The Post-Imperial Politics of Security and Depoliticisation: Comparing Discourses and Practices of Ordering Across Central Asia

Abstract

In this essay, we build on earlier discussions on the insufficiency of labels such as ‘post-Soviet’ and ‘postcolonial’ for Central Asian regimes and propose a consideration of their particular post-imperial character. We illustrate the usefulness of this lens through an analysis of security and violent conflicts in Central Asia and how governments interpret and present these conflicts. Our discussion draws systematically on existing research on relevant processes in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, allowing us to identify key themes of a post-imperial politics of security and their implications in a comparative perspective.

Although the USSR presented itself as a union of different nations that, under the responsible leadership of the Communist Party, worked together to achieve development and peace, the literature repeatedly pointed out the existence of notorious lines of conflict that were harshly suppressed in order to sustain the image of peaceful socialism. As stated by Abashin (2018, p. 4), recent conflicts in Central Asia are mostly linked to the codification and enforcement of national and ethnic identities by Soviet authorities in the region’s five republics. Similarly, the way Central Asian regimes are dealing with conflicts, whether interethnic or anti-regime, replays some important features of Soviet conflict management. In this essay, we suggest that not only the conflicts but also the approaches Central Asian governments have taken in response can best be understood in terms of a post-imperial character. We are interested in how the Central Asian regimes react to conflict, particularly episodes of violent conflict and related security concerns, as opposed to political or symbolic conflict. The analysis builds on earlier works that examined post-conflict political ordering in its discursive and practical dimensions both in Central Asia and in other post-imperial contexts. In using the framework advanced in the Introduction to this special issue, we argue that regimes engage in a ‘politics of security’ that helps them to depoliticise conflicts, that is, reduce their overall significance and any perception of government culpability or even active involvement. As we show, this ‘politics of security’, similar to the depoliticising effects ascribed to it in the Western European context (Huysmans 2006), helps the Central Asian regimes to legitimise their rule and stabilise state–society relations amidst the challenging conditions they face.

By applying the ‘politics of security’ framework and demonstrating its operation in both discursive and practical ways, the essay aims to show how the current dynamics in the region and the historical legacies foregrounding them can be understood as ‘(post-)imperial’; that is, as reproducing and carrying forwards imperial logics of ordering and securitising while transcending them in some respects. As we have argued in more detail in the Introduction, the fact that both the post-Soviet and postsocialist labels are increasingly being called into question shows the need for a fresh perspective.¹ Furthermore, being transposed from a more global context, the postcolonial approach towards Central Asia and the post-Soviet space has not developed the momentum one might have expected, as exemplified by Diana Kudaibergenova (2016).²

In this light, conceiving of the condition of Central Asian and other post-Soviet states—including their ambiguous and often positive relation to the Soviet and earlier imperial projects—as ‘(post-)imperial’ seems fruitful. While ‘post-imperial’ can imply a critique of, and a move beyond, past injustice and violence, it also acknowledges the achievements and legacy of the past that post-Soviet citizens express, feel or even act upon unconsciously, in one way or other. Taking inspiration from analyses of contemporary (post-)imperial forms of ordering in other contexts and global perspectives (Gilroy 2004; Stoler 2016; Uyama 2018), we argue that the continuation of imperial forms of acting, thinking and being—even if these behaviours are legacy habits rather than intentional tactics—points to the continued validity of principles of imperial ruling and ordering in today’s Central Asia, even if new institutional designs and normative frameworks may suggest rupture and change. Among the many post-imperial continuities, one could single out post-Soviet nationalising regimes and their reproduction of ideology-driven government, where the former telos of building communism was replaced by that of building the nation, a goal that all citizens were expected to fully support and defend (Brubaker 2011). Building on this and other research on post-Soviet Central Asian regimes, we analyse how these engage in a ‘politics of security’ to reassert their authority in the aftermath of violent conflict. In doing so, we put a particular focus on the economic, political-institutional and discursive-ideational repertoires on which Central Asian regimes have drawn in navigating the challenges of the post-Soviet period. Besides providing a rare perspective on four Central Asian republics (Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan) and exploring the usefulness of a post-imperial lens in their analysis, the main contribution of our essay is to apply the ‘politics of security’ and depoliticisation lens. Contrary to other analyses, this perspective seeks to facilitate more systematic and comparative thinking about the potential for societal change while departing from a clear picture on the negotiated nature of Central Asian security regimes.

The essay proceeds as follows. We first introduce in more detail our theoretical framework and the way it brings together security/securitisation studies and the post-imperial lens on Central Asia. In the following four sections, we discuss the ‘politics of security’ and its post-imperial characteristics in the four countries, which have faced several violent conflicts, though to a variable extent. We then conclude by highlighting how the ‘politics of security’ in these four cases illustrate, although in ways that necessarily differ from context to context, the post-imperial nature of these Central Asian regimes.

The (post-)imperial condition of Central Asian ‘politics of security’

The deepening trends of repressive law enforcement, counterinsurgency and human rights abuses in Central Asia and beyond in the name of security and countering extremism/terrorism are reflected in recent scholarly literature (Lemon 2018; Smith Finley 2019). While acknowledging the validity of these analyses, the twin concepts of a ‘politics of security’ and ‘depoliticisation’, which we propose in this special issue, are intended to complement existing securitisation analyses in two ways. First, the politics of security is not only a process by which threats are securitised but also one in which, according to Huysmans, the (in-)security of certain referent objects or agents is constructed to begin with, or ‘written and talked into existence’ rather than being established as a ‘fact of nature’ (Huysmans 2006, p. 7). Huysmans (2006) demonstrates this in his analysis of how politicians, policymakers and even experts have securitised asylum seekers and migrants as a potential source of terrorism, rather than taking seriously the threat posed to the health and wellbeing of these vulnerable groups by the measures taken to prevent them from entering or settling in Western European countries. The irony of this situation is that the stigmatisation and societal marginalisation experienced by communities and groups with an asylum-seeker or migrant background have been an important, if not a key, factor in the emergence of radicalisation and violent extremism. The task of critical scholarship is then to exhibit this selective, subjugating and also counterintuitive logic of ‘politics of security’. Among others, Paul Gilroy (2004) and Ann Laura Stoler (2016, ch. 6) have demonstrated how such contradictions and their underpinning fears characterise contemporary and historical forms of social ordering and knowledge in Western post-imperial societies. Such inquiry then foregrounds possibilities of a counter-politics of security, where groups, people and worldviews securitised and marginalised by dominant visions of security challenge the latter and reclaim safer lives for themselves. In the Central Asian context, Tromble’s (2014) and Lemon’s (2016) works on the adverse effects of countering violent extremism and counterterrorism discourse have provided important insights to this end, as have von Boemcken et al.’s (2018) analyses of the securityscapes of LGBT people.

Our second contribution to existing security/securitisation analyses is the ‘politics of depoliticisation’, which, we argue is almost synonymous with the ‘politics of security’, although it concerns a potentially wider range of issues and policy areas possibly unrelated to security. Taking Flinders and Buller’s understanding of depoliticisation as ‘the range of tools, mechanisms and institutions through which politicians can attempt to move to an indirect governing relationship and/or seek to persuade the demos that they can no longer be reasonably held responsible’ (Flinders & Buller 2006, pp. 295–96), it can be argued that depoliticisation is at work in the ‘politics of security’ as examined above, as decision-makers claim authority for actions that deter or alleviate the threat that they have constructed as imminent. In such a situation, other political actors and the wider population need to contest threat definitions, constructions of referent objects and proposed policy measures if exclusionary, marginalising and potentially violent forms of ordering are to be avoided. In Central Asian polities, such acts of (re-)politicising can be observed more rarely, given the often limited space for expression and debate. Yet, the bigger issue with processes of politicisation is perhaps the lack of attention scholarship has paid to it: existing analyses of protests demonstrate the significant effect they can have on questions ranging from land claims and political influence (Beyer & Kojobekova 2019, p. 9) to improvements in social welfare (Putz 2020). While unable to follow up such contestations, our analysis offers a more systematic picture of how Central Asian regimes have depoliticised and clouded the debate on the details of and reasons for violent conflict, thus further adding to critical perspectives on how to resist and possibly overcome such depoliticisation.

