Christine Bichsel

In search of harmony: repairing infrastructure and social relations in the Ferghana valley

Conflict mitigation projects have been funded in Central Asia since 1999. They follow the academic and policy-oriented writing that locates Central Asia ‘in the midst of a host of crises’, ‘where a “cold war” could easily become a “hot” one’ and ‘engagement from the international community will be required to avert the increasing tensions and the outbreak of proliferating regional conflict and chaos’. An interview conducted in 2003 with a representative of a conflict mitigation project in the Ferghana Valley contrasts these assessments.

The Drought Does Not Cause Fear

This paper seeks to further recent reflections by scholars on whether James C. Scott’s concept of “high modernism” provides a useful framework to analyse Soviet irrigation schemes in Soviet Central Asia. Empirically, it looks into the irrigation development and land reclamation project of the Hungry Steppe in Soviet Central Asia during the post-Stalinist period with a focus on the Tajik SSR. Two aspects of the Hungry Steppe project are examined: the discursive shift which enabled to reframe the steppe as arable land, and the changes in resettlement policies for populating the newly reclaimed areas. The paper concludes that despite the manifold criticism voiced towards the concept of “high modernism”, it proves nevertheless productive in explaining the big discursive shifts related to post-Stalinist large-scale Soviet irrigation schemes such as the Hungry Steppe project. At the same time, it fails to account for, let alone explain the complexity of these shifts.

From dry hell to blossoming garden: metaphors and poetry in Soviet irrigation literature on the Hungry Steppe, 1950–1980

This paper explores scientific and popular literature published on irrigation development in the former Soviet Union for its forms of narration. It asks why and how authors writing on irrigation development for a specialized, but also a general Soviet audience chose to alternate between factual prose, and metaphors and poetry. The analysis centers on two passages stemming from Russian-language books published in the Soviet Union in 1957 and 1963, respectively. Both of them describe irrigation development on the Hungry Steppe, a large rolling plain which today is part of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. The paper starts from the assumption that factual prose is likely to be expected in scientific and popular literature given the dominant perception of irrigation as engineering and prevailing discourses of scientific rationality and technological progress in the Soviet Union of this period. However, findings indicate that metaphors and poetry were an important form of narration for portraying the large-scale transformation of society and nature in scientific and popular literature. The paper argues that they served to reinforce discourses of scientific rationality and technological progress, but at the same time opened up semantic spaces to deconstruct and undermine them.

Government of Paper. The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan

So it is clear that regional innovation systems are becoming more open and heterogeneous. Of the three issues highlighted by the title, the contents deliver more on innovation and globalization, and much less on resilience. Cooke and Eriksson synthesize a range of theoretical evolutionary approaches and argue that innovations emerge through pre-adaptations and in the ‘white spaces’ between clusters. Pre-adaptive innovations can be transferred from one industry or cluster to another so that more resilient innovation systems are formed by a platform consisting of several clusters and industries. These appealing ideas are only supported by a list of examples of Scandinavian policy initiatives with varying detail, so the theory remains a research agenda. Cooke and Zhang provide a review of China’s environmental innovation policies and argue that innovations have occurred in intersections between paths of development. Notwithstanding these strong theoretical contributions, there is little empirical research in the book on whether and in what ways the innovative economies being studied are actually resilient or robust. Many of the chapters describe particular systems rather than evaluate and scrutinize conceptual debates. Cohen provides a review of cities in the global recession, but seems inconclusive about the causes of differences and the effects of urban policies. The focus on resilience promised by the title is fairly weak and the relations between innovation and resilience tend to be assumed. There are two sets of policy messages emerging from this book, which are not necessarily alternatives but rather different in focus. The first is the need to look at the microeconomic conditions and invest in education and skills. Rodriguez-Pose and Comptour argue that the benefits of clustering are secondary and contingent on having integrated communities that are well-endowed with skilled workers, researchers and scientists. The key policy message is therefore to invest in education, appropriate training, and science and technology. Second, however, many of the studies argue for smart specialization and participatory strategies so that that there are no universal blueprints. It is argued that actors need to trust each other and that innovation as a social process requires cooperation and a shared vision. Larrea et al., for example, offer a participatory approach to analysing the regional innovation system in Gipuzkoa (a province in the Basque Country) in order to discover where trust is weak. Many of the policy discussions are critical of how regional policy has failed to understand innovation dynamics and there is a general sense that the European Union is failing to provide steering influence. Cooke and De Propris criticize the European Union for not promoting eco-innovation industries and paying poor attention to the cultural industries. However, several chapters admit that the payback to innovation policy is blurred and difficult to evaluate, and the recommended policy measures seem rather elusive and implicit. To convince a policy audience, future research will need to be more explicit and conclusive about how and why successful regional innovation systems should be fostered and supported.

Dangerous Divisions: Peace-Building in the Borderlands of Post-Soviet Central Asia

This chapter1 looks into peace-building in the Ferghana Valley, a large intramontane basin in former Soviet Central Asia. In 2002, a document of an aid agency running peace-building projects characterized the Ferghana Valley as “a culturally rich and diverse area with the potential for real growth in many spheres, but also the undeniable potential for dangerous divisions”.2 “Dangerous divisions”, as referred to in this quotation, were seen by the aid agency in manifold aspects. An important one among them were the divisions as embodied in the political borders that transect the Ferghana Valley, separating the three states Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan who currently share the basin. Dangerous, in turn, refers to a particular social imaginary of the Ferghana Valley, attributed by both academic and journalistic writing, as well as by practical attempts to mitigate a perceived potential for violence.