Understanding the Post-Imperial Politics of Security, Stability and Ordering in Central Asia: An Introduction

The difficulty of building long-lasting peace and comprehensive security in societies emerging from conflict and external rule seems to be particularly pronounced in the peripheries of the former Soviet Union and its sphere of influence. The limited success and failures of long-standing efforts to build up and shape state structures and institutions that guarantee democratic, peaceful and secure development have led to increased questioning of the assumptions of liberal and institutionalist approaches that have long dominated scientific and policy debates. Given the sustained and increasingly sophisticated ways in which regional regimes shape and restrict possibilities for cooperation and interaction, and, more significantly, the livelihoods of their populations, there appears to be ample room for further discussion of new ways of grasping current political and societal developments in Central Asia against their historical background.

This special issue seeks to facilitate a better understanding of continuities, parallels, path dependencies and possible future scenarios of the development of sustainable peace and security in Central Asia in light of its imperial legacies. Drawing together historical, political and area studies perspectives, as well as critical and post-colonial approaches in critical security studies, political science and IR, the collection seeks to elucidate the macro-level and international relations perspectives, while also considering micro-level and sector-specific dynamics of ‘(post-)imperial politics’ in Central Asia. The specific contribution that we seek to bring to debates on the region and analogous cases beyond Central Asia develops along two lines. First, the in-depth inquiry of current post-imperial policies, practices and lifeworlds—as well as their imperial precursors—can yield new empirical insights that help to refine established understandings of life before, during and after the Soviet Union. Such differentiation and nuancing, as we illustrate below, can be valuable for more critically, and perhaps realistically, assessing present possibilities of progressive social and political change and the barriers posed to it by the persistence of past forms of rule and administration. Secondly and relatedly, theories and concepts of domination, resistance and change may not only be challenged and re-thought in light of newly evident empirical realities, but also thanks to the theoretical and disciplinary dialogue that this special issue enacts. As we show in more detail below, bringing together political science and critical security studies perspectives under the term ‘politics of security’ (see Huysmans 2006) helps to channel existing research into a new agenda that tackles and may grapple more effectively with the current or newly emerging deadlocks in Central Asian politics.

As we have indicated, we believe that this special issue captures a juncture, the contours of which have been shaped by critical studies of security, conflict and politics in Central Asia and the wider Eurasian space (Marat 2008; Mahapatra 2012; Heathershaw & Cooley 2015; Owen et al. 2018). These and other publications have highlighted a specific Central Asian manifestation of what could be called a fundamental regressive shift in the political relations between states and populaces across the world (Dzenovska & Kurtović 2018). Both recent and more dated studies in the areas of peacebuilding (Heathershaw 2009; Reeves 2014), governance and political participation (see Ismailbekova 2017), and norm diffusion and localisation more generally (see, for instance, Omelicheva 2015; Kluczewska 2019), have shown that whatever international, and for many years Western-dominated actors do to facilitate democratic transition, peace and security in Central Asia, things rarely turn out the way they are supposed to. A more pessimistic view might hold that whatever attempts are made at assistance and cooperation in Central Asia, they end up getting turned around and thus fail to prevent or even advance the further sophistication and deepening of authoritarian regimes in this region.

In this situation, it was the motivation of this special issue to continue in-depth analysis in dialogue of international and regional scholars to exhibit the ways in which processes and practices get captured and inverted by regressive elite interests, and to exhibit how different societal and political actors point to the policies and actions needed to build more holistic and sustainable forms of security and peace in Central Asia. We believe that the lens of a post-imperial ‘politics of security’ helps us to exhibit counter-productive logics of social, economic and political ordering in a way that binds together recent critical research with earlier debates on the colonial nature of the Soviet regime (Khalid 2007) and the post-colonial dynamics of newly independent states (Heathershaw 2010; Kudaibergenova 2016). By building dialogue across national and regional borders and bridges between academic, policymaking and practical fields, we hope to carry forward the critical momentum of these interventions and establish a critical approach which receives a wider and more sustained resonance both globally and in Central Asia.

