
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Organized groups of violent men are the consequence of social mythmaking by politicians in
the post-April 2010 interim government who created a symbolic aura around participants in
the violent seizure of power which they called a “revolution”, and of the political nationalism
project visible in the interethnic conflict in June 2010 in the south of Kyrgyzstan.
Groups of young men who gained the symbolic status of protectors of the nation and real
Kyrgyz patriots and victors for acts of violence and vandalism committed in April and June
2010, but who have been found excess to requirements in the local labour market and forced
into migration, have found a way to enhance their “patriotic” status in criminal activity in
Russia. In essence, this is a political collective unconsciousness produced by the nationalist
imagination.
The faces of the “patriots” in the video film are not seen. This may perhaps be understood not
just as an attempt to avoid justice, but rather to enhance the symbolic figure of the heropatriot. The victims should shake in fear at the mention of them, for the patriots number in
hundreds.
The fact that criminals stripped their victims and showed them naked on film signifies their
“othering” or removal outside the nation, as a dangerous and hostile element that patriots must
destroy.
Violent acts of this kind reflect a general trend to form a negative image of women migrants
as offending against cultural norms and traditional codes of behaviour. The choice of female
migrants is no accident: for all the difficulties of life outside one’s home country, it does offer
many women and girls from patriarchal communities the chance for some personal
emancipation, leading to the development of subjectivity, independence and economic and
cultural autonomy.
There is a risk that men's collective unconsciousness as violent “patriots” could grow into a
political-religious-nation building project.
d) Contribution to the literature
The concept of political unconsciousness proposed by Frederic Jameson is limited to the
analysis of written texts viewed as “socially symbolic acts”. The analysis offered in this
article focuses on a discourse analysis of “perverted justice” perpetrated by an oppressed mass
of men without voice. The attempt to bring together the problematic of power and oppression,
the violence and masculinity in the narrative of nation-building, and the ideological
conditionality of consciousness are all pioneering to a large degree.
The analysis of nation-building processes in contemporary Central Asia in the context of
gender violence is also a significant contribution in regional studies.
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