Deniz Kandiyoti

Poverty in Transition: An Ethnographic Critique of Household Surveys in Post‐Soviet Central Asia

Post-Soviet transitions have prompted a search for new policy tools and methods of data collection. The shift from universal welfare provision under the Soviet system to targeted assistance and poverty monitoring has stimulated a new interest in the measurement of living standards and poverty lines. This has promoted the use of quantitative techniques and sample surveys (household surveys, in particular) as privileged tools for the collection of policy-relevant information. This paper contends that survey techniques have particular limitations as research tools in an environment where local level case studies are scarce and where a host of new socio-economic processes are creating fundamental shifts in the landscape of social provision, redistribution and employment. These limitations are illustrated by drawing upon a household survey conducted by the author in four villages from two regions in Uzbekistan, Andijan and Kashkadarya, between October 1997 and August 1998. The ambiguities surrounding five basic concepts, those of household, employment, access to land, income and expenditure are discussed in detail, as are the changes in their contents and meanings in the context of transition. The gender differentiated outcomes of current changes and their possible implications are highlighted throughout the text. The conclusion suggests that Uzbekistan finds itself at an uneasy juncture where the policies deployed to ‘cushion’ the social costs of transition may reach the limits of their sustainability. A more contextually sensitive approach to the mechanisms that generate new forms of vulnerability and the use of qualitative and longitudinal methodologies are essential to an adequate monitoring of further changes.

The Cry for Land: Agrarian Reform, Gender and Land Rights in Uzbekistan

Agrarian reform in Uzbekistan has been informed by contradictory objectives and priorities. Legislation has oscillated between measures to increase private access to land, in line with populist pressures and the structural reform agenda of international agencies, and counter–measures to tighten and restrict such access in response to the Government imperative of retaining control over the production and export earnings of cotton. Drawing on fieldwork carried out in the provinces of Andijan and Khorezm in 2000–1, this article analyses the role of gendered divisions of labour in the maintenance of a commercial cotton sector alongside a smallholder economy that has become the mainstay of rural livelihoods since the post–Soviet collapse of public sector employment and wages. It also discusses the outcomes of different types of farm restructuring and highlights the gender differentiated outcomes of a reform process that forces a growing number of women out of the recorded labour force into casual, unremunerated and informal work.

The politics of gender and the Soviet paradox: neither colonized, nor modern?

Abstract This article examines scholarly debates that cast Soviet policies for the emancipation of women in Central Asia as instances of colonial domination, as the modernizing endeavours of a revolutionary state or as combinations of both and takes them to task for overlooking the gendered consequences of the ‘Soviet paradox’. This paradox is evident in the combined and contradictory operations of a socialist paternalism that supported and legitimized womens presence in the public sphere (through education, work and political representation), with a command economy and nationalities policy that effectively stalled processes of social transformation commonly associated with modernity. Post-Soviet gender ideologies do not represent a simple return to national traditions, interrupted by Soviet policies, but constitute a strategic redeployment of notions of cultural authenticity in the service of new ideological goals. The politics of gender, thus, plays a crucial role in signalling both a break from the Soviet past and in creating new imaginaries of the nation that enhance social solidarity in increasingly fractured post-Soviet societies. The official endorsement of Islam, as a central tenet of national identity and the simultaneous rejection and policing of its more radical expressions contributes further to the politicization of gender, while the promotion of gender equality by the international donor community carries limited credibility in a context where the core of womens former claims to citizenship—through welfare entitlements and social protection by the state—has been thoroughly eroded.

Between the hammer and the anvil: post-conflict reconstruction, Islam and women's rights

Abstract This paper argues that gender issues are becoming politicised in novel and counterproductive ways in contexts where armed interventions usher in new blueprints for governance and ‘democratisation’. Using illustrations from constitutional and electoral processes in Afghanistan and Iraq, it analyses how the nature of emerging political settlements in environments of high risk and insecurity may jeopardise stated international commitments to a womens rights agenda. The disjuncture between stated aims and observed outcomes becomes particularly acute in contexts where security and the rule of law are severely compromised, where Islam becomes a stake in power struggles among contending factions and where ethnic/sectarian constituencies are locked in struggles of representation in defence of their collective rights.

Modernization without the market? The case of the ‘Soviet East’

This paper examines the contradictory nature of the ‘modernizing’ encounter between the former Soviet state and Cnetral Asian societies with a view to exploring more fully a path that purported to be transformative in the absence of a market economy. This encounter was evaluated by some as a radical break with the past and by others as an instance of cultural stasis and continuity. This apparent paradox is explained with reference to the specific features of the command economy and Soviet nationalities policy and their interplay with local forms of social organization. The main argument is that what appeared to some commentators as ‘traditionalism’ was as much a response to and creation of the system itself as a feature of local communities.