The present collection is the result of a workshop on the same topic, which was hosted at the Collaborative Research Centre/Transregio 138 ‘Dynamics of Security. Types of Securitisation from a Historical Perspective’ in Marburg and Giessen (Germany). Bringing the Centre’s endeavour to historicise security across eras and areas into dialogue with perspectives on the ‘politics of security’ in Central Asia has led to a rich debate on the interconnected trajectories of imperial ordering and the changes and outcomes they have wrought across regions and spheres of influence of various empires. This special issue is the first step in galvanising this conversation into research outputs that systematically consider and map out domination, rule and resistance in the post-Soviet world and beyond. Further steps in realising this debate are necessary, most importantly in light of the relative under-representation of scholars from Central Asia, four of whom were not able to deliver their planned contributions owing to Covid-19-related disruptions or insufficient resources, while another one was unable to join the workshop event due to untimely processing of the visa application.

In mapping the conceptual steps and aspects of this endeavour, this Introduction proceeds as follows. We first set out how this special issue draws together and extends critical conversations on post-colonial legacies in critical security studies and, more specifically, the Central Asian region, and further presents the idea to conceive of Central Asia, its international relations and internal dynamics as ‘post-imperial’. In the third section, we develop the core concept of ‘politics of security’ on the basis of critical security studies (Huysmans 2006) and political science literature (Flinders & Wood 2014) and show how it presents a key node of thinking in recent Central Asian and Eurasian studies. The fourth and final section sets out the contributions of the special issue essays.

Conceptualising Central Asia’s post-imperial condition

As stated above, the key idea behind conceptualising Central Asia as a post-imperial space is to build up on and extend previous debates on the nature of the Soviet regime in this region, and also on post-colonial debates in critical security studies and social science more generally. These two aspects will be addressed in turn, before the key features of Central Asia’s post-imperial condition are briefly outlined.

Based on earlier comparative explorations of post-colonial theory in the Middle East and Central Asia (Moore 2001; Kandiyoti 2002), a first key engagement of Central Asian studies with post-colonial theory has been the 2007 Central Asian Survey special issue ‘Locating the (Post-)Colonial in Soviet History’ (Khalid 2007). This collection has drawn much attention to the ambiguities and discontents of Soviet attempts to, for instance, re-fashion societal norms around gender roles and identities (Kandiyoti 2007) and the Soviet legacy of managing multi-ethnic populations by toeing the thin line between national liberation and strengthening of traditions and identities (that is, ‘nativisation’ or korenizatsiya) on the one hand, and inter-ethnic harmony and ‘peoples’ friendship’ (druzhba narodov), on the other (Edgar 2007; Sahadeo 2007).¹ The collection has, however, brought more insights to other debates than bringing post-colonial theory to Central Asia, as Khalid’s statement suggests: ‘the Soviet case can also inject new caveats and perhaps a new scepticism toward generalizations built on the basis of the experience of mainly bourgeois, western European overseas empires’ (Khalid 2007, p. 471).

Taking the debate further, other works by Dave on Kazakhstan (2007) and Heathershaw’s conceptual piece (2010) have provided more concrete applications of the post-colonial thinking of Partha Chaterjee and Edward Said, showing how it can inform a critical perspective on power and the making of and exclusion from political communities. These and related works have also drawn links with the literature on nationalism and nationalising regimes in Central Asia and shed light on the discontents and dangers of nationalist rhetoric and policies. Especially nationalism studies (Laruelle 2007; Marat 2008; Murzakulova & Schoeberlein 2009) and studies of peace and conflict (see, for example, Heathershaw 2009; Lewis 2012, 2016) have examined the different ways in which Central Asian successor states of the Soviet Union tried to (re-)fashion and emphasise their ancient sources and pre-existing forms of statehood and greatness.

Another collection ‘On Colonialism, Communism and East-Central Europe’ (Kołodziejczyk & Sandru 2012) has facilitated thinking about post-colonial theory in the post-Socialist space more widely. An especially noteworthy contribution was offered by Madina Tlostanova’s (2012) identification of the specific intersecting nature of Soviet coloniality in light of the Soviet Union’s status as a ‘second class empire’ in relation to the Western British, French or German empires. This intersection, argued Tlostanova, led to the ‘generating [of] mutant forms of the main vices of modernity—secondary Eurocentrism, secondary orientalism, secondary racism’ as ‘Russia has projected its own inferiority complexes onto its colonies, particularly the Muslim ones’ (Tlostanova 2012, p. 135). Tlostanova’s work has also shed light on some possibilities of resisting and deflecting (post-)Soviet imperial forms of domination along ethnic, racial and gender lines through ‘multilingual code-switching’ or ‘hybridity and tricksterism’ (Tlostanova 2012, p. 140).²

