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ABSTRACT
The aim of this article is to conceptualize the way political power discourse is legitimized through everyday life and normalizing processes of accepting the truth about political regimes and the “way things ought to be” within the given political discourse. The article analyzes power from two positions—from the discursive approach of the political statements and images of the most authoritative political figures (presidents, local governors) in the community and from the individual approach of accepting these statements and authorities as truth. To paraphrase Michel Foucault’s famous statement, the article questions “what governs” the individual to accept a certain political statement, and how this normalization in turn “governs” the political statement. In doing so the article utilizes an ethnographic and discursive approach to the study of power and authority in non-democratic political regimes. The ultimate question is, What normalizes these discourses, which may be considered “illegitimate” or “authoritarian” from the outside but completely “acceptable” and “authoritative” from within the given political community? How does a specific community form the idea of the collective “normalization” of these diverse political discourses?
Acknowledgments
A draft of this paper was presented at the workshop “Power in Central Asia” on October 6–7, 2018, at the Sociology of Law department of Lund University, Sweden, which was generously sponsored by the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. I am grateful to the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and my colleagues at the Sociology of Law department at Lund University for their great support preceding this workshop and the forthcoming Special Issue. This paper was also first presented at the ESCAS biannual conference in Bishkek at the American University of Central Asia in June 2017 at the panel I co-organized with Dr. Filippo Costa Buranelli, Dr. Adrian Fauve, and Paolo Sorbello titled “Power in Central Asia.” I want to thank Adrian Fauve and Paolo Sorbello, Farkhad Tolipov, Rustam Burnashev, and the audience in Bishkek for their initial comments and discussions. I benefited greatly from the comments shared in Lund and I am indebted to my colleagues who participated in this Special Issue as well as to my co-editor, Dr. Filippo Costa Buranelli. Finally, I am grateful for the funds and support from the University of Cambridge and Lund University for the prolonged fieldwork that provided the basis for this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Author’s focus group, July 2018, transcript from Russian language.
2. See also Totaro in this issue on the discussion of state control and “appropriate behavior” when it comes to threats to state stability and the desire of the state apparatus (political elites in power) to control the narrative of threats, insecurity, and instability in Kazakhstan. These examples and findings can be expanded and generalized further into other cases in the region and beyond.
3. In most of the cases I explored, the president of the country was addressed by name and patronym, but there were also a lot of informal instances outside my main field sites where the president had a nickname and was usually called “papa,” “the guy,” “001,” or “the first, the second [president]” if there was a change in power over the years. Often the respondents referred to the political power holder as “the family,” identifying power holders as the presidential family and its close circle in a given context. What was surprising was that in all of these distinct country cases across Central Asia, the lexicon about “the guy,” “him,” “you know who” when talking about the most authoritative figure (the president of the country) was the same across the cases. None of the local contextualization of a change from the first president through elections, death, or voluntary resignation, influenced the way the president was addressed by a nickname, neutral pronoun, or shortened name. It is also striking because in the Russian context that I studied separately, the last name of the president, “Putin,” is often used in referring to the president rather than addressing “him” by nicknames, pronouns, or neutral names.
4. See Kudaibergenova (Citation2015) on Kazakhstan 2030, for example.
5. Badie, et al. (Citation2011), International Encyclopedia of Political Science.
6. This was defined as such by the male colleague who disputed the necessity to discuss “political issues in a workplace.” Fieldnotes, political discussion, June 2017.
7. Fieldnotes, political discussion, June 2017.
8. Fieldnotes, political discussion, June 2017.
9. Fieldnotes, government institution meeting, June 2018.
10. Fieldnotes, October 2018.
11. Fieldnotes, June 2016.
12. From the discussion in the city of N, in 2018, fieldwork notes.
13. D.T. Kudaibergenova, “The Archaeology of Nationalizing Regimes in the Post-Soviet Space: Narratives, Elites, and Minorities,” Problems of Post-Communism 64(6): 342–55, and Toward Nationalizing Regimes. Conceptualizing Power and Identity in the Post-Soviet Realm (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020).
14. Fieldwork notes, 2017, while passing by the Cabinet of Ministers on one weekend evening. Talking to a male friend who has connections to the field.
15. Name changed for confidentiality of the respondent who agreed to a series of interviews and observations at the beginning of the research and throughout the interviews.
16. Fieldnotes, Mr. Brightside initial interview with the author.
17. Mark Haugaard and Stewart R. Clegg, “Introduction: Why Power Is the Central Concept of the Social Sciences,” in The Sage Handbook of Power, ed. Stewart R. Clegg and Mark Haugaard (London: Sage, 2009), 13.
18. Interview with Mr. Brightside no. 2, 2017.
19. Fieldnotes, August 2018.
20. Fieldnotes, August 2018.