The travails of the secular: puzzle and paradox in Turkey

Abstract Conflicting claims of Muslim marginalization and injury and alarmist narratives of encroachment on secular spaces and intimidation of its citizens have dominated public debates in Turkey. The purpose of this paper is to disentangle the web of meanings associated with the ‘secular’ and to analyse the political fortunes of secularism. It specifically attempts to elucidate how and why critiques of lack of accountability, authoritarianism and militarism were mapped onto an onslaught on secularism itself. It argues that the historical shallowness of civic notions of citizenship was compounded by the instrumentalization of religion by the secular establishment, the embedding of Islamist actors in the electoral politics of patronage and the consolidation of Islamic capital in the wake of neoliberal policies since the 1980s. It concludes that the terms ‘secular’ and ‘Islamic’ have become empty signifiers and tropes mobilized by contending political actors in their search for hegemony and the consolidation of their power.

Post-Soviet institutional design and the paradoxes of the ‘Uzbek path’1

Two contradictory visions of society have co-existed uneasily in analyses of Soviet Central Asia. Divergent accounts have portrayed Central Asian societies as either subject to total domination by an all-encompassing, totalitarian state or as retaining autonomy under a Soviet institutional carapace. These accounts of state-society relations spilt over into the post-Soviet policy arena and continued to inform different perspectives on transition. In policy terms, the most influential discourse has been the extension of the neo-liberal ‘good governance’ agenda promoted by the international donor community to the special case of former Soviet command economies. According to this perspective, the totalitarian state captured the societies over which it ruled to the extent that it had all but obliterated the possibility of an autonomous associative sphere. The market transitions ushered in by post-Soviet reforms needed as their indispensable adjunct the creation of a robust associative societal sphere that could make the state more transparent and accountable. This justified the promotion of a ‘democracy’ sector which, in turn, fostered the creation of NGOs as a proxy for a ‘modern’ civil society. A counter-argument was offered by Roy who invoked the paradox that the Soviet project of destroying traditional society via ‘social engineering’ in fact translated into ‘a recomposition of solidarity groups within the framework imposed by this system’. He argued that society in Central Asia restructured itself around the very elements that had been conceived to destroy it, namely the kolkhozian/ communitarian system. Thus, paradoxically, it is within these very structures that the elements of a local civil society could be found, rather than in the donor-led window-dressing evident in the nascent NGO sector. In a somewhat different vein, Koroteyeva and Makarova had drawn attention to the ‘domestication of the state’ by local communities that turned Soviet institutions to their own advantage through forms of participation that invested them with everyday forms of utility. In either case, Soviet institutions, however defined, were assumed to play a critical, if contested, role as mediators between the central state and local communities. This paper attempts a partial micro-analysis of how Soviet institutions that were central to the management of the economy and the distribution of benefits have Central Asian Survey (March 2007) 26(1), 31–48

Locating the politics of gender: Patriarchy, neo-liberal governance and violence in Turkey

This article attempts to demonstrate that the politics of gender in Turkey is intrinsic rather than incidental to a characterization of its ruling ideology. It does so by focusing on three central nodes of ideology and practice in three domains: first, the use of gender as a central pillar of populism and a marker of difference that pits an authentically national ‘us’ against an anti-national ‘them’; second, the marriage of convenience between neo-liberal welfare and employment policies and (neo)- conservative familialism and finally, the ‘normalization’ of violence in everyday political discourse and practice. It concludes that soaring levels of gender-based and societal violence are not indicative of a securely entrenched patriarchy but of a crisis in the gender order and the polity more generally.

Education as Battleground: The Capture of Minds in Turkey

Academic freedom is broadly understood as the freedom of teachers and students to teach, study, and pursue knowledge and research without unreasonable interference or restriction from law, institutional regulations, or public pressure. The long-term interests of society are assumed to be best served when the educational process leads to the advancement of knowledge and knowledge is itself best advanced when inquiry is free from restraints by the state, the church, or other institutions and special-interest groups. Since academic freedom is generally invoked in relation to institutions of higher education, it may appear unorthodox to broaden the scope of our discussion of Turkey to the evolution of the educational system as a whole. The justification for adopting this approach is that it serves to elucidate the institutional and ideational backdrop of the rapid and accelerating erosion of academic freedom. Without a prior understanding of the ways in which institutions are refashioned and citizens’ subjectivities are moulded through education at all levels it becomes a great deal harder to comprehend the total collapse of academic freedom currently plaguing establishments of higher education. The drastic transformation of Turkey’s educational landscape under Justice and Development Party (AKP) presents an exemplary case study of the embeddedness of the freedom to think, write, and teach in the vagaries of systems of governance. By chronicling the key phases of these transformations, we attempt to show how education became the site of hegemonic struggles and overt forms of social engineering, culminating in a totalizing vision for a ‘New Turkey’ project that aims to fashion pliant citizen/subjects.