Notwithstanding the important insights and considerations of the post-colonial legacy of Central Asia, the term also carries associations that have limited its usefulness for academic and wider societal debates. The ‘use and abuse’, as well as confusion and imprecision surrounding the idea of post-coloniality is well illustrated in Kudaibergenova’s analysis of such discourses and their limited appeal in the rhetoric of Kazakhstan’s government, opposition and ‘national patriots’ (Kudaibergenova 2016). Furthermore, Abashin has pointed out that ‘one of the reasons behind the unwillingness to be remembered in the role of the colonised lies in the fact that a large proportion of the contemporary Central Asian elites have a Soviet biography of careers and successes. All the modern attributes of statehood—borders, institutions, imagery—likewise were formulated in the Soviet era and bear the stamp of Soviet construction’. Abashin thus concludes that ‘to publicly label these roots colonial would mean to call into question the legitimacy of their social and symbolic capital and, consequently, also their present-day political status, which the elites fear doing’ (Abashin 2014, p. 90).

In light of the ambiguous connotations of the ‘colonial’ label for the Soviet legacy, and given the sustained roles and evolving nature of the Soviet and even pre-Soviet Russian structures, achievements and forms of knowledge in Central Asia, we would like to argue that it is suitable to conceive of the region’s condition as a ‘post-imperial’ one. As with the term ‘post-colonial’, post-imperial does not suggest that the domination by the Soviet empire is necessarily over and displaced. Rather, in a similar vein to former colonial powers maintaining spheres of influence and mechanisms of economic and political exchange and exploitation in former overseas territories, it seems important to inquire about the afterlives and continuities of imperial connections and sensibilities in Central Asia. Furthermore, new forms of dependence and unequal integration into regional and global trade and political architectures throw up the question as to whether and how ‘imperial’ could be an appropriate analytical term without the prefix ‘post’.

In bringing the literature above into dialogue with relevant post-colonial perspectives in critical security studies, we focus on the central themes in this Introduction while providing further background in our own contribution in this issue (see also Bilgin 2018; Persaud 2018). The key focus of post-colonial approaches in security studies is to critically inquire about the (historical) construction and normalisation of governing logics, ordering practices and corresponding forms of violence. Most instructive in this vein is Barkawi and Laffey’s (2006) article, which argues that security studies ‘systematically understate and misrepresent the role of what we now call the global South in security relations’ as they are underpinned by ‘taken-for-granted historical geographies’ that fail to acknowledge ‘the mutual constitution of Europe and the non-European world’—Global North and South; ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ countries—‘and their joint role in making history’ (Barkawi & Laffey 2006, p. 330). Focusing mostly on Al-Qaeda and the challenge it posed to US and Western foreign policymaking, they posit that security studies need to overcome the Eurocentric bias and primacy of great power politics and instead inquire about the relational (re-)production of categories, spaces and actors, for instance through what Edward Said called ‘contrapuntal’ studies ‘that analyse events, developments and processes in core and periphery together’ (Barkawi & Laffey 2006, pp. 348–49).

Jana Hönke and Markus-Michael Müller’s 2012 special issue in Security Dialogue has most substantially heeded this call. In their views, security studies can only overcome Western-centrism by embracing the concept of post-coloniality to ‘critically engage with the entangled histories of transnational security governance … with a “strategic exoticism” that does not deny difference but avoids essentialization by challenging exoticist representational codes through an uncovering of the underlying differential (epistemological, political, symbolic, etc.) power relations’ (Hönke & Müller 2012, p. 384). Drawing on post- and decolonial theorists including Mbembe, Coronil, Mignolo and Hall, they illustrate the entanglement of centre and periphery in the sphere of policing, where ‘“cross-fertilization” between colonial and domestic policing practices and knowledge continued to shape British policing ideas and practices throughout the 20th century’ (Hönke & Müller 2012, p. 387) as well as in the transformation of state structures, state security apparatuses and anti-terror practices. As a second key point, they propose to move beyond the predominant abstract and macro-level thinking by also including ‘everyday social practices’ and methods from neighbouring disciplines for analysing the latter (Hönke & Müller 2012, p. 385). This argument resonates with Bonacker’s conceptualisation of security practices as having materialisations in ‘the lives of people and groups within the targeted societ[ies]’ and thus ‘contribute[s] to a fabrication of socioterritorial order’ embedded both in centre–periphery relations but also registers of class, race and gender (Bonacker 2018, p. 6).

