Domination and Togetherness: Conceptions of Power in Central Asia’s International Politics

ABSTRACT

Central Asian (international) politics has traditionally been understood as if domination were the core aim of local actors, and that they apply any sort of means (such as obtaining rent or coercion) to achieve that end. The persistence of that conception subsequently reproduces the “spirit” of the New Great Game. By spirit, I mean a way of interpreting regional events that rests on practices akin to a Great Game—such as competition and a struggle for power—without fully subscribing to the analogy. The essay then assesses a distinctive and increasingly important way of understanding Central Asian politics based on a conception of power as “togetherness.” As a result, the article stresses the need for a joint application of the two versions of power.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Filippo Costa Buranelli and Diana Kudaiberganova for having organized this initiative. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their productive feedback, as well as to Stefano Guzzini for his broader considerations on the nature of power during a workshop at the International Studies Association.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For a synthesis of competing notions of power, see Guzzini (2016). Barnett and Duvall (2005) also offer a series of typologies that build on the notion of power. This paper nevertheless focuses on two distinct readings of power, precisely to address competing ways of interpreting political action. I therefore do not address further ways of conceiving power, such as that of Barnett and Duvall (2005), who also look at concealed manifestations of power. For several competing understandings of power, see the following works that deal with power from multiple theoretical perspectives: Dahl (1957), Arendt (1970), and Bourdieu (2005).

2. Despite many existing references to the concept of power in contemporary International Relations and political theory (see a sampling in note 1), potestas and potentia, including their subsequent conceptual evolution, capture well some of the dichotomies to which Roman legal and political scholars pointed in their attempt to make sense of how legates, consuls, and other political officials were to conduct themselves in the Republic. Subsequently, church and secular scholars, including philosophers, such as Baruch Spinoza, built on that tradition to make sense of political action. See, for example, Priban (2018, 531–32).

3. For more on the concept of regional and state co-constitution, see Hameiri (2013).