Politics of Identity and Ancientizing Kyrgyz State

This article examines how a narrative of 2,200 years of Kyrgyz statehood became part of official nation-building under President Askar Akaev in the early 2000s. The celebrations of 2003 drew on references to the Kyrgyz in ancient Chinese chronicles, but the interpretation of these references as evidence of continuous statehood remains contested. Using presidential documents, historical scholarship and four semi-structured interviews with university historians conducted in Bishkek in summer 2024, the article investigates both the political uses of the anniversary and historians’ differing assessments of the claims on which it rested. The interviews reveal neither uniform endorsement nor a straightforward opposition between official history and independent scholarship. Rather, respondents distinguish, sometimes inconsistently, between the antiquity of an ethnonym, possible forms of early political organisation, ethnic descent and the legitimacy of a modern state. The article argues that historians are not merely observers of state-sponsored nation-building: their interpretations may authorise, qualify or challenge narratives of historical continuity.