For our conceptualisation of Central Asia as ‘post-imperial’, the key takeaway from this literature and from the discussion of post-colonial approaches to Central Asia above is two-fold. First, the region’s historical imperial dynamics and its present post-imperial condition have to be understood in both their global connectedness and in terms of the depth of their social reach and materialisation. In this issue, we try to address both aspects by bringing into dialogue research that focuses on the global and (trans-)regional ramifications of post-imperial Central Asia, and on the micro-level and ‘intimate’ forms of interaction they produce and are produced by (see especially Isaac Scarborough’s and Nick Megoran and Shavkat Rakhmatullaev’s contributions).

Second, the specific structures, institutions and trajectories in the region need to be understood in a relational manner as emanating from this globally, even if selectively, as well as regionally and transnationally connected processes of ‘cross-fertilisation’ and diffusion. This is presciently illustrated in the contributions of Karolina Kluczewska and Oleg Korneev and those of Hélène Thibault and Sebastian Schiek, while Megoran and Rakhmatullaev’s analysis shows how the relational production of responses to particular challenges can also involve processes of resistance to particular frameworks and corresponding ‘non-securitisation’ of referent objects, whether it be general political stability or the safety of minority groups.

Finally, the imperial nature of the legacies and forms of rule in Central Asia can always be understood in two ways: either in a historical perspective inquiring about them directly, or, alternatively, through a historiographical lens that looks at the way in which a given country’s (or the entire region’s) history is constructed in public discourse. The final line-up of essays focuses on the first aspect while being aware of the latter perspective, as well. Two essays look at the Soviet period and its continuities in diachronic historical perspective in the health sector (Kluczewska & Korneev) and security sector (Scarborough) in Tajikistan. Another three essays unpack politics of security and stability in post-Soviet Central Asia and consider the respective roles of Soviet imperial legacies of policymaking and globally dominant agendas in the spheres of religion (Thibault), conflict prevention (Megoran & Rakhmmattulaev) and political participation (Schiek). Our discussion in the final essay combines such analysis with the historiographic approach mentioned above. We compare ‘politics of security’ and their post-imperial character across four Central Asian regimes, pointing out how constructions of the Soviet (and pre-Soviet) past feature in the attempts of political leaderships to fashion themselves as guarantors of peace and stability. This way, the collection sheds important empirical light but also offers conceptual insights on how Soviet-era ordering principles, repertoires and interpretive frameworks have been carried forward into what we call a post-imperial period. While future research will have to examine the wider ramifications of this trajectory, such as the pre-Soviet or comparative perspective with other world regions, the present volume provides a fruitful entry for this agenda.

The politics of security, stability and ordering: an analytical approach

As indicated above, this special issue’s contributions are articulated around a shared concept of ‘politics of security, stability and ordering’. This section develops this approach on the basis of critical security studies and political science literature and illustrates how it captures an emerging consensus in studies of peace, conflict and politics in Central Asia and Eurasia more generally. In doing so, we put emphasis on the technocratic nature of politics in modern societies, and the concurring trajectory of depoliticisation via normalisation of ‘state of emergency’ politics in both Western and Central Asian societies.

