Forced labour in Turkmenistan

Every autumn since the mid-1990s, a peculiar migration takes place across Turkmenistan. Doctors leave their clinics, teachers their classrooms, students their lecture halls, and civil servants their desks, all converging on the same white fields under instructions that arrived, as they always do in Turkmenistan, from somewhere above and beyond appeal. Quotas move down through the layers of provincial government until they land on individuals who never had the standing to refuse them. There is no legislation that names this coercion; there is only a chain of expectation so total that refusal becomes, in practice, unthinkable. It is one of the more curious features of the modern authoritarian state that its cruelties so rarely need to be written into law.

What is striking about Turkmenistan's cotton economy is not that forced labour underpins it, but how little that fact has cost the regime internationally. An estimated 72,000 people, nearly 12% of the population, live under conditions classifiable as modern slavery, a prevalence rate that places the country 14th among the 160 nations for which such comparisons exist. Cotton is no trivial sideline propping up an otherwise ordinary agricultural sector; at roughly 200,000 tonnes a year, it remains the government's 4th most valuable export and keeps Turkmenistan among the 10 largest producers on the planet. And still, among the 52 states of Europe and Central Asia rated on how seriously they respond to modern slavery, only Russia scores worse. The gap between the scale of the practice and the scale of the world's attention to it is, in its own way, the real subject here.

Professor Luca Anceschi, a Professor in Eurasian Studies and Subject Group Lead for Central & East European Studies at the University of Glasgow, resists the idea that any of this was designed with particular malice. The state that emerged in 1992, he points out, did not invent an economy so much as inherit one; a Soviet arrangement built around exporting raw material, in which gas and cotton played complementary roles. When the wider region adjusted to market prices after independence, energy adapted with relative ease; cotton did not, and the government that came after Moscow simply kept exporting it through the same channels, the same logic, the same demands on rural labour, because there was no obvious reason to stop.

Coercion, in this telling, is less an ideology than a residue; something that persisted because dismantling it would have required an imagination the state never needed to exercise. It is worth sitting with that thought for a moment, because it unsettles a comfortable assumption about how dictatorships operate. We like to imagine every mechanism of control as the product of deliberate cunning, engineered by a mind determined to dominate. Turkmenistan suggests something quieter and more troubling: that abuse can simply outlive its original justification, sustained not by will but by the absence of any force strong enough to interrupt it.

Here, Professor Anceschi's account of what research on the country actually involves becomes revealing. There is no reliable domestic press to consult, no state statistic worth taking at face value, so the picture has to be built sideways, through Chinese trade figures that hint at how much gas is really flowing, through the occasional and incomplete findings of international labour bodies, through comparison rather than direct testimony. Professor Anceschi is candid that no comprehensive Western study of the country exists at all. Turkmenistan has achieved a form of obscurity that few closed societies manage: it is too controlled for journalists, too marginal for most universities to prioritise, too opaque for the kind of documentation that boycotts and sanctions typically require. Uzbekistan's cotton sector, once similarly compromised, drew years of coordinated international pressure once the evidence became undeniable. Turkmenistan has faced comparatively little, not because its practices are gentler, but because the evidence was never allowed to accumulate in the first place. Secrecy, here, functions less as a wall than as a kind of climate; pervasive, self-sustaining, requiring no single dramatic act of concealment because so little was ever visible to begin with.

There is a further wrinkle that complicates any tidy narrative of unbroken repression. Between 2023 and 2024 the government briefly reduced its conscription of doctors and teachers into the harvest, only to reverse that decision by 2025, alongside a broader decline in governance and rights more generally. A concession offered and then withdrawn tells us something a concession never attempted cannot: that the state understood exactly what a lighter hand would look like, weighed it, and chose control instead. Meanwhile Turkmenistan continues to present itself abroad through the language of positive neutrality, an image built almost entirely around the orderly export of gas, where no comparable system of coercion exists. Cotton, as Professor Anceschi observes, barely enters into that self-portrait at all. The regime has not needed to hide it behind an elaborate story, because the story it tells the world was never really about cotton to begin with. What survives, then, is not so much a secret as an absence, a practice that persists precisely because no one outside was ever invited to look for it.

Further information and opportunities to engage with organisations working in this area are listed below:
Red Crescent Society of Turkmenistan | IFRC
Home - The BEARR Trust
Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov Charitable Foundation

Share This Article

What's Your Opinion?

Share your thoughts on this article