Following a primary interest in securitisation and its role in processes of state-building and the establishment, consolidation and legitimation of political regimes, the analysis we present in the following will mostly focus on the ‘politics of security’ and the particular combination of discursive and practical measures pursued by the regimes in four Central Asian states. Thus, our interest lies in the way in which evolving political regimes (and, especially in the Kyrgyz case, various successive ones) have constructed their claim to govern their countries and defended these claims against various challenges. Due to lack of space and for conceptual parsimony, we focus on the significance of incidents of large-scale conflict and violence, which often pose challenges to political leadership that is reasserted or transformed as a result of such challenges; a phenomenon Erica Marat has called ‘transformative violence’ (Marat 2018, p. 16). At the same time, we seek to show that such changes may also be performative and insubstantial overall and thus be part of a ‘politics of security’ that simply seeks to stabilise and consolidate power against challenges.

In order to understand the post-imperial characteristics of ‘politics of security’ in Central Asia, we take inspiration from recent explorations of the conceptual and empirical relevance of ‘imperialism’ (Narayan & Sealy-Huggins 2017) and in-depth discussions of the reproduction and continuity of imperial ordering (Gilroy 2004; Stoler 2016; Uyama 2018). What seems to be particularly productive for the tracing of historically produced forms of imperial ordering is Stoler’s problematisation of the binary between rupture and continuity, which she proposes to overcome with Foucault’s idea of recursion that foregrounds ‘partial reinscriptions, modified displacements, and amplified recuperations’ (Stoler 2016, p. 27). She thus suggests that the ‘convention[s] of past, present, and future are not only inadequate [but also] occlude how imperial regimes work and what they do to those living the subaltern and privileged sites within them’ (Stoler 2016, p. 35).

To grasp this ambiguous post-imperial nexus of imperial continuity and change, we propose to focus on three dimensions in which it plays out, namely the economic, political-institutional and discursive-ideational ones, which we discuss in turn. We understand these dimensions first and foremost as a heuristic to structure our analysis and not as rigid analytical categories. In the economic dimension, a key factor for understanding ‘post-imperial’ politics is to appreciate the continuity and ‘stickiness’ of economic relations and cooperation between existing entities across epochal periodisations, while also taking into account opportunities and actual instances of structural change. In the case of Central Asia, the most instructive observation in this regard is the development of Kazakhstan’s oil sector with corresponding two-digit growth rates to the extent that it can no longer be described as a developing country.³ The continued underdeveloped and dependent nature of the economies of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, despite their relative openness and cooperation with international partners and trade regimes, as well as Uzbekistan’s relatively marginal economic status, despite its state-led, rather than market-based, development path, overall tell a story of the continued peripheral status of Central Asia. In this sense, Narayan and Sealey-Huggins’ understanding of the contemporary period as a ‘new phase of imperialism’ in which ‘neoliberal globalisation’ is superseding ‘the theoretical and political limits of what we have previously called imperialism’ (Narayan & Sealey-Huggins 2017, p. 2388) seems to capture the imperial continuities of a politically ‘post-imperial’ phase.

Yet, while things might indeed have changed in terms of the global nature and integration of production networks, capital markets and financial infrastructures, the same cannot be said for production processes and extraction methods yielding the goods and commodities inserted into global circulation, especially in resource-intensive economies like those of Central Asia. Economic conduct is, therefore, still largely a story of capital–labour relations. The level of violence generated by conflicts over labour rights and working conditions—sadly illustrated by the police killing of protestors in the oil town of Zhanaozen, Kazakhstan, in 2011—gives an indication of the enormous societal pressures that political leaders and intermediaries in major sectors like oil production in Kazakhstan, cotton in Uzbekistan (Trevisani 2010) or agriculture in Tajikistan (Hofman 2019) need to manage. It is thus no coincidence that discourses propagating the necessity of a strong state and ‘strong-handed’ government in managing economic affairs for the benefit of the people (Omelicheva 2015, pp. 91–2) abound across Central Asia. Prozorov traces this discourse back to Stalinist times and invokes the term of the ‘effective manager’ (Prozorov 2016), whose supposed competency in managing economic and political affairs reflects the paternalistic logic of policymaking characteristic of both Central Asian and post-Soviet countries. Thus, it can be argued that, in the economic realm, a post-imperial politics of security is a trend of centralised and top-down decision-making and policy as well as institutional design, where powerholders and elites try to maintain their access to rent and profit accumulation while either fending off or co-opting emerging new players.

The second dimension directly relates to the economic one as the arena where both economic conduct and more general forms of political ordering and everyday life are shaped and re-shaped according to evolving dynamics. In all areas of public and social life, it again makes sense to assume a long-term equilibrium between ‘local’ solutions and traditional approaches on the one hand, and processes of ‘cross-fertilisation’ and diffusion of institutional designs, practices and norms relatively new or foreign to Central Asia, on the other. The latter include, most importantly, the wave of democratic ‘transformation’ of the region following the independence of its states in 1991, but also earlier processes of ‘democratic’ normative influence as under the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, conducted through the Organization for Co-operation and Security in Europe (OSCE). As regards the effects of ‘democratisation’ in the past three decades, it is well known that the Central Asian political regimes have been quite adept at adopting and re-appropriating the institutional designs, principles and practices of electoral democracy, and political participation more generally, according to their own needs, namely, to legitimise and stabilise societal consensus while dismissing both domestic and international criticism.⁴

Perhaps the most controversial area of international cooperation, assistance and policy transfer is that of law enforcement and security. Here, the advent of the US-led ‘global war on terror’ created a new foreign policy trend of stabilising and propping up Central Asian regimes. While the problem of violent extremist tendencies need not be downplayed, many measures taken in the name of counterterrorism have all too often been directed against internal opponents of regimes (most notoriously so in Tajikistan) and have often helped governments to raise their legitimacy by distracting attention from more serious problems. A comprehensive analysis of the materialisations of the security complex emerging from international assistance to Central Asian states is Lemon’s (2016) examination of ‘transnational authoritarian security governance’. Focusing on Tajikistan, Lemon shows how this form of governance operates both through military counterinsurgency and also through practices that aim to ‘create docile, loyal subjects’ via processes of responsibilisation and interpellation that are at times particularly repressive as they operate along dimensions of nation, class, gender and other forms of belonging (Lemon 2016, pp. 22–3). As we show in our analysis of the four Central Asian countries, the ‘politics of security’ often evolves in close connection and cross-fertilisation with processes in neighbouring countries. Furthermore, as Lemon (2016, pp. 119–30) and scholars focusing on the other republics have shown (Megoran 2017; Cucciolla 2017; Marat 2018), the ‘politics of security’ and the concrete policies they foreground often draw on the epistemic and ideational repertoires established during Soviet and earlier imperial rule.

The third dimension of the politics of security and depoliticisation is that of discourses and ideas or, put differently, the interpretive framework within which both governing actors and wider societies conceive of and carry out their actions. As argued in earlier analyses of the relational character of authoritarian governance in Central Asia (Matveeva 2009), even regimes that have established a high degree of control and submission of the population have much to lose from arbitrary acts of repression and violence or incompetence. Conversely, dealing with a problematic situation subjects weak and incompetent rulers to scrutiny that may eventually extend from the issue at hand to their overall performance. As existing analyses of securitisation in the wider Central Eurasian region indicate (Lemon 2018; Smith Finley 2019), conjuring up existential threats and urgencies often serves as a welcome means to redirect attention away from authorities’ weakness and incapacity. This is a key feature of the ‘depoliticisation’ aspect of the ‘politics of security’. Examples include Tajikistan’s president Emomali Rahmon: since brokering a peace agreement between the warring factions of the Civil War in 1997, he came to be seen as the guarantor of a fragile yet cherished peace (Heathershaw 2009a; Epkenhans 2016). Counter-examples of the securitisation of state weakness include criticisms of Kyrgyzstan’s leadership in the context of incursions of Islamic fighters into the Batken region in summer 1999 (see Megoran 2017, pp. 108–11) and other discourses on the threatened territory and population that Laruelle has analysed as ‘imperilled sovereignty’ (2012, pp. 43–5). These serve as a reminder that, while their logics and grounds are often feeble or even fictive and undeniably wrong, processes of securitisation invoke existential questions and situations where war and peace, the wellbeing or even, as irrational as it might sound, the future existence of populations is at stake. These concerns, in turn, allow policymakers to justify and even normalise draconian measures and top-down policies.

