Thread by @samagreene

(1) If you want to know what's going on in Kazakhstan, read people who are experts on Kazakhstan. For me, this includes a number of excellent scholars and observers, including @CreativeCorazon, @EricaMarat, @joannalillis, @Peter__Leonard, @KassenovaNargis, @SchatzEd. Please add!

(2) People who are experts on other countries -- say, Russia, Ukraine or Belarus -- may have smart and thoughtful things to say, but that doesn't make them experts on Kazakhstan.

(3) Comparisons to other countries -- Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, etc -- can be instructive and enlightening, but they need to be structured in order to be useful. We need to know what we're comparing and why, if we want to use the comparison wisely.

(4) Are we comparing the grievances? The demographic makeup? The institutional context? The police response? Focusing on one thing and saying "This is just like X!" or "This is so different from Y!" will be misleading, if we ignore the rest of the picture.

(5) Protest movements -- especially evidently massive movements like this one -- are extremely complex phenomena. Resist the temptation to simplify them.

(6) The movement already contains multiple constituencies and strands, which means it does not belong to any one of them. Do not assume that any particular group of protesters is somehow representative of the movement as a whole.

(7) Competing Kazakh political & economic sides will try to bend the movement to their benefit and claim leadership. They may even succeed. But if, say, an oligarch supports the movement and rides it to power, that it was his doing from the get go. Or was ever his doing.

(8) Similarly, foreign powers will have their say and their influence. That doesn't mean that this movement is a geopolitical phenomenon. In other words, we should listen to @grudkev

https://twitter.com/grudkev/status/1478720434984128517

(9) Remember, too, that movements change over time. They begin with one thing -- a response to a grievance -- and then develop into something else. The state responds to the street, the street to the state, and on and on.

(10) The reasons people participate on Day 2 of a movement are different than they were on Day 1, because they incorporate the lessons learned on Day 1. And so on. Movements are not linear processes.

(11) The fact that movements are not linear processes means that we cannot extrapolate from where a movement is now to explain its past -- or predict its future.

(12) The non-linear nature of protest movements means that everyone -- the protesters, the state, other governments, the media and us academics -- is flying blind. No one knows what's going to happen, and everyone is learning new things as they go.

(13) Because everyone is flying blind, it's a mistake to rely on assumptions about the various actors' interests and preferences. Uprisings happened because everyone's assumptions turned out to be wrong.

(14) We should focus instead on what the actors appear to be learning -- about the strengths and weaknesses of the other side, and about their opportunities and prospects for survival.

(15) Please be skeptical. In moments like these, information comes through thick and fast. Much of it will be unverifiable, almost all of it will lack the context we need to accurately judge scale and scope, and none of it will convey the real emotions that drive protest.

(16) We need to be analytically humble. At the end of the day, we will learn where this is going together with the people who are making it happen.

/END

Addendum: Always remember to review and edit your tweets before pressing send. Dammit. 🙄