Local Ordering and Peacebuilding in Kyrgyzstan: What Can Customary Orders Achieve?

ABSTRACT

The post-liberal IR debate on peacebuilding has made considerable efforts to reintroduce ‘the local’. In principle, critical peace studies follow the argument that communal capacities for peace formation exist in every society. However, few take the further conceptual step of taking emic perspectives on ordering and peacebuilding more seriously. This article aims at exploring and understanding customary concepts and practices of ordering with examples from Kyrgyzstan. It asks how and why communal actors and institutions contribute to ordering in the context of limited local tensions and how these actors navigate at national and international levels.

KEYWORDS:

• Peacebuilding
• ethnographic peace research
• customary order
• everyday peace
• hybridity
• Kyrgyzstan

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the anonymous reviewers, to the editors of the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, and to my colleagues Klaas Anders, Carolyn Benson, Hendrik Hegemann, Khushbakt Hojiev, Holger Niemann and Azamat Temirkulov.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Anna Kreikemeyer is a researcher at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg (IFSH). She has conducted research on conflict and peace in the post-Soviet space, on local peace and on the prospects for peace research in Central Eurasia and on the post-liberal debate on peacebuilding. Her findings contribute to the academic exchange in the Academic Network ‘Eurasia Peace Studies Exchange’.

Notes

1 According to the Central Eurasian Studies Society, Central Eurasia comprises the Caucasus, post-Soviet Central Asia, Afghanistan and Xinjiang.

2 While in many Muslim countries adat refers to customary law, the Kyrgyz understanding of ürp adat primarily refers to customs and habits. Interview with the Kyrgyz social anthropologist Cholpon Chotaeva, American University of Central Asia, Bishkek 18 June 2019.

3 The Soviet state had tried to co-opt traditional institutions like mahallas, domkoms (Russian: domovyi komitet, street leaders) and aksakals on duty (Russian: dezhurnye aksakaly). Interviews with Uzbek colleagues at IFSH Hamburg.

4 Drawing on her fieldwork among the Zapotec in Mexico, the legal anthropologist Laura Nader uses the term ‘harmony ideology’ to characterize postcolonial systems of justice in which marginalized people are denied access to legal means and forced to demonstrate unity to outsiders to avoid state interference in dispute resolution. While Beyer and Gierke appreciate Nader’s findings, they seek to better understand communal demands for harmony that go beyond attempts to control conflict (Beyer and Gierke 2015, 197, 201; Beyer and Finke 2019, 313).

5 On 26 May 2014, a draft law on foreign-funded NGOs, requiring registration and the label ‘foreign agents’ in the case of political engagement, was submitted to the Kyrgyz Parliament. In October 2014, the Osh office of Freedom House was closed down due to its investigations into ethno-political issues. See International Centre for Non-For-profit-Law, NGO Law Monitor Kyrgyz Republic.

6 In recent years, several Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Tajik and Uzbek students who undertook their Master’s and PhD studies at my institute told me that although they appreciated their experiences in Germany, they had to (and wanted to) follow their families’ demands that they return to their home countries, obey their fathers or elder brothers in conflicts (even if they already had families of their own), and follow customary practices (for example taking part in arranged marriages).