The possibility of uncovering this nexus from abstract and often exaggerated ideas, from discourses to concrete practices in the political-institutional or economic realms attests to the analytical usefulness of our proposal of the ‘politics of security’ and depoliticisation in particular. Our division into three realms of analysis is of course not mutually exclusive, as it makes sense to conceive of specific ideas, logics and discourses in the economic and political-institutional realm as well. Borrowing from Lewis et al. (2018, p. 486), our aim is to identify ideas and interpretive repertoires that cannot be located clearly in the economic or political-institutional realms but are based on other referent objects such as ‘culture’, the ‘nation’ or the imperial past in putting forward a particular politics of security.

In analysing and contextualising the respective ‘politics of security’ and its post-imperial nature, we trace the ‘politics of security’ pursued by Central Asian regimes with attention to the following parallel developments: first, the establishment and self-representation of the political regime, including positioning vis-à-vis the Soviet past and its imperial underpinnings; second, tensions underlying governance arrangements and incidents of large-scale conflict and violence in which they surface; and third, public concerns or open challenges to powerholders. With this analysis, we seek to extend and bring into dialogue other research on the discourses and performances of governments and political regimes on the one hand, and the on-the-ground, everyday worlds of Central Asian societies where official ideology and policy can both be challenged but also appreciated and even reinforced, on the other. With its conceptual focus on and discussion of four cases, this essay largely draws on the existing literature and augments it with desk-based research where necessary.

Tajikistan: peace by all means necessary?

In light of the long-term ramifications of its five-year civil war (1992–1997), Tajikistan is the most illustrative case of ‘politics of security’ in Central Asia. President Emomali Rahmon’s regime was established during the war and further strengthened by the 1997 peace agreement. Rahmon presented himself as a guarantor of peace in the immediate aftermath of the war and has maintained this position for more than two decades. Various analyses have documented how the increasingly authoritarian and often violent practices of this regime were able to evolve despite the high standards set by successive international intervention and assistance programmes (Heathershaw 2009a, 2014) and a number of intergovernmental organisations and bilateral donor programmes thereafter (Epkenhans 2016; Lemon 2016).

The post-conflict politics of security can thus be demarcated into a first period that Heathershaw (2009b) called a ‘virtual politics of peace’ in the immediate aftermath of the war. This politics involved different discourses that ‘misrepresented’ and ‘simulated’ processes of peacebuilding, stability and democratisation within the internationally dominant framework of ‘liberal peacebuilding’ (Heathershaw 2009b, p. 1317). In the long run, since about 2007 onwards, a different form of ‘politics of security’ took hold as a wider emerging ‘transnational authoritarian security governance’ (Lemon 2016). Within this framework of international cooperation and support, the regime made use of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism tools to not only deal with challenges within the country’s wider elite circle, but also to consolidate its grip on power by neutralising opposition figures in wider society (Lemon 2019). In this light, while Rahmon may have effectively presented himself as a ‘reasonable’, strong and paternalist leader following a significant conflict, the increasingly militarised and repressive nature of his regime also raises critical questions about the price that people pay for a fragile peace (Bonacker 2020, pp. 212–15).

The civil war claimed between 40,000 and 100,000 lives (Tunçer-Kılavuz 2014, p. 1; Epkenhans 2016, p. 2). It began with protests in Dushanbe, which escalated rapidly after President Rahmon Nabiyev ordered the distribution of weapons to pro-government militias. Numerous violent clashes occurred, after which the government agreed to share power. However, Nabiyev was subsequently kidnapped and compelled to resign. The original governing alliance recaptured power with the help of Russia and Uzbekistan. In 1992, the parliament had elected a new government led by Emomali Rahmonov, whose power base lay not in the capital but in the southern city of Kulob (Heathershaw 2009a, p. 29). His leadership was confirmed in a national election in 1996.

Although the conflict was strongly regional in character, recent research has indicated that Tajik regionalism was more a consequence than a cause of the conflict. It seems that the conflict arose and escalated not least because different political elites were able to rely on different regional power bases. However, these power bases were neither ethnically homogeneous nor characterised by a stable regional identity. Such identities emerged only during the course of the conflict itself (Epkenhans 2016, pp. 97–112). That said, the regional origins of groups and actors became important during the conflict, especially with respect to the use of force by the army and armed groups against civilians (Kevlihan 2016, p. 421). Nevertheless, regional identities, which were reinforced and politicised during the conflict, originally emerged in Soviet times. As Tunçer-Kılavuz (2014) has shown, the creation of territorial-administrative divisions within Tajikistan and party politics were responsible for making regional belonging politically salient.

Above all, the constellation of conflicts that began in Tajikistan in 1992 points to the institutional weakness of the post-imperial Tajik state. In the initial phase after independence, the Tajik state failed to establish a sustainable balance of power between different groups and to organise political competition peacefully. This situation was only exacerbated by an ongoing economic crisis in what was the poorest of the Soviet successor republics of Central Asia. At the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Tajikistan had been receiving about half of its state budget from central government transfers (Epkenhans 2016, p. 9). It was thus virtually unavoidable that the building of state capacities would be severely limited.

The most serious violence occurred between militias from Kulob and the oppositional Islamic Renaissance Party (Tajik: Hizbi Nahzati Islomii Tojikiston) and ethnic Pamiri from Gorno-Badakhshan. This violence included targeted killings and mass violence against the civilian population. In 1996, the United Tajik Opposition (Tajik: Oppozitsiai Muttahidai Tojik) intensified its campaign and ultimately forced the government into peace negotiations. A central role was played by the weakness of Rahmonov’s government and external pressure, particularly from Kazakhstan, Russia and Uzbekistan, to reach an agreement with the opposition.

The armed conflict ended in 1997 with a ceasefire and a peace treaty negotiated in Moscow, which in itself demonstrated the post-imperial character of the conflict. However, even after the treaty had been signed, armed conflict continued at the local level until 2001. The difference between the ‘virtual politics of peace’ until around 2007 and the ‘politics of security’ ensuing thereafter is a slight, yet important, shift of international support and cooperation frameworks from the ‘liberal peace’ to ones which Lemon (2016) has grouped under the term ‘transnational authoritarian security governance’. Regarding the political-institutional dimension of this postwar politics of security, the Tajik state has tried to enact ‘authoritarian conflict management’ (Lewis 2012) with international assistance in order to preserve a negative peace—that is, the absence of violent conflict while grievances and rivalries continue—and increase regime security. Thus, rather than seeking help in ensuring compliance with ceasefires and wider provisions for the peace treaty, the Tajik government mainly sought international support in fighting insurgent warlords and other disloyal actors, as well as the persecution of opposition elements on fictitious criminal grounds. The discursive hegemony in which President Rahmon was publicly portrayed as the guarantor of peace had already been established and challenges to this status were kept out of public debate. Below the surface of this ‘politics of security’, however, political meddling and open conflict both within elite circles and with known rivals continued. As part of this, opponents were framed as criminals and as disloyal to the Tajik nation, but not as political rivals. Outbreaks of violence included the shooting of former rebel leader Imomnazar Imomnazarov in 2012, directly followed by anti-government protests in Khorog in which around 50 people were killed by security forces.⁵

With regard to the discursive-ideational realm, the government drew on repertoires provided by cooperation frameworks in the global fight against terror, extremism and organised crime by demarcating and labelling its rivals as enemies of the people of Tajikistan. It also frequently invoked a long-standing disagreement between secular and religious forces within Tajik society. One striking feature of the Tajik civil war in comparison to other anti-regime wars is that the fundamentally Tajik identity of the state was never questioned, despite the strongly regional character of the conflict. Even if there was no real disagreement over the identity of the Tajik state, this identity remained quite weakly elaborated, partly because culturally important Tajik cities such as Bukhara and Samarkand had been declared part of Uzbekistan (Tunçer-Kılavuz 2014, p. 54). Epkenhans (2016) has emphasised the disunity and ambivalence among the Tajik elite over the interpretation of Tajik history and culture in relation to the symbolic foundations of the new state in the immediate aftermath of independence. Thus, the history of the Tajik Republic can also be understood as post-imperial with regard to the discursive construction of identity. As early as the 1970s, the overarching sense of Soviet identity that had predominated for decades came to be opposed by alternative concepts of social and political order. Islam, for example, was discovered by Muslim activists as a cultural and political resource (see Epkenhans 2016, pp. 181–90).

