Uzbekistan takes steps towards establishing a welfare state and eradicating poverty: from ‘Iron Feast’ to ‘Iron Notebooks’
Tolibjon Mustafoev, PhD candidate at Lund University For the last few decades, Uzbekistan has been a popular research destination for many scholars studying authoritarian regimes. Indeed, the first president of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov, had been in power from the first days of independence in 1991 until September 2016. Karimov was known for his policies on closed economy, high bureaucracy, centra