First off, the concept of ‘politics of security’ is adapted from Jef Huysmans’ (2006) book The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU. Being part of early contributions to the emerging field of critical security studies, Huysmans situated this work around the central question, as to ‘how to conceptualise “insecurity”—i.e. what is at stake and contested in the politics of insecurity’; or, put simply: ‘what threatens whom?’ (Huysmans 2006, p. 2). The key differentiation of the corresponding domains of insecurity, for Huysmans, is one between state security and human security, which can be distinguished by their threat definition: ‘The former refers to the protection of the individual from a wide range of dangers potentially threatening a sustainable form of life. The latter refers primarily to defending the national territory and the citizens of a state from external aggression’ (Huysmans 2006, p. 4). Given the fact that such threats and the corresponding ‘domain of insecurity’ need to be constructed through ‘discourses of danger’ (see Campbell 1992) or specific ‘speech acts’ (Wæver 1995; Buzan et al. 1998), Huysmans concludes that ‘insecurity [and hence, security] is not a fact of nature but always requires that it is written and talked into existence’ (Huysmans 2006, p. 7). Huysmans further emphasises the importance of analysing the role of technocracy and expertise in constructing (in-)security, given the important role played by these forces and their hidden nature from a lay perspective (Huysmans 2006, p. 9).

In this light, we hold that Huysmans’ concept of ‘politics of (in-)security’ is valuable for analysing the way that security, stability and order are reproduced and maintained in Central Asia (as well as in other regional contexts), and for critically inquiring about ‘whose security concerns and threat perceptions are being prioritised at the expense of others’. Correspondingly, it is also reasonable to adapt Huysmans’ idea into a politics of security, because maintaining the security of one group or entity might entail a situation of insecurity for another one, or in Huysmans’ words, ‘security and insecurity are not opposites but two sides of the security framing coin’ (Huysmans 2006, p. 61).³ The link between the ‘politics of security’ and politics more generally is the logics by which a situation or a certain policy may be constructed as important or desirable by situating it in a wider context. According to Huysmans, ‘phenomena are not necessarily directly targeted as threats. Instead, security framing can discursively and/or administratively link up phenomena like asylum and immigration with more traditional security phenomena facilitating a transfer of insecurity from the latter to the former phenomena’ (Huysmans 2006, p. 4). In Huysmans’ concrete example, concerns with terrorist attacks or organised crime, as were present in Europe around 9/11, can be used to justify increased usage of border controls, even though there may be no evidence that the latter would be a way to effectively combat the former. This logical gap, as Huysmans and also others argue (see, for example, Bigo 2002) is filled by the expert and technocratic logic of security, which evades democratic control and accountability.

The latter critical insight on the trade-off between security and accountability—and the effective constraining of basic freedoms this leads to in many cases—builds the bridge between critical security studies and political theory which particularly reflects recent shifts to technocratic anti-politics and depoliticisation. Writing at roughly the same time as Huysmans and colleagues, Flinders and Buller have shown how depoliticisation had in fact been ‘proposed by think-tanks and pressure groups as a solution to both public policy … and constitutional challenges’ (Flinders & Buller 2006, p. 293). They define 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 for a certain issue, policy field or specific decision. (Flinders & Buller 2006, pp. 295–96)

The ‘indirect governing relationship’ or suspension of accountability vis-à-vis the demos clearly resonates with the critical accounts provided by critical security scholars. Taking up and further developing the argument, Wood and Flinders argue that depoliticisation can be seen as an expression of the ‘gradual marginalisation or closing down of democratic governance, due to the paradigmatic influence of neoliberalism’s antipathy towards the state and its deification of the market’ (Wood & Flinders 2014, p. 137), as had been discussed in other works on post-financial crisis United Kingdom (see, for instance, Norris 2011). In the same text, Flinders and Wood further elaborate on how this trajectory appears to be rooted in the normalisation of a ‘state of emergency’ politics ‘in which depoliticised modes of governance have mutated from being used provisionally and exceptionally to becoming a “technique of government” which had, as a consequence, made it harder for citizens to challenge the authority of the state’ (Flinders & Wood 2014, p. 138).⁴

This critical analysis of tendencies in policymaking presents the common denominator between critical studies of depoliticisation and anti-politics and, as we show in turn, critical approaches to the intersection of authoritarian and neoliberal forms of governance in Central Asia and post-socialist Eurasia more generally. The key aim of this special issue will be to advance an analysis that repoliticises that which is depoliticised in the technocratic ‘politics of security, stability and order’ in Central Asia. A further aspect pertaining to this endeavour is to expose how the ‘politics of security’ and the depoliticisation they produce play out on different levels and in different domains. Wood and Flinders provide further conceptual grounding for this in arguing for a differentiation between ‘societal depoliticisation’—‘the role played by, for example, the media, special interest groups and corporations in shifting issues off the agenda of public deliberation’ (Wood & Flinders 2014, p. 152), alongside ‘discursive depoliticisation’ which, as discussed in regards to security studies perspectives above, is more focused on speech acts in the public sphere, especially among governmental and other key decision-making actors (Buzan et al. 1998). The conceptual and empirical depth, into which analyses of the (bio-)political effects of security and associated ‘securitisation’ discourses can reach is further explored in the next section which introduces the individual contributions.