The conflict between secular government and Islamic mobilisation thus played an important role before the outbreak of the war, and it continues to do so even today, informing the regime’s ‘politics of security’. For instance, authorities frequently link Islamism with neighbouring Afghanistan and political terrorism and, thus, present Islamism as an existential threat to the security of the Tajik state. The 2015 ban on the Islamic Renaissance Party is rooted in this narrative. Moreover, such a view is echoed in both the old Soviet conceptualisation of Islam as incompatible with a Tajik identity, and in contemporary international discourses that frame Islamism as the dominant security threat in Central Asia (Lemon 2016, p. 121). Such narratives have served to lend considerable legitimacy to the growing unilateral state violence against Islamic activists and opponents that has been observed in recent years (see Thibault, this issue; Lemon & Thibault 2018). They have also largely immunised the Tajik authorities against international criticism in this area.

One example of this came in the form of violent clashes in the Rasht Valley (northern Tajikistan), which flared up repeatedly between 2009 and 2011. These clashes claimed the lives of around 100 members of the military and opposition militias. During the civil war, the valley was considered a stronghold of the Islamic opposition, which also controlled much of the region after the conclusion of the peace treaty. The government used the return of Mullo Abdullo, a former militia leader, as an opportunity to carry out alleged anti-drug operations. Attacks and raids on government troops and buildings followed, as well as a bomb explosion in Dushanbe. The government presented its actions as part of a broader struggle against Islamist terrorism. However, the conflicts are at least partly due to individual actors inside and outside the government attempting to gain control over resources, which in the case of the Rasht Valley, include rich coal mines (Hamrin & Lemon 2015).

The government’s portrayal of its altercations with rival forces as a matter of containing the drug trade and organised crime, or as a fight against Islamist insurgencies in other cases, is a clear indication of the ‘politics of security’ used by the government to strengthen its own position as a provider of security while maintaining its grip on power and control over both political elites and the population at large. The regime and its ‘politics of security’ continue to face challenges, such as revelations of behind-the-scenes meddling in regional and international media (see Epkenhans 2016, ch. 7), which also point to the illicit and corrupt practices of elite circles and the injustice they present vis-à-vis a population that is heavily reliant on low-income jobs and labour migration.

Although much emphasis has been placed on the political-institutional and discursive dimensions of the government’s politics of security and its depoliticising effects, the economic aspect of the postwar politics of security should not be overlooked. Analysing postwar peace-building from the microlevel of everyday practices, Kluczewska (2020) has recently argued that postwar conflict management in Tajikistan may be accurately described as a top-down strategy of political elites with the aim of avoiding collective mobilisation and large-scale anti-regime protest. However, in socio-economic terms, postwar Tajikistan can be considered as a largely atomised society. Compared with the collectivism of the Soviet Union, social life in Tajikistan is concentrated in small communities and narrow social spaces with the consequence that ‘collective local agency may no longer exist’ (Kluczewska 2020, p. 565). In economic terms, the rolling back of welfare support and public sector employment has meant that the state is no longer materially incentivising or ‘buying’ people’s loyalty, but is leaving them to fend for themselves in the neoliberal market economy (Kluczewska 2020, p. 555). As a result, people do not make claims on the state as they do not expect any improvement of their socio-economic situation. Instead of controversy and debate, the individualist pursuit of neoliberal citizen subjects and calls to moral virtue and diligence by the government present a clear case of depoliticisation as proposed above.

Therefore, Tajikistan is a prime example of a country where ‘politics of security’ can legitimise a peace which, despite its fragility is still preferred by most people and not publicly called into question because of the state’s politics of security and its depoliticising effects.

Kyrgyzstan: maintaining interethnic peace under ‘democratic’ capitalism

In Kyrgyzstan, the subsequent regimes of presidents Askar Akaev (1991–2005), Kurmanbek Bakiev (2005–2010), Almazbek Atambaev (2011–2018) and Sooronbay Jeenbekov (2018–2020) have arguably faced the greatest challenges in both consolidating power and maintaining peace. Powerholders have not been able to maintain consistent control in the economic, political-institutional or discursive-ideological realms. In economic terms, large-scale privatisation, market reforms and the failure to create an effective tax collection apparatus consistently incapacitated state institutions from effectively addressing tensions, security issues and conflicts that inevitably evolved in the increasingly complex social and dire economic situation. Given the massive 50% drop in GDP from 1990 to 1995, and the drop in industrial employment to 35% of its former level in the same period (Igamberdiev 2016, p. 135), unemployment rose and general economic conditions worsened. Furthermore, opportunities to make a living in newly emerging sectors like bazaar trade and small businesses became limited by rent extraction from organised crime, state regulation and taxation (see for example, Spector 2017). These problems and the main challenge of interethnic peace could not be effectively addressed either in the political-institutional sphere or in that of discourses and ideas, where successive presidents saw their hegemonic positions vanish in light of scrutiny and criticism.

With independence, voices within the Kyrgyz ‘titular’ ethnic community increasingly demanded more representation and even dominance within various spheres of life, at the expense of the supposedly excessive privileges of Russian and other ethnicities. Hence, the key difficulty for all political regimes in Kyrgyzstan has been the management of interethnic relations, including the multiple and contradictory claims of different communities and the avoidance of further tensions or open conflict. As documented by a number of authors (see for example, Marat 2008; Laruelle 2012; Megoran 2017), the first president, Askar Akaev, attempted to assuage competition and animosities by embracing the Soviet ‘peoples’ friendship’ (Russian: druzhba narodov) model under the banner ‘Kyrgyzstan—our common home’ (Kyrgyzstan—nash obshchii dom) that emphasised the richness and benefits of a diverse, multicultural society. Because his economic reformist agenda did not bring about the promised growth and prosperity, and also because of his increasingly patrimonial, self-enriching and corrupt conduct, Akaev was eventually toppled in 2005 and followed by Kurmanbek Bakiev. Both Bakiev and later Almazbek Atambaev, who was elected in 2011, pursued more patriotic and nationalistically inclined cultural politics, which were arguably driven by even more aggressive voices in the political spectrum (Marat 2008, 2016). The main theme of the ‘politics of security’ in Kyrgyzstan is thus the maintenance of interethnic stability amid pressures from representatives of the titular ethnic group for a more dominant position.

Violence between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in south Kyrgyzstan in 1990 and 2010, essentially followed existing patterns of intergroup conflict (Bonacker 2020, pp. 209–12). In the years preceding the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Moscow’s leadership and institutional capacities for conflict management were weak. Furthermore, peaceful coexistence within the ethno-federalist model of the Soviet Union gave way to nationalist sentiments and demands (Marat 2008). The origins of intergroup conflicts in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan lie principally in the construction and demarcation of constituent republics of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s (Hirsch 2005). Within the context of Soviet nationality policies, each of these three republics served as a titular nation for minorities within the borders of the other republics. Frequently, minorities were concentrated in border regions. In 1989, for instance, the Uzbek minority made up about 20–25% of the population in southern Kyrgyzstan and was actually the majority in some areas (Abashin 2018, p. 8). Ever since the ‘national territorial delimitation’, and especially when these three states gained independence some 70 years later, the republic-building processes of the 1920s resulted in conflict-laden majority and minority ethnic constellations and enclaves, as well as controversial border settlements, in all three states (Hirsch 2005; Megoran 2017).

