From a political scientist’s perspective, Uzbekistan is almost certainly an authoritarian government: the regime of President Islam Karimov, who has ruled the country since before the breakup of the Soviet Union, has imprisoned critics, held sham elections and each year forces millions of people to pick cotton for the state.

It therefore came as little surprise last week when the government banned the teaching of political science, on the grounds that it is a western pseudo-science that does not take the “Uzbek model” of development into account.

In a decree issued on 24 August and later made public, higher education minister Alisher Vakhabov ordered that the words “political science” be dropped from the name of the last remaining course in the subject widely taught in the country, which will now be called The Theory and Practice of Building a Democratic Society in Uzbekistan. It also required universities to move all literature relating to political science from the “general fund to a special fund”, which means students and academics will need permission to access it.

Political science studies … political struggle, but there hasn’t been political struggle in Uzbekistan for a long time Daniil Kislov

The order effectively banned political science as an academic subject, according to Farkhad Tolipov, a well-known political scientist who used to teach at the National University of Uzbekistan and now heads an independent education and research institution, Bilim Karvoni, in Tashkent. Tolipov penned an open letter against the decision, which he said resembled the Soviet-era campaign against “pseudo-sciences” including political science, and was made on the recommendation of conservative officials who “have practically no knowledge of this discipline”.

Tolipov told the Observer: “This decision to cancel political science simply corresponds to the character and nature of an authoritarian system, for which political science probably looks like an inexplicable irritant and is not a science at all.”

In the decree, Vakhabov cited the findings of a working group summoned to evaluate the discipline, which argued that political science does not use scientific methods, examines topics that are already studied by other disciplines, and uses textbooks which are based solely on western literature.

The group also criticised the discipline for not including the “Uzbek model” of development, regardless of the fact that in reality this model looks like a typical dictatorship. Despite an supposed two-term limit, Karimov won a fourth presidential term in April with 90.39% of the vote in an election criticised for irregularities and lack of competition. For 25 years, he has ruled the country of 31 million people with a heavy hand, throwing thousands into prison on politically motivated charges. Human Rights Watch has documented cases of widespread torture and mistreatment. The authorities have forced millions, including children, to work on the cotton harvest each year to replenish state coffers, even as Transparency International regularly ranks Uzbekistan as one of the 10 most corrupt countries in the world. Among these are students from the National University of Uzbekistan, some of whom wrote an open letter protesting against being ordered into the fields last year.

Daniil Kislov, a native of Uzbekistan and editor of the central Asian news site Ferghana.ru, said the new ban on political science marked an increasingly authoritarian trend in Uzbekistan. He said the country had “almost caught up to Turkmenistan in the development of its idiotism,” referring to the extreme personality cult in the neighbouring state, known as one of the world’s most repressive and closed countries.

“Political science studies the fundamentals of … political struggle, but there hasn’t been political struggle in Uzbekistan for a long time,” Kislov said. “There’s no discussion of politics, so no academic can study this topic without doing it through the frame of Karimov.”

Political analysis of the Karimov regime has been an increasingly touchy subject. On 29 August, Uzbek authorities barred Sergei Abashin, anthropologist and expert on Uzbekistan at the European University in St Petersburg, from entering the country following an article he wrote about “national government”, “post-colonialism” and “post-Sovietness” in Uzbekistan.

Political science has been under attack in Uzbekistan since at least 2010, when universities stopped enrolling students in the subject.

Those few remaining political scientists who try to do serious work in the field have now been driven further underground, Tolipov added. “Our publications and work are only for ourselves now, for our soul. We do it just because we love this science,” he said.