As already indicated, the politics of security and its depoliticising effects provide a rich conceptual ground to synthesise and extend recent and ongoing debates on politics in Central Asia. The perhaps most straightforward point of connection is provided by the analyses of presidential and governmental discourses on economic policymaking and politics in general. Broome (2010) and Omelicheva (2015), for instance, have analysed how the presidents of the newly independent Central Asian republics constructed their countries’ integration into the international economy and their structural and institutional reform as inevitable, although to differing degrees, depending on their dependence on international financial borrowing. Regardless of their degree of integration, trade liberalisation and restructuring of the economy, however, Omelicheva has observed that Central Asian polities have generally maintained a discourse about 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). Prozorov traces this discourse back into Stalinist times and invokes the term of the ‘effective manager’ (Prozorov 2016, ch. 1), whose supposed competency in managing economic and political affairs reflects the paternalistic logic of policymaking characteristic of both Central Asian and post-Soviet countries more generally (Lewis 2016, p. 389). The distinguishing feature in these countries’ politics is the normalisation of a ‘state of emergency’ kind of policymaking, which gives little space to deliberation, dissent or alternative proposals. The corresponding top-down mode of governance is justified as inevitable both in light of the precarious conditions of the global economy but also with reference to the cultural specificities of the respective country or region (Omelicheva 2015, pp. 91–2).⁵ A theme running through presidential and governmental communication about economic policy and politics in general is the calling to order and perseverance as a better alternative to criticism and unrest, which are often associated with foreign, and particularly Western, influence-mongering and not granted the status of legitimate contributions to political or societal debates. Besides a ‘politics of security’, which effectively takes the security of incumbent political regimes as its referent objects, one could thus also speak of a securitised ‘politics of stability’ through which Central Asian leaders try to maintain the legitimacy of and societal consent to their actions (Omelicheva 2015, pp. 15, 76, 87–8).

As the sources and factors of dissent and discontent remain, however, the logics of policymaking and justification in Central Asia and the wider post-Soviet area seems to be increasingly characterised by a biopolitical tendency. Particularly in the Russian case, Makarychev and Medvedev, drawing on Agamben (2005), have identified the above-mentioned ‘state of emergency’ logic of government policy and legislation, which they expose as being justified with the overarching goal of maintaining or increasing the welfare, well-being and future development of the country (Makarychev & Medvedev 2015, p. 46). This biopolitics is characterised by a ‘transition from public punishment of the individual body to the disciplining of the population’ via the propagation of norms of good moral conduct, health, sexuality, and so on (Makarychev & Medvedev 2015, p. 45), which resonates with the ‘societal’ level of politics and depoliticisation discussed in relation to Wood and Flinders’ work above.

As a consequence of this biopolitical politics of security, responsibility for the ineffectiveness of public policy becomes a secondary issue vis-à-vis the emphasis on the responsibility of the subject citizen to equip themselves appropriately for the labour market, maintain their health and be able to adapt to economic and any other kinds of shocks (Makarychev & Medvedev 2015, p. 49).⁶ In Central Asia, the implication of this ‘responsibilisation’ of the subject is that large parts of the working population leave to work abroad to ensure social reproduction, with often dire effects for families and relatives left behind, and home communities more generally (see Fryer et al. 2014). This demonstrates—apart from the socio-economic pressure on large parts of the population—how a moralising component renders politics of security yet more effective, as it serves to not only point to other problems but, as discussed in the works of Foucault (1981),⁷ produces forms of subjectivity that declare the adaptation to and embracing of particular regimes of governance as a priority superseding questions of political participation and collective decision-making. This, therefore, presents a link between politics of security and stability in the public realm and governmental discourse into more wide-ranging and everyday fields of policy and practice, that is, the ‘societal’ dimension of politics, where a politics of ordering according to moral, cultural and other context-specific dimensions increasingly takes hold.