The 1990 conflict was mainly sparked by controversies over land distribution. These had a clear ethnic component, as poor Kyrgyz dwellers from Osh and rural areas demanded redistribution of land from the Lenin collective farm, which was largely populated by Uzbeks (Abashin 2018, p. 8). The authorities’ decision to indeed reallocate some of the land in question led to a confrontation between the competing groups, during which police shot Uzbek demonstrators, which sparked pogroms and riots in Osh and the wider region, especially in Uzgen and Aravan (Abashin 2018, pp. 8–9). After the fighting was stopped by Red Army forces (Laruelle 2012, p. 39), Askar Akaev, elected as the first president of the Kyrgyz SSR in October 1990s, presented himself as a paternalistic guarantor of interethnic peace in the established Soviet-era fashion. The conflict was not negotiated or settled but repressed with reference to its dangerous potential for interethnic relations, while ‘interethnic accord’ (mezhdunarodnoe or mezhetnichskoe soglasie) (Marat 2008, p. 31; Laruelle 2012, p. 40) became the main component of Akaev’s early ‘politics of security’. Thus, the underlying problems with interethnic relations and urgent socio-economic issues faced by the affected communities were depoliticised. In this way, Akaev, similar to Nursultan Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan, balanced, at least temporarily, economic and societal problems by presenting himself as a protector of the country’s ethnic pluralism and strengthened his power base by securing the loyalty of Kyrgyzstan’s ethnic minorities.

Akaev’s civic nationalism, emphasising the ‘unity in diversity’ of the different constituent groups, gave way to a more ethnonationalist discourse celebrating the historical greatness of the Kyrgyz, their ancient history and their legendary forefather Manas, whose epic became part of the country’s public life and education curriculum (Marat 2008, p. 15). After Akaev was ousted, Bakiev pursued this deepening of ethnocultural and ethnonationalist politics, instituting various initiatives based on a national ideology aimed to further strengthen Kyrgyz predominance in cultural and political terms (Laruelle 2012, pp. 39–40). Apart from corruption and self-enrichment, his increasingly weak grip on power was ultimately attributed to his inability to balance the demands of different political factions and groupings, which included representatives of the Uzbek community and the nationalist and patriotic parties opposing them (Laruelle 2012).

In 2010, President Bakiev was overthrown. He fled from the capital Bishkek to Jalalabad in southern Kyrgyzstan, his home region. In order to further destabilise the political situation in the south and delegitimise the transitional government, Bakiev’s supporters spread rumours that the Uzbek community would retaliate. In Osh, the second largest city in Kyrgyzstan, the situation began to escalate. In June 2010, a small dispute in central Osh drew large crowds, leading to communal violence against Uzbeks, including mass rape, the destruction of houses and shops, and targeted murders. Before long, a wave of refugees was heading for Uzbekistan. A total of 426 people lost their lives, around 2,000 were injured and 3,000 houses and public facilities were destroyed (Abashin 2018, p. 10). This conflict, which came to be known as ‘Osh’ or ‘June events’ attracted international attention and controversy and inaugurated a new phase of ‘politics of security’ predicated on interethnic peace, which was remarkably similar to that of the Akaev era.

As in 1990, Kyrgyz officials blamed the Uzbeks for the violence, even though Uzbeks accounted for around two-thirds of the victims. Different reports by international commissions and organisations were not approved by the government,⁶ which accused some of these actors of falsely portraying events and went as far as declaring Kimo Kiljunen, the head of the international Kyrgyzstan Inquiry Commission, persona non grata and revoking cooperation with the OSCE and the United States over quarrels on human rights issues in the aftermath of the ‘2010 events’ (Gullette & Heathershaw 2015, p. 126). The government around interim President Roza Otunbaeva rejected the overall message and recommendations of the KIC report, thus reflecting the popular sentiment that Kyrgyz victimhood had not been duly represented (Gullette & Heathershaw 2015, p. 126). This line was also pursued by President Atambaev, who was elected in late 2011. It can be argued the government has effectively tried to silence the issue of ongoing identity-based conflict since 2010. This has been documented in various analyses of the forms of discrimination, forced redistribution of business assets and relocation to other parts of town, and also irregularities in police investigations and lack of post-conflict justice (Bennett 2016; Ismailbekova & Karimova 2018).

While low-level interethnic conflict is ongoing, unnoticed or sanitised from public discourse, the government has attempted to recalibrate interethnic relations by adjustments in the political-institutional realm, namely through the ‘Conception for Strengthening National Unity and Inter-Ethnic Relations’, a national policy strategy adopted by the presidential administration in 2013 after a long public debate.⁷ As Marat has shown in detail, the Conception primarily mirrors Kyrgyz nationalist notions of the nation and its culture as it decrees the strengthening of Kyrgyz as the state language and of Kyrgyz culture with no mention of or provision for minority cultures and languages (Marat 2016). The Conception’s effect of further marginalising Uzbeks and other minorities is thus undeniable, especially given the access barriers encountered by non-Kyrgyz speakers facing republican school exams in Kyrgyz, Kyrgyz-language proficiency tests for civil servants and the mandating of Kyrgyz-language public service communication. The promotion of Kyrgyz language and culture points to a ‘politics of security’ where the interest of the Kyrgyz titular ethnicity has finally gained dominance over those of other groups, making the interethnic peace in Kyrgyzstan a hierarchical and potentially structurally violent one. It can thus be argued that the post-imperial reinscription of ‘peoples’ friendship’ put forward by Akaev’s ‘common home’ policy has gradually given way to an overt ethnic nationalism.

The ‘2010 events’ in Kyrgyzstan are undoubtedly the most visible form of intergroup conflict that has occurred in post-imperial Central Asia. However, below the threshold of such organised violence, a number of other conflicts have continued to fester. These occasionally lead to violent altercations, often over resources especially between communities in border regions in the Ferghana Valley. For example, there are repeated incidents between Tajiks and Kyrgyz along the common border, arising from contested access to land and water and from a certain ambiguity over the precise location of the border itself. Differing legal traditions with respect to the ownership of, and access to, agricultural land and a general lack of overall regulation in the border regions have also given rise to conflicts (Kurmanalieva 2019). Moreover, alleged or real violations of laws in these border regions led to violent clashes between groups or border troops. One recent example came in the form of contested infrastructural work on the roads around the border, which resulted in shootings.⁸

These small-scale conflicts could be seen as the inevitable legacy of territorial delimitation and the chessboard pattern of borders created by Stalin’s imperial ‘divide and rule’ approach in the early twentieth century. Their continuation in the post-imperial period is, therefore, not only a result of negligent and incapacitated state institutions. Rather, as various political analyses have shown, tensions and altercations on the border are also driven by discourses and sentiments about the threatened territorial integrity or unity of Kyrgyzstan. Thus, the ‘Batken events’ of summer 1999—the incursion of Islamic fighters into Kyrgyzstan’s southwestern Batken region that could only be ended after sustained fighting and with international military support, initially provided by neighbouring Uzbekistan—led to a surge of criticism from opposition politicians and the news media directed at the incapability of then-president Akaev to defend Kyrgyz territory (Megoran 2017, pp. 108–11). The events not only sowed the seeds of Akaev’s eventual ousting but also created the impression that Kyrgyzstan’s territory needed defending not only by border troops but also by responsible citizens. Thus, as analysed by Laruelle (2012, p. 44), the occupation of deserted Kyrgyz land to Tajik or Uzbek dwellers was constructed as a security threat, resulting in both ‘Kyrgyz land for the Kyrgyz’ rhetoric and in policies incentivising people to stay in border regions. Conflict between communities bordering the Kyrgyz–Tajik or Kyrgyz–Uzbek border have thus to be seen in their relation to the ‘politics of territorial security’ (Reeves 2014, p. 146). As Megoran (2017) showed in his analysis of the Uzbekistan–Kyrgyzstan boundary, the unregulated and often inflammatory media and public discourse in Kyrgyzstan’s young democracy often aggravated such sentiments, which were more effectively controlled and contained in Kyrgyzstan’s more authoritarian neighbouring states.⁹

Uzbekistan: leaving behind the imperial past?

