Nations No Longer in Transit: Tracking Central Asian Democracy Without Data

Rankings consistently listing the states of Central Asia as unfree and authoritarian have rankled the region’s governments for decades. That may be less of a problem in the near term, as one of the most prominent organizations generating rankings on internet freedom and democratic governance in the former Soviet Union, in particular, has shuttered or severely downsized the programs that once produced such reports.

In April, Freedom House – a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization founded in 1941 and funded almost entirely by U.S. government grants – laid out what extreme cuts to U.S. foreign assistance unveiled on the first day of Donald Trump’s second term, would mean for their programing.

The January 20, 2025, Executive Order on Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid, “froze all programs funded by U.S. foreign assistance and ultimately led to the termination of more than 80 percent of Freedom House’s programs and activities in more than 140 countries… As a result, Freedom House has had to lay off a large portion of its staff and end its work on vital projects that were relied upon by policymakers, business leaders, civil society organizations, front-line activists, and the general public.”

Among the programs Freedom House said would be terminated was the annual Nations in Transit (NIT) report.

Launched in 1995 to track democratic governance in Central and Eastern Europe as well as Central Asia – the former Soviet Union – NIT chronicled “both the early successes of liberal democracy and the ongoing struggle against illiberalism, state capture, and authoritarianism,” as Freedom House put it. Although the report’s methodology evolved and expanded over the last 30 years, it tracked democratic health via assessments of electoral processes, civil society, independent media, local governance, judicial frameworks and independence, and corruption in an effort to present a holistic assessment.

“The project’s funding was fully terminated,” the organization’s statement said, “forcing Freedom House to halt production of this crucial research and gravely impairing the organization’s ability to support democratic resilience in some of the world’s most vulnerable and strategically significant countries.”

One of the starkest conclusions one draws from even casually looking through NIT reports, and the program’s color-coded map, is the divide between Central Asia (plus Russia) and Europe. That divide has hardened and reflects what Freedom House termed a “geopolitical reordering.” The most recent – and for now, last – NIT report noted a “calcifying” of the divide between the post-Soviet space’s “transatlantic, prodemocracy bloc” and “a bloc of autocracies that reject liberal democracy.”

Central Asia exists entirely in the latter bloc. In the 2024 NIT report, Freedom House noted that “Russia, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, and Kyrgyzstan’s scores have dropped so far over the last 20 years that many of their scores have reached 1.00, the lowest possible… Many of these countries have little-to-no room to drop lower in our scoring.”

On the one hand, such reports are not necessary to confirm the autocratic ossification of Central Asia – we can see this in the lack of political competition in elections; the often arbitrary jailing of a wide variety of individuals, from protesters to journalists to citizens commenting online; the enriching of the elite, who show off their fancy cars and Dubai penthouses on social media while other videos depict the abuse of migrant Central Asian workers in Russia amid the deafening silence of their home governments.

But on the other hand, the devastating reality – that the people of Central Asia have little to no influence over their governments, and that this has costs not just for the agitators but for everyone – is more difficult to explain without efforts like the NIT.

“It is not a coincidence that U.S. adversaries around the world cheered the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the termination of hundreds of projects aimed at bolstering democracy and human rights,” Freedom House said in its April statement. “The closure of these projects – which supported activists on the front lines of the struggle for freedom and provided important and unique insights on how to push back against authoritarian regimes – is a clear win for the world’s dictatorships.”

For all the failings of rankings, and there are plenty, there is a simplicity in such efforts that serves a greater purpose in communicating a complex, multifaceted reality. In trying to track progress and regression, we are better able to understand the geopolitical currents that move our world. While Central Asian governments may be cheering the diminishment of organizations like Freedom House, and dancing on the NIT report’s grave, they are missing a hard truth: The NIT scores reflected a reality that exists regardless of whether the report does.