Tajikistan amidst globalization: state failure or state transformation?

Abstract

This paper considers the nature of Tajikistani statehood in an era of globalization. It takes as its foil a recent report of the International Crisis Group, ‘Tajikistan: on the road to failure’. The paper interrogates this claim and finds that it is based on a poor conceptualization of the state which disregards advances in state theory made in the last two decades. However, this problematic declaration cannot simply be dismissed but, being from an authoritative source, must be considered for its constitutive functions for Tajikistani statehood. The paper thus considers Tajikistan's position in world politics theoretically in terms of the sociological and anthropological literature on global assemblages, particularly Sassen's concept of denationalization. It goes on to investigate a single case of the contemporary Tajikistani state: the state-owned Tajik Aluminium Company's (Talco) international trading arrangements and tolling agreements. The paper argues that the post-Soviet, post-conflict Tajikistani state is not simply captured by elite networks or a shell for the personnel of the regime. Rather, whilst an explicitly ‘nationalizing state’, it has been transformed along the lines of denationalization. Tajikistan's official institutions, in cooperation with global actors from multinational corporations to donor agencies, have been incorporated within certain global economic and political assemblages. The paper discusses the implications of all this in terms of the consequent hollowing out of the national-territorial state model and the establishing of lines of economics and politics which make the state, in parts, global.

Keywords:

• Tajikistan
• state formation
• state failure
• state building
• globalization
• global assemblages
• denationalization
• nationalism

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Tim Epkenhans, Daniel Neep, Madeleine Reeves, Chad Thompson and an anonymous Central Asian Survey reviewer for contributing comments that aided in the development of this paper. Following the Oxford conference, a second draft was presented at both the workshop ‘Capturing the political: how to analyse power beyond state politics’, Humboldt University, Berlin, 21–23 October 2010, and the University of St Andrew's Middle East and Central Asian Studies seminar series, 16 November 2010. Thanks are due to the participants and organizers of these events, especially Klaus Schlichte and Sally Cummings.

Notes

For a discussion of approaches to factionalism in the study of Central Asian politics see Gulette (2007). For approaches to factionalism through networks and neo-patrimonialism in neighbouring states, see Radnitz (2006) and Ilkhamov (2006). As numerous authors have shown, Tajikistan's elite networks are not simply constituted of sub-ethnic or ‘clan’ solidarity (Collins 2009) but are formed of complex network relations based also on fictive kinship, social histories and economic relations (Dudoignon 1994, Rubin 1998, Roy 2000, Akiner 2001).

Various authors, ‘Tajikistan: On the Road to Exaggeration?’, Turan and Iran, 1 March 2009. Available from: http://turaniran.wordpress.com/2009/03/01/tajikistan-on-the-road-to-exaggeration/ [Accessed 11 August 2010].

See Mitchell's (1991) response to the ‘bringing the state back in’ thesis (Skocpol et al. 1985) as well as Migdal's later discussion of these issues (2001).

This claim is based on my own experience of struggling to produce reports for donor agencies and NGOs which were both true to the complexities of context and readable for a non-academic audience. See my discussion of monitoring and evaluation in Heathershaw (forthcoming).

Parviz Mullojanov, ‘The politics of national-state ideology in Tajikistan’, presentation to the conference, ‘Tajikistan: birth and rebirth’, 13 October 2009, St Antony's College, Oxford.

The recent press and policy commentary on the armed conflict between the Government of Tajikistan and factions under Ali Bedak and Mirzokhuja Ahmadov in the Rasht Valley region (from September 2010) provided many examples. For example, West (2010, p. 24) cursorily summarizes nine militant groups operating in Central Asia including the Islamic Revival Party (IRP) of Tajikistan. The IRP is, of course, a legal and moderate Islamic political party which has very good relations with Western states.

The mainstream literature has recognized this dilemma of international state building: Chesterman (2004), Zaum (2007) and Paris and Sisk (2009). For critical scholars this remains an inherent contradiction within the discourse of international state building: Chandler (2006), Bickerton (2007), Heathershaw and Lambach (2008), and Bliesmann de Guevara (2010).

In the context of Tajikistan, the neo-colonialism of international state-building interventions evoke the early Soviet era where Moscow attempted to build a Soviet colony in explicitly anti-colonial terms (see Kassymbekova, this volume). However, by the late Soviet period the boundaries between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ were less clear-cut and both Tajik national and Soviet international spaces had begun to be instantiated. This suggests that the logical contradiction of building sovereignty through intervention does not prevent the emergence of new, hybrid forms of political order. There may then be a historical basis for the transformation of statehood in Tajikistan described below. However, post-1991 transformation, shaped by the emergence of global assemblages, is of a qualitatively different kind to Soviet era nationalization and internationalization.

Antoine Buisson, ‘Twelve years after the peace agreements: what lessons have been learnt from the civil war and its causes’, presentation to the conference, ‘Tajikistan: birth and rebirth’, 14 October 2009, St Antony's College, Oxford.

See Held and McGrew (2003) for the debate between globalists and sceptics. See Brenner (1999) and Ferguson and Gupta (2002) for critiques of the spatio-hierarchical premises of the globalization debate.

Sassen (2006) uses ‘Territory, Authority, Rights’ (TAR) as the criteria of assessment whilst Ong and Collier (2005) speak of territorialization. I prefer the process (‘territorialization’) to the state (‘territory’) because it allows us to consider incomplete processes of making and remaking territories as much as the emergence of new territories themselves. Sassen speaks of the global city and Special Economic Zones as examples of new territories made under globalization as well as ‘emergent institutionalizations of territory that unsettle the national encasement of territory’ (2008, p. 64). In the case of Tajikistan we see new territorializations and spatializations occurring under the dynamics of land reform and seasonal labour migration networks (see also Heathershaw 2009, pp. 164–169).