Similar to its neighbour Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan has taken its own path of a gradual transition both in the economic realm and in political affairs and is able to claim some degree of success in doing so, at least when compared to Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Islam Karimov’s regime was regarded as Central Asia’s most repressive alongside Turkmenistan, and yet he also engaged in a post-imperial ‘politics of security’ to legitimise his actions. As shown by Cucciolla, Karimov orchestrated an explicit break with the Soviet past, which had come to be seen as ‘imperial’ and ‘colonial’, especially in its final years (Cucciolla 2017, pp. 662–65). Uzbekistan’s identity as a ‘victim’ of Soviet colonialism became a main feature of Karimov’s memory policy, which foregrounded the ecological exploitation of the Uzbek SSR through a cotton monoculture and, in particular, the disproportionate disciplinary measures in the context of the 1980s ‘cotton affair’ (Cucciolla 2017).¹⁰ While supposedly leaving this imperial legacy of victimhood and dependence behind, however, Karimov’s regime was still very much dependent on cotton production, and on the exploitation of an increasingly low paid and impoverished labour force. This points to the self-contradictory nature of a regime that was ‘post-imperial’ only in its self-portrayal while still operating on very much the same principles and political-economic model.

To justify this state of affairs, Karimov pointed frequently to the instability and economic collapse in neighbouring Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, which he attributed to weak rule as well as the democracy-promotion efforts of the United States and other international actors in a context that was culturally not compatible with such Western concepts. Karimov argued that political and institutional development should, rather, be based on contextually and culturally specific visions of society (Omelicheva 2015, p. 87). The ‘Uzbek path’, as described in Karimov’s own writings (Karimov 1993, 1996), therefore included a ‘strong executive power’ as а key tool to ‘bloodshed and confrontation, and to maintain … interethnic and civic accord, peace and stability at any, even the highest price’, which he saw as a precondition to achieve ‘economic prosperity’ (Karimov 1996, pp. 95, 107). In addition to external enemies and the threat of disorder, instability and underdevelopment, Karimov also invoked the threat of internal enemies, first and foremost Islamist insurgents and organised crime (Omelicheva 2015, p. 86). Rather than being mere discursive constructions, contestations about questions of cultural and political ordering soon led to a large-scale conflict that would significantly shape Karimov’s ‘politics of security’.

Given the generally perceived stability of Karimov’s rule, the shooting of protestors by National Security Service (SNB) troops in Andijon in May 2005 drew regional and international attention. The exact number of casualties is unclear and disputed between the Uzbek government and international observers. While the government claimed that SNB forces killed 187 armed hostage-taking insurgents, almost all other accounts report at least 800 deaths, the majority of them civilian (Kendzior 2006; Hartman 2016). The precursor to this violence was the arrest of a group of local businessmen accused of planning a political coup. The ensuing protests escalated dramatically, resulting in the forcible freeing of hundreds of prisoners, including the businessmen. The protesters occupied several administrative buildings. Negotiations between the government of Islam Karimov and the insurgents failed, and the military was ordered to crush the protests by force.

Accounts of what happened next vary considerably. It has not been possible to establish definitively the extent to which the protesters also resorted to the use of force. Equally uncertain, but very unlikely, is the veracity of the government’s claim that radical Islamic groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir were involved in the events. Certainly, such groups were very active in Andijon at the time. Either way, there is a basic consensus in the scholarly literature that the security forces used a disproportionate level of violence.¹¹ The protests in Andijon occurred in a context of rapidly growing dissatisfaction with the regime. It can be reasonably assumed that the government felt acutely threatened by these developments. The overthrow of the Akaev government in Kyrgyzstan had probably created a sense of vulnerability (Burnashev & Chernykh 2007). Bearing in mind that there is limited knowledge of the actual degree of organisation and violent mobilisation of Islamic groups in Uzbekistan, this presents a clear parallel with the securitisation of radical Islam by President Rahmon of Tajikistan to justify violence and repression.

Essential for Karimov’s attempt to consolidate authority through a politics of security was the establishment of a discursive hegemony in which he tried to depoliticise the incidents. In his official account, Karimov objected strongly to any description of the events as an ‘uprising’ and thus as incidents of a political conflict. In fact, he insisted, these were the acts of armed criminals and terrorists. Hence, he presented the events as security incidents and as a threat to public order. Karimov repeatedly stressed that the violence in Andijon provided ample testimony to the dangers of radicalised Islam, as opposed to more moderate Uzbek Islam (Megoran 2008, pp. 18–20).

In cases of de facto unilateral state violence, the way in which this violence is conceptualised and depicted publicly is of crucial significance. This depiction often draws on established patterns of discourse, such as the threat of Islamism in the Uzbek case. However, unilateral violence in Uzbekistan is perpetrated not only by the state, but also by extremist groups such as the Islamic Jihad Union (Uzbek: Islomii Jihod Ittihodi). A year before the events in Andijon, a total of 47 people were killed in several terrorist attacks. Indeed, it seems likely that the memory of these attacks played a role in persuading the Karimov government of the need for harsh measures in response to the protests in Andijon (Hartman 2016). In appealing to the people and justifying the increasing number of human rights violations and other consequences of Uzbekistan’s fight against terrorism, Karimov argued, ‘it is better to have hundreds arrested than thousands killed’ (cited in Matveeva 2009, p. 1109). As Mariya Omelicheva concluded, ‘these views are shared by the Uzbek ruling elite and many ordinary people influenced by the fear-mongering propaganda about the threat of radical Islamists’ (Omelicheva 2015, p. 87).

Karimov’s ‘politics of security’ can in this sense be seen as more substantial and effective, while less performative or subject to challenge than in Kyrgyzstan, with its democratised public sphere, or in Tajikistan, where the discursive sphere and available repertoires have long been shaped by international cooperation frameworks. In particular, in comparison with Tajikistan, Karimov’s politics of security were prioritising nation-building by loosening regional and international links. From a political-institutional point of view, Karimov created a security state with a high level of repression and a somewhat North Korean-like opacity, although lacking a similar cult of personality (Lewis 2012). The socio-economic dimension of the government’s politics of security corresponds with the simultaneous establishment of a post-Soviet ‘developmental state’ characterised by isolationist tendencies and direct government intervention in economic affairs. As an outcome of this, the production and export of cotton was decreased while food production was increased in order to strengthen post-imperial sovereignty (Bolesta 2019).

Karimov’s sudden death in September 2016 had particular implications for the political-institutional dimension of the politics of security. As Schiek’s analysis points out, the changes brought about by the new president, Shavkat Mirziyoev, such as opening up the economy to international investment and capital markets, ‘ultimately serve to generate political legitimacy and are, thus, also instruments of power consolidation’ (Schiek 2018, p. 98). Especially remarkable is Mirziyoev’s criticism of the security services in which he compared them to the Stalin-era NKVD (Schiek 2018, p. 97), which mirrored Karimov’s attempt to break with the Soviet ‘imperial’ past. How much change or continuity the ‘new’ era brings remains questionable in light of reports on the ‘continued use of widespread, routine torture and ill-treatment by law enforcement and prison officials’ (Abdurasulov 2019). Therefore, Uzbekistan’s ‘politics of security’ can be understood as post-imperial in terms of the continued application of control and ordering in the realms of security, public order and the economy, which are accompanied by evolving discourses on the country’s renewal and progress from past forms of violence and injustice.

Kazakhstan: development and its discontents

As the previous sections have indicated, the attempts of Central Asian governments to present themselves as guarantors of security and order in the face of imminent internal or external dangers is an essential aspect of post-imperial politics of security. This also holds true for the regime of Kazakhstan’s former president, Nursultan Nazarbaev, who had been in power since the country’s independence until the transfer of power to his successor Kassym-Jomart Tokaev in March 2019. As explored in more depth by Schiek’s contribution, Nazarbaev’s regime has benefited from exceptional economic development and growth rates while making, at best, moderate political-institutional adjustments and retaining a strong grip on its de facto, yet not unchallenged, discursive-ideological hegemony. In a striking similarity to Uzbekistan’s Karimov, Nazarbaev personally wrote a foundational national narrative that set out the country’s victimisation by the Soviet imperial power, its long-standing nomadic cultural heritage and the corresponding special ‘development path’ that he had chosen for it. Regarding the first aspect, the referent object of Kazakhstan’s victimisation was less the ecocidal consequences of Soviet industrial agriculture and, primarily, the fallout of Soviet nuclear testing in Semipalatinsk in the Kazakh Steppe, as well as Moscow’s long silence about it. In their analysis of Nazarbaev’s writing, Werner and Purvis-Roberts argue that the president had ‘taken an active role in the construction of a shared history of nuclear testing … to position himself (and his government) as a moral actor, relative to the immoral Soviet state’ (Werner & Purvis-Roberts 2014, p. 298). Their analysis further demonstrates Nazarbaev’s leading role in revealing the tremendous health consequences of the ‘polygon’ (test site) to neighbouring villagers and in making independent Kazakhstan a regional and global leader in denuclearisation (Werner & Purvis-Roberts 2014, pp. 298–301).