The politics of security, stability and ordering and its micro-level effects have, at least implicitly, received plenty of attention in recent publications on Central Asia, which provide a fertile basis for the contributions in this special issue. In the Kyrgyzstani context, for instance, insightful works by Madeleine Reeves (2014, 2015), Judith Beyer (2016) and Aksana Ismailbekova (2017) examine how traditional authorities like courts of elders (Kzrgyz: aksakals) or village and tribal (Kyrgyz: uruu) heads play important roles in maintaining security and order within communities and between them, including across international borders in the Ferghana valley. They have also, however, indicated the constraining and coercive elements of the ways in which such forms of order are produced, for instance in regard to people who are not part of ethnically Kyrgyz communities or do not share the preference for a ‘traditional’ way of life. In the context of Tajikistan, Lemon (2016) examines how regimes of power entangled in the discourses and practices of security governance shape everyday life. He particularly analyses how a ‘politics of (in)security’—part of what he calls transnational authoritarian security governance—operates ‘from the top-down’ (Lemon 2016, p. 89) through the instantiation of ideal models and behavioural rules for ‘good’ and resilient citizens, and how such ideas are further kept and even accelerated in their circulation and reception by people themselves, often leaving little room for resistance and freedom of interpretation. This is a good example of a number of recent studies that analysed the fight against and prevention of terrorism and extremism with a focus on discursive and practical dimensions of securitisation, and as part of patterns of political (re-)ordering in Central Asia (Tromble 2014; Lenz-Raymann 2014; Thibault 2018; Lemon 2018). Especially Lemon’s special issue on ‘Critical Approaches to Security in Central Asia’ (Lemon 2018) is instructive as some contributions tackle forms of (in)security in particular lifeworlds, such as those of sexual or ethnic minority groups in Kyrgyzstan (von Boemcken et al. 2018)⁸ or in informal settlements (Cramer 2018). These and other works present useful entry points for the critical inquiry presented in this special issue, whose individual contributions are discussed and situated within the collection’s themes in turn.

Situating the contributions to the special issue

In introducing the individual essays of this collection, we discuss these according to their relation to the main theme of ‘politics of security, stability and ordering’. The first contribution clearly demonstrates how the politics of security proffered by one social group may clearly foreground insecurity and even dehumanising experiences for another. Thus, Karolina Kluczewska and Oleg Korneev’s essay on policies of prevention, testing and treatment of HIV/AIDS in Tajikistan from the late Soviet to the present period shows how governmental actors, international organisations and non-governmental organisations extended and implemented internationally financed programmes in ways that prioritise the public health of society as a whole over the human rights of affected individuals. An example for this logic is the case of mandatory HIV testing among labour migrants and future spouses. This analysis exhibits striking parallels with both historical practices of dealing with health threats in Turkestan in the late Russian Empire, later in the USSR, and present-day reactions to the Covid-19 pandemic and their detrimental effects on the livelihoods of large parts of Central Asian societies. Kluczewska and Korneev thus point to the imperial logics underlying the way in which health policy in Central Asia is conducted.

The next two essays examine how Soviet-era institutional designs and practical as well as discursive repertoires have been carried on into the present period, thus shedding further light on post-imperial forms of security and ordering. Isaac Scarborough’s essay focuses on the structural and institutional changes and continuities brought about by the transition from the late Soviet to the early independence period. He exhibits the only partial sovereignty and high degree of cooperation of Tajik security services with their Russian counterparts and how continued Russian dominance is expressed in key strategic areas such as border security. This de facto security dependence on the Russian Federation presents clear continuities with the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic, not least via the biographies and personal journeys of ex-KGB and other security organs’ staff. Nick Megoran and Shavkat Rakhmattullaev’s essay focuses on questions of internal security and conflict management in a comparative perspective on Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. They analyse Uzbek authorities’ attempts to prevent inter-ethnic unrest and attacks against Kyrgyz minority populations in the country’s eastern provinces, including references to the Soviet-era concept of ‘peoples’ friendship’ (druzhba narodov), and juxtapose these with the relatively unregulated discourses on the ‘threat’ posed by Uzbekistan circulating in Kyrgyzstani media in the 1990s and 2000s. The authors provide valuable detail on how, while freedom of speech had been abused for hate speech and agitation against Uzbek minorities in Kyrgyzstan, eventually contributing to inter-ethnic clashes in the country’s south in June 2010, the same was not the case in Uzbekistan. Here, authorities imposed a ban on news on the ongoing clashes in June 2010 and deployed numerous security forces to potentially endangered regions to reassure the Kyrgyz minority and deter retaliatory attacks on them. Megoran and Rakhmattullaev conclude that with this combination of non-securitisation of ethnicity in the public sphere with securitising practices on the ground, Uzbekistan’s ‘authoritarian conflict management’ worked better than Kyrgyzstan’s ‘populist democracy’, although it leaves unresolved wider questions about the management of peaceful inter-ethnic relations and the obvious discontents of the ‘peoples’ friendship’ model of multiculturalism hailing from the Soviet period.

