Studying states and regimes in Central Asia: contributions to comparative politics and future challenges

ABSTRACT

This article surveys research on regimes and states in Central Asia and assesses its contribution to Political Science, specifically the subfield of comparative politics. It discusses three areas in which research on the region has been influenced by and, in turn, fruitfully shaped the comparative political analysis of state and regime: a turn from macro- to micro-level topics; innovations in research design; and the embrace of interdisciplinarity. It then addresses the challenges confronting scholars of the region, including uneven theoretical contributions to comparative politics and impediments in the feasibility of field research. It identifies several lively debates in comparative politics to which Central Asianists have the potential to contribute important insights. It concludes that the study of states and regimes in Central Asia has greatly enriched some debates in comparative politics (and vice versa), but declining pools of funding, the politicization of academic research, and unequal access to institutional resources among local and Western scholars threaten to diminish the field’s contributions in the coming years.

KEYWORDS:

• regime
• state
• comparative politics
• political science

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We focus most of this paper on the five post-Soviet states in Central Asia.

2 There are multiple ways in which area studies and comparative politics mutually engage, such as extending theories to new empirical contexts, employing novel social scientific methods and approaches, and generating new empirical evidence. While considering these, we seek to understand the extent to which empirical research on Central Asia’s states and regimes have shaped theoretical and topical discussions within comparative politics.

3 Due to space limitations and the dominance of English as the academic lingua franca (for better or worse), we focus predominantly on English-language scholarship, although we acknowledge that work in Russian, European and Central Asian languages has made important – and growing – contributions to the field.

4 While we assess regional scholarship’s engagement with comparative politics, we also recognize that an important role of area studies is to go where disciplines do not – to pose novel questions, experiment with interdisciplinary approaches and pursue inductive research. Nonetheless, we assume that more engagement between scholarship of Central Asia and social science is mutually beneficial.

5 In recent years, area studies and thematic journals have seen a substantial increase in empirical studies on these topics in Central Asia.

6 A small number of intrepid scholars got there before 1991, including Nancy Lubin, Martha Brill Olcott, William Fierman and Teresa Rakowska-Harmstone.

7 These data coverarticles published every five years from six journals (American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics and World Politics). We isolated the comparative politics subfield entries and limited our analysis to the post-1991 years (i.e., 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2017). The original data come from Obermeier and Pepinsky (2018).

8 Murtazashvili (2016) is one exception.

9 These challenges of field research have become the centre of debate within the discipline. From 2012 to 2014, leading Political Science journals and organizations proposed adopting standards on data access and research transparency (DA-RT) – drawn from the natural sciences – to ensure adherence to the scientific method and facilitate reproducible results. This initiative illustrates influential norms within Political Science that assume open data access and overlook real-world challenges (and dangers) that confront those who study politically sensitive topics. In response, the DA-RT effort has faced significant and broad-based pushback questioning any standard measure of research transparency across different logics of qualitative research and raising ethical concerns about data-sharing requirements including protections for human subjects (Jacobs et al. 2021).

10 A handful of scholars, such as Slavomir Horak, are an exception.