The question of the depletion or transformation of the state-idea is more complex and shall be considered only in the conclusion of this paper.

Asia-Plus, ‘TALCO receives report on audit of its financial activity’, 4 August 2010, http://www.asiaplus.tj/en/news/54/68017.html [Accessed 11 August 2010]

Tajik Aluminium Plant v Ermatov & Ors [2005] EWHC 2241 (Ch) (21 October 2005), para 22–23, available from: http://www.bailii.org/ [Accessed 14 August 2010].

Tajik Aluminium Plant v Ermatov & Ors (21 October 2005), para 59.

Tajik Aluminium Plant v Ermatov & Ors (21 October 2005), paras 28, 60.

Tajik Aluminium Plant v Ermatov & Ors (21 October 2005), paras 61.

Tajik Aluminium Plant v Ermatov & Ors (21 October 2005), paras 81–85.

In fact the barter agreements of 2000 and 2003 were made under the jurisdiction of English Law in the form of the London Court of International Arbitration. Tajik Aluminium Plant v Ermatov & Ors (21 October 2005), para 23.

In particular, the judgment of Justice Blackburne of 21 October 2005, Tajik Aluminium Plant v Ermatov & Ors (21 October 2005), and the subsequent Settlement Agreement between Hydro Aluminium and Tajik Aluminium Company, 20 December 2006. Available from: http://johnhelmer.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/taj-trial-hydro-tadaz-agreement-of-dec-20-2006.pdf [Accessed 15 August 2010].

It seems that these moves began in at least 2003 as Ermatov, by his subsequent testimony, was pressured by Sadulloev to transfer Talco accounts to Oriyonbank. Tajik Aluminium Plant v Ermatov & Ors (21 October 2005), para 63.

Tajik Aluminium Plant v Ermatov & Ors (21 October 2005).

Tajik Aluminium Plant v Ermatov & Ors (21 October 2005), paras 74, 191.

Tajik Aluminium Plant v Ermatov & Ors (21 October 2005), paras 75, 76.

This ‘breach of contract’ action referred to a 2003 barter agreement between the two parties where Talco had failed to deliver US$128 million in aluminium shipments.

Justice Blackburne states: ‘TadAZ [Talco] claims that CDH is ultimately owned by Orienbank [sic]. The evidence lends support to the view that Orienbank is controlled by close members and/or associates of President Rakhmonov's family.’ Tajik Aluminium Plant v Ermatov & Ors (21 October 2005), para 180.

Tajik Aluminium Plant v Ermatov & Ors (21 October 2005), para 182.

Justice Blackburne states: ‘It is difficult to see why TadAZ should have wished to enter into an agreement of this kind with an off-shore shelf company, as CDH was, which had no track record in alumina, aluminium or any other kind of dealings.’ Tajik Aluminium Plant v Ermatov & Ors (21 October 2005), paras 181, 183–4.

The agreement also includes ‘settlement sums’ totalling $94 million made in instalments from 31 December 2006 to 31 December 2010. Settlement Agreement between Hydro Aluminium and Tajik Aluminium Company, 20 June 2006, pp. 5, 21–25. See also Helmer 2008e.

Tajik Aluminium Plant v Ermatov & Ors (21 October 2005), paras 29, 99.

Justice Blackburne states, ‘a “near irresistible” inference of all of this is that, in the period between 1996 to the end of 2000, there was a fraudulent scheme similar to the scheme between TadAZ and Ansol after that time.’ Tajik Aluminium Plant v Ermatov & Ors (21 October 2005), para 35.

Tajik Aluminium Plant v Ermatov & Ors (21 October 2005), paras 175, 177.

Similar arrangements are described with respect to the 1996–2004 partnership with Ansol in the 2005 judgement. Tajik Aluminium Plant v Ermatov & Ors (21 October 2005), para 163.

Eurasianet, Tajikistan: suit settlement brings no resolution. 1 December 2008, available from: http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/insightb/articles/eav120208a.shtml [Accessed 10 August 2010].

World Bank, World development indicators 2009. Available from: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator. [Accessed 10 August 2010].

Nazarov's lawyer, John Doctor QC, estimated the losses of Talco to be $450 million from 2005 to 2005 whilst the profits of CDH/TML were around $500 million, all of which were transferred directly to CDH/TML unknown owners (Helmer 2008e, no pagination).

‘Press-reliz po auditu’, Talco, 3 August 2010. Available from: http://www.Talco.com.tj/index.php?l=2&action=newslist&id=153&page=1. [Accessed 14 August 2010].

‘Press-reliz po auditu’, Talco, 3 August 2010. Available from: http://www.Talco.com.tj/index.php?l=2&action=newslist&id=153&page=1. [Accessed 14 August 2010].

The survival of a state-idea which jars with state practice may be explained by a traditional analysis of authoritarianism in terms of a passive populous, weak press and relatively strong capacity for coercion. However, this seems incomplete partly because the effect of globalization on the state remains invisible in democratic states (Sassen 2006, p. 12). Moreover, whilst the analysts of ICG were open to the idea of state failure, their own neo-Weberian idea of the state left them ignorant of the globalization of the state. The vitality of the ideas of national statehood and state sovereignty, despite considerable evidence to suggest frequent violations of the principles of both, is a product, in part, of the hegemony of the modern discourse of nationalism. This raises issue beyond the scope of this paper.