The pronounced break from the imperial past was accompanied by the embrace of an agenda of opening, privatising and modernising the economy, which was more selective than in Kyrgyzstan and more comprehensive than the ‘Uzbek path’. Very similar to the latter, however, Nazarbaev favoured a gradual and conditional opening up to democratic reforms, which were necessarily preceded by economic development and stability. He argued that ‘presidential power enabled us to focus on resolving pressing problems and conducting the most urgent reforms as swiftly as possible instead of being sidetracked by protracted discussions and quests for compromises and half-measures’ (Nazarbaev 2008, p. 8). Mariya Omelicheva sums up his position as one framing ‘presidential rule … as the most effective solution to political and economic emergencies, and any alternatives to state control are construed as recipes for destabilization and crisis’ (Omelicheva 2015, p. 75). However, given the blurry line between different degrees of crisis and the daily needs of policymaking in vast countries like Kazakhstan, it can be argued that this presents the technocratic claim to top-down policymaking where ‘state of exception’ logics have become the rule.¹² As elsewhere in Central Asia, this paternalistic politics of economic security with the president as ‘effective manager’ (Prozorov 2016) was not spared discontent and failure in light of the societal challenges that Kazakhstan faced despite its economic development.

Similar to Kyrgyzstan, challenges in Kazakhstani society emanated from the significant degree of ethnic diversity: a very large ethnic Russian population predominating, especially in urban areas and in the country’s north, and the increasing popular sentiment that Kazakhs should assert their status as the titular national group (Dave 2007, ch. 6). However, open conflict and violence as well as more daily forms of competition between ethnic groups was well known from the Soviet period. As Dadabayeva and Sharipova (2016) showed, deadly interethnic clashes had already occurred in the late Soviet period, most visibly in the oil town Novy Uzen in the country’s west. These pointed to a rising ‘economic nationalism’ on the part of Kazakhs who were discontented with the ‘lack of developed local industries and the withdrawal of oil resources for the benefit of other Soviet republics’ (Dadabayeva & Sharipova 2016, p. 226).

Given the continuing importance of such challenges, another main pillar of Nazarbaev’s reign was his attention to maintaining a degree of interethnic harmony. This took a shape similar to Kyrgyzstan’s reproduction of Soviet-era ‘peoples’ friendship’, with an ‘Assembly of the Peoples of Kazakhstan’ representing the different ethnic groups and their cultural richness (Dave 2007, pp. 131–33) and with architectural landmarks such as the Palace of Peace and Reconciliation in Astana symbolising the country’s commitment to intercultural harmony (Dave 2007, p. 168). As Omelicheva notes, Nazarbaev liked to speak ‘of his state as an exemplar of interethnic harmony and a model of stability in a sea of violent conflict’ (Omelicheva 2015, p. 76). Yet, this variant of ‘politics of security’ and its depoliticisation of social discontent would come under scrutiny throughout the post-Soviet period.

The most significant outbreak of unrest and subsequent state violence was the oilfield protests in western Kazakhstan in the spring of 2011. These protests took place in the cities of Zhanaozen and Shetpe, in a region of crucial oil and gas exploitation. Since the early 2000s, there have been repeated strikes and calls for an improvement in the difficult living conditions in this region. The protests were preceded by strikes against imminent pay cuts. Hundreds of workers were laid off as a result of their participation, which caused the protests to escalate. In clashes with protesting oil workers, the police shot and killed 16 people and police violence was captured on video. Authorities sought to blame these developments on external instigators (Stein 2012), while Kazakh media pointed to a lack of integration by immigrant ethnic Kazakhs, the so-called oralman, as the basis of tensions in the region. At the same time, the state used social media and online blogs to spread its version of events; that is, to establish discursive dominance over the interpretation of what had happened (Lewis et al. 2018). As in the case of the 2005 Andijan events, events in Zhanaozen were followed by an official information campaign that aimed to maintain the narrative of the state as guarantor of security and, thus, to depoliticise the conflict and the political claims of the protesters. To this end, the state security apparatus undertook a number of actions, including threatening and intimidation of journalists, to prevent the circulation of any information or witness accounts of the Zhanaozen events (Kostyuchenko 2019).

Both in Zhanaozen and elsewhere, detentions, trials, jail sentences, informal pressure and other ways of repressing dissent have arguably led to dissatisfaction and grievance among the population. Although the link with the government’s practices and ‘politics of security’ is still unclear, a clear new security problem is posed by the increasing number of terrorist attacks that have hit Kazakhstan in recent years.¹³ Also in 2011, a series of bomb attacks and shootings hit the National Security Committee’s (KNB) and government buildings in Aktobe in western Kazakhstan and the capital Astana (May and June), and in Atyrau and the southern city of Taraz (both in October) (Umarov 2019). With local connections to ISIS increasing, along with the recruitment of Kazakhstani citizens to fight in the conflict in Syria and Iraq, 2016 saw the deadliest attack, again in Aktobe, where about 20 armed persons robbed two hunting stores and attacked a National Guard station, killing seven and injuring at least 37 people (Erubaeva 2019). As commentators pointed out, given the ‘target choice and execution’, the attacks appeared as ‘a poorly-organized, poorly-funded operation sparked by anger at the state’ rather than having a primary religious motivation (Putz 2016).¹⁴

The government and security services have maintained a focus on the external and religious links of the attackers, not least in light of the widening of attempted attacks on Russian military units, for example, one near Balkhash, and apparent plans to conduct attacks in Russia itself (Michael 2016). The recently passed US$700 million strategy to combat violent radicalism emphasised societal engagement, stating the government’s intentions to involve religious associations and NGOs to educate the population, particularly youth, with ‘counter-propaganda materials’ and ‘playful elements and interactive methods’.¹⁵ These and other measures are not sufficient, however, to alleviate the undeniable role of the government’s restrictive and at times repressive approach to dealing with political dissent and social issues, which may itself be enhancing trajectories of radicalisation.¹⁶

A case in point is the continuing interethnic tensions, which have in February 2020 led to violent clashes and the deaths of 11 people in the village of Masanchi in the southern Kordai district, which is mostly populated by the Dungan minority (Levine 2020). While the government downplayed the significance of the ethnicity of the involved parties, various commentators have pointed to the fact that competition in socio-economic and business areas is playing out along ethnic lines and has repeatedly erupted into violent clashes; for example, in the Tengiz oil and gas field in 2006, in the Almaty region in 2007 and in a Tajik-majority village in the south in 2015 (Levine 2020; Sorbello 2020). President Tokaev’s attempts to control the narrative by announcing he would ‘hold accountable persons who incite inter-ethnic discord, spread provocative rumors and disinformation’ (cited in Levine 2020) bear close resemblance to the Kyrgyz authorities’ efforts to keep discussion of interethnic issues out of public discourse. Thus, similar to other challenges faced by the Kazakhstani government, tense interethnic relations and the discontent of workers in key industries are challenges carried forward from the Soviet period of ‘imperial’ dominance. Having rhetorically and symbolically left behind this domination by, and dependence on, Moscow, the government’s post-imperial ‘politics of security’ can contain the discontents of its generally successful development path but, as in other Central Asian states, it has not managed to fundamentally transcend them.

