The Rumi Forum presented "The Hijacking of a Government and the Collapse of a Society: The Kyrgyz Protests and Violence of 2010" with Kevin DeWitt Jones.

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This presentation analyzes the dynamics which led to the 2010 overthrow of the Kyrgyz President, explains how these protests differed from the 2005 events and examines the process and causes of the subsequent ethnic protests and killings. The talk will also discuss the international communities response and what it may mean for U.S., Russia or EU strategy in the region.

Dr. Kevin D. Jones is an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University and a Research Scholar at the Center for International Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM). He has been a Non-Resident Fellow at the Brookings Institution, an IREX Fellow in Central Asia and a Guest Fellow at the Moscow office of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Dr. Jones has experience in researching, implementing and managing projects on civil conflict, crisis response, political transition, and economic development throughout the United States, Central Asia, Caucasus, Russia, and Ukraine. The majority of his research and publications have examined the key components and dynamics of civil violence in order to effectively prevent and respond to violent conflict.
Dr. Jones is an expert on Central Asia and specifically Kyrgyzstan. He lived in Kyrgyzstan for almost five years working with Peace Corps and USAID and is working on a book tentatively titled “The Dynamics of Political Protests” about the 2005 Kyrgyzstan Tulip Revolution.

Barbara Junisbai, a Title VIII-Supported Research Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center's Kennan Institute, is studying elite-led political opposition movements in the post-Soviet autocracies. She has has spent more than five years studying and working in Central Asia, most recently in 2007-2008, when she conducted two years of fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.