Uzbek president bans teaching of political science

Alec Luhn
Saturday 5 September 2015 22.46 BST

From a political scientist’s perspective, Uzbekistan is almost certainly an authoritarian government: the regime of President Islam Karimov, who has ruled the country since before the breakup of the Soviet Union, has imprisoned critics, held sham elections and each year forces millions of people to pick cotton for the state.

It therefore came as little surprise last week when the government banned the teaching of political science, on the grounds that it is a western pseudo-science that does not take the “Uzbek model” of development into account.

In a decree issued on 24 August and later made public, higher education minister Alisher Vakhabov ordered that the words “political science” be dropped from the name of the last remaining course in the subject widely taught in the country, which will now be called The Theory and Practice of Building a Democratic Society in Uzbekistan. It also required universities to move all literature relating to political science from the “general fund to a special fund”, which means students and academics will need permission to access it.

The order effectively banned political science as an academic subject, according to Farkhad Tolipov, a well-known political scientist who used to teach at the National University of Uzbekistan and now heads an independent education and research institution, Bilim Karvoni, in Tashkent. Tolipov penned an open letter against the decision, which he said resembled the Soviet-era campaign against “pseudo-sciences” including political science, and was made on the recommendation of conservative officials who “have practically no knowledge of this discipline”.

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