Conclusion

In introducing our theoretical framework, we have argued that the post-imperial character of Central Asian regimes, of the conflicts they inherited from the Soviet past, and of their respective ways of dealing with violent conflict can be grasped in three interrelated dimensions, namely economic, political-institutional and discursive-ideational. In reflecting on our analyses, we want to highlight some findings along these dimensions that exhibit the reinscription of imperial ordering logics in the post-imperial continuity of conflict lines and ‘politics of security’ that we have observed in the Central Asian republics. As argued initially, the imperial character of these logics lies in how they ‘write’ and ‘talk’ insecurity and corresponding security and securitisation needs ‘into existence’ (Huysmans 2006, p. 7) in ways that contradict modernity and Enlightenment knowledge, which is otherwise claimed as a basis of ruling authority (Gilroy 2004; Stoler 2016, pp. 210–14). The first imperial continuity can be seen with the downplaying or denial of economic problems in the Soviet state, as Central Asian governments have depoliticised discussions on such issues and presented them as threats to stability. This is most obvious in the case of conflicts associated with labour rights and working conditions in Kazakhstan, while such topics seem much more marginal and suppressed in the other three countries examined. The same can be said with regard to labour migration, which has been successfully depoliticised by the regimes domestically, although this has caused tensions between Central Asian states and Russia in the past. Together with Kazakhstan, the case of Kyrgyzstan underlines the significant implications of economic issues for competition and—possibly fatal—conflict along ethnic lines. In this regard, ‘titular’ ethnic demands for a stronger representation, in particular, in the economic field after the dissolution of the USSR and in national politics in the 2000s, have led to increased tensions between the majority and the (predominantly Uzbek) minority who faced increasing pressure and, especially since the events in Osh, marginalisation both in politics and everyday life. Similar to many Western countries, Central Asian states, particularly Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, appear to adopt a still very much imperial approach to governing difference, as they downplay or deny completely the ethnonationalist and racist logics of exclusion and hierarchy that continue to shape everyday life and thus remain unchallenged.

In the political-institutional dimension, the Central Asian regimes continue the Soviet policy of strengthening the state security apparatus on one hand and of securitising oppositional forces on the other. This is most obvious in the case of Uzbekistan, which has exploited conflicts to increase security capacity in order to suppress challenges to the regime. The post-imperial Tajik state has drawn on the same repertoire but shown a decisive lack of capacity to resolve conflicts and failed to unify the different regional power bases. Therefore, conflict and tension with regional factions continue and are constantly balanced by the counterinsurgency and less violent capacities of the government, which are supported by regional and international partnerships and support programmes (Lemon 2016). As do many other places globally, Tajikistan as a country thus resembles the ‘frozen conflicts’ of the Caucasus or Eastern Ukraine more than a case of accomplished postwar peacebuilding. While the regime has, like the one in Kyrgyzstan, adapted to this situation, the instability and possible long-term consequences—including re-emergence of violent action—of such repressive forms of ‘peace’ require careful consideration.

However, this example already shows that the emergence and continuation of conflict in post-imperial Central Asia cannot be limited to questions of state capacity and state fragility. On the contrary, they are often associated with discourses about threatened territorial integrity and national sovereignty, as is most obvious in the cases of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. As we demonstrated, in the discursive-ideational dimension political order is understood by regimes as essentially being linked to state authority. Uzbekistan is a telling example as, with explicit reference to failing Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, Karimov established a powerful authoritarian state that was able to succeed in authoritarian conflict management. In this post-imperial worldview, conflicts seem to threaten public order and undermine the authority of regimes that fear being considered weak. Thus, political legitimacy emerges from the capacity to depoliticise conflicts and contain resistance, at least as far as the public sphere is concerned. Therefore, Uzbekistan’s and Tajikistan’s ‘politics of security’ continue to control and order society most effectively, while regimes in Kazakhstan (especially in the wake of the recent power transition) and Kyrgyzstan (during most of its post-independence period) have faced increasing challenges in the evolving spaces of online and news media and social movements.¹⁷ While more detailed analysis of the variation of politics of security across time and space is still needed, this first insight from our comparison and the collection more generally points to the analytic value of ‘politics of security’.

Finally, when critically considering the (post-)imperial politics of security and depoliticisation, one important aspect needs to be borne in mind. The analysis we have presented focused on the four Central Asian countries where, unlike in Turkmenistan, some degree of access, exchange and production of scholarship has been possible, and similar analyses for other countries in the post-Soviet space and wider Eurasia are a possibility. However, such an analysis should by no means be limited to this particular region and the Soviet and Russian empires. Rather, as we have hinted, future scholarship needs to tackle the similarities and parallels with Central (Eur)Asia’s post-imperial politics of security that other empires and their present-day successor states—both in the metropole and the periphery—demonstrate. Only with such a complex and wide-reaching understanding of the dynamics of cooperation, cross-fertilisation and acceleration of post-imperial rule, past and present, can scholarship contribute to inform attempts to move beyond these legacies to establish more equitable, inclusive and peaceful forms of life.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft as part of the Collaborative Research Cluster 138 ‘Dynamics of Security. Types of Securitization from a Historical Perspective’.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thorsten Bonacker

Thorsten Bonacker, Collaborative Research Cluster ‘Dynamics of Security’, Center for Conflict Studies, University of Marburg, Germany. Email: [email protected]

Philipp Lottholz

Philipp Lottholz, Collaborative Research Cluster ‘Dynamics of Security’, Center for Conflict Studies, University of Marburg, Germany. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 For example, Müller (2019).

2 See also the special issue guest edited by Adeeb Khalid: ‘Locating the (Post-)Colonial in Soviet History’, Central Asian Survey, 26, 4.

3 See Schiek, this issue.

4 See Schiek’s discussion on ‘consultative ideology’ in this special issue.

5 ‘Tajikistan Begins Troop Withdrawal After Rallies in East’, Eurasianet, 24 August 2012, available at: https://eurasianet.org/tajikistan-begins-troop-withdrawal-after-rallies-in-east, accessed 30 April 2020.

6 A Chronicle of Violence: The Events in the South of Kyrgyzstan in June 2010 (Osh Region) (Oslo, Norwegian Helsinki Committee, Memorial Human Rights Center, and Freedom House), available at: https://www.nhc.no/en/a-chronicle-of-violence-report-details-june-2010-events-in-kyrgyzstan/, accessed 9 September 2021; ‘Report of the Independent International Commission into the Events in Southern Kyrgyzstan in June 2010’, Kyrgyzstan Inquiry Commission, 2011, available at: http://www.kgzembind.in/Report%20(English)pdf, accessed 7 September 2012.

7 Kontseptsiya ukrepleniya i edinstva naroda i mezhetnicheskikh otnoshenii, President of the Kyrgyz Republic, 10 April 2013, available at: http://www.president.kg/files/docs/kontseptsiya_ukrepleniya_edinstva_naroda_i_mejetnicheskih_otnosheniy_v_kr.pdf, accessed 7 December 2021.

8 ‘Four Killed in Tajikistan–Kyrgyzstan Border Clash’, Eurasianet, 17 September 2019, available at: https://eurasianet.org/four-killed-in-tajikistan-kyrgyzstan-border-clash, accessed 30 April 2020.

9 See also Megoran and Rakhmatullaev, this issue.

10 This was possibly the biggest scandal in late Soviet Central Asia, spurred by the realisation that the Uzbek authorities had over-reported cotton production by up to 340,000 tonnes annually. The consequences included prosecutions, the launch of a far-reaching anti-corruption campaign within the Communist Party of Uzbekistan (CPUz) and a highly publicised intervention by the Central Committee, which eventually entailed the resignation of the CPUz leader Rafiq Nishanov, who was succeeded by Islam Karimov (see Cucciolla 2017, pp. 645–48).

11 For a nuanced analysis see Khalid (2014, p. 192), Hartman (2016).

12 See the Introduction to this special issue.

13 The protests erupted in early 2022 in Zhanaozen to then spread across the country can be understood as a crisis in the politics of security of the Kazakhstani government, which obviously cannot rely on its previous repertoire and its own security apparatus. The intervention by the Collective Security Treaty Organisation certainly marks a turning point in Kazakhstan's political history.

14 See also Umarov (2019).

15 ‘286 milliardov tenge planiruyut potratit’ na bor’bu s terrorizmom’, Tengrinews.kz, 18 November 2018, available at: https://tengrinews.kz/kazakhstan_news/286-milliardov-tenge-planiruyut-potratit-borbu-terrorizmom-336394/, accessed 30 April 2020.

16 See, for example, Lemon (2016).

17 See the arguments put forward in this collection by Megoran and Rakhmatullaev, and Schiek.