Dr. Asel Doolotkeldieva is an Associate Researcher at the OSCE Academy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. She earned her PhD from the University of Exeter (UK) in Politics and previously engaged as a Visiting Fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin and the Collège d'études mondiales, FMSH in Paris. Her academic interests include political mobilisations and protests, as well as political economy of resource extraction in Central Asia. Presently, she is leading a research project on protests and mass mobilisations in Central Asia. Her last paper proposes a bottom-up approach to the study of popular mobilisations: The 2020 Violent Change in Government in Kyrgyzstan Amid the Covid-19 Pandemic: Three Distinct Stories in One. In February 2023, she is a visiting researcher at ZOiS as part of the project Central Asia: Connecting Protest Research(ers), which she launched together with ZOiS Central Asia expert Dr. Beate Eschment.