Sebastian Schiek’s contribution on ‘politics of stability’ in Kazakhstan further broadens the perspective on how Central Asian regimes deal with conflict and political unrest. His analysis of the depoliticising effects of new participatory institutions focuses on the so-called ‘National Council of Public Trust’ which Nursultan Narzabaev’s successor Kassym-Jomart Tokaev had set up in reaction to the unexpectedly widespread protests against the government in 2019. Schiek explains the wider trend of setting up ‘public councils’ (Russian: obshestvennye sovety) to demonstrate authorities’ willingness to include citizens in decision making, but further unpacks how both the latter and the new ‘National Council’ are part of a consultative ideology which is preoccupied with mimicking public dialogue and inclusion while brushing over a lack of necessary political reforms. To unpack this trajectory, Schiek’s analysis scrutinises the narratives put forward in the National Council, its limited and mostly government-affiliated line-up and the overall superficial level of dialogue and participation that it generates despite authorities’ claims to the contrary.

Also situated in the Kazakhstani context, Hélène Thibault’s essay sheds light on the post-imperial nature of knowledge on religious dynamics but adds an important nuance in reflecting on the role of academic research in co-producing and stabilising potentially inaccurate and possibly detrimental framings and understandings of religious radicalism. Through content and quantitative analysis, Thibault traces the emergence of the concept of ‘Wahhabism’ in Soviet-era scholarship and its disappearance and displacement by that of ‘Salafism’ in recent Central Asian scholarship as well as expert discourses. She thus demonstrates the homogenising and distorting effects of global security discourses on various genres of knowledge production, which call for a critical re-consideration of present-day academic and other mechanisms of inquiry.

As has become clear from this brief overview, all contributions to this special issue examine concrete practices and the corresponding ‘politics of security, stability and ordering’ in Central Asia, as well as the way they connect to historical precursors and the imperial logics underlying Soviet (as well as pre-Soviet) rule in Central Asia. As a final contribution that further systematises and situates this argument, Thorsten Bonacker and Philipp Lottholz unpack the politics of security and depoliticisation in the context of violent conflicts across the four states of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. This analysis traces how the root causes and driving factors of conflicts, such as legacies of rule via identity differentiation and exploitation of resources, are linked to the Soviet period, and how the discourses and practices employed by political regimes to appease and stabilise societies re-invoke or recur to Soviet repertoires and interpretive frames alike. In theoretical terms, we draw, among others, on the works of Ann Laura Stoler (2016) as well as John Narayan and Leon Sealey-Huggins (2017) to situate the argument in the wider discussion of the reproduction, continuity and transfiguration of imperial ordering across the globe. By revealing the global embeddedness and interlinkages of Central Asia’s post-imperial politics of security, alongside the special issue’s demonstration of the discursive, practical, everyday and epistemic manifestations of this trajectory, we hope to spark an engaged and productive conversation in future research and wider societal dialogue.

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Philipp Lottholz

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

Thorsten Bonacker

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

Notes

1 See also Martin (2001), Hirsch (2005).

2 See also Tlostanova (2010, ch. 6).

3 See also Campbell (1992).

4 See also Agamben (2005).

5 See also Makarychev and Medvedev (2015).

6 See also Chandler and Reid (2016).

7 See also Lemon (2016, ch. 2).

8 See also van Boemcken et al. (2020).