Eric McGlinchey

Aiding the Internet in Central Asia

This article asks why Central Asian governments, although equally repressive of their traditional media, pursue diverging policies toward the Internet. Ultimately we find Internet regulatory policy in the Central Asian states varies according to who provides financial capital for information communication technologies (ICTs). Where international aid organizations and non-governmental organizations provide capital and assistance for ICT infrastructure, such as in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan and, to a lesser extent, in Uzbekistan, the formal regulatory environment is more open, clearly articulated, and permissive of electronic media. In contrast, where domestic actors fund the development of ICT infrastructure, as in Kazakhstan, regulation is vague and government control and interference more extensive. While a more liberal ICT regulatory regime does not ensure more momentum for democratization, the freedom to use and actively participate in the ICT sector has important implications for societys ability to enact political change in ICT regulation and social mobilization on a wider scale as demonstrated in Kyrgyzstans political events of March 2005.

The Making of Militants: The State and Islam in Central Asia

I n Central Asia, as in other regions of the world with large Muslim populations, opposition groups are increasingly turning to the ideas of militant Islam in their efforts to challenge authoritarian rule. Activists from Kokand to Kabul have learned that political Islam provides an unusually potent language of opposition. In Central Asia, a wide array of opposition movements—the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the Islamic Renaissance Party, and Hizb ut-Tahrir—have, with varying degrees of militancy, applied the banner of Islam to their struggle with local authoritarian rule. The March 2004 suicide bombings and gun battles in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in which more than forty people died and dozens were injured are only the most recent reminder that, despite seven decades of Soviet rule, Islam remains a powerful mobilizing force in Central Asia. That Islamist movements have reemerged in Central Asia in the wake of the Soviet collapse is clear. What is less clear, however, is why tensions between the state and Islam have been significantly more pronounced in some Central Asian regions than in others. Variations in the extent, militancy, and intensity of Islamist movements, much like the many different and markedly varied authoritarian states these movements oppose, are rarely differentiated in the social science literature. Thus, while scholars have helpfully devised theories to explain the recent upsurge in Islamist political mobilization, few of these theories explain why Islamist movements are more pronounced and more militant in some authoritarian states than in others. Seeing these differences in Islamist mobilization to be of both theoretical interest to social science theory and immediate import to state-society conflicts not only in Central Asia but also in the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, and, more and more, in the Western world, I seek to explain the root causes of variations in political Islam. Scholars have devoted considerable attention to the question of political Islam. Historian Bernard Lewis and political scientist Samuel Huntington, for example, write that the globalization of Western culture has sparked an Islamist backlash. Central Asian political leaders, for their part, have argued that the Islamist opposition has been artificially crafted

Searching for Kamalot: Political Patronage and Youth Politics in Uzbekistan

THE ISLAM KARIMOV GOVERNMENT IN UZBEKISTAN is precariously brittle. Signs that the regime might collapse, though, would not be readily apparent if one’s analytical framework derived solely from the political science transitions literature. Paradoxically, though political scientists are preoccupied with change, our leading theories emphasise continuity. We stress path dependency, institutional stickiness, and enduring ethnic, national and indeed civilisational identities. When change does arrive, we attribute it to sudden disruptions, to ‘exogenous shocks’, ‘punctuated equilibriums’, mobilisation ‘cascades’, and to the contingencies of ‘elite miscalculation’ (North 1990; Steinmo et al. 1992; Kuran 1991; Huntington 1993; Pierson 2000). So much for predictive social science theory. What if, however, we jettisoned the ex-post causal parsimony of transitology and, instead, rolled up our analytical sleeves and actually ‘mucked around’ in the messiness of day-to-day autocratic politics? What indicators, short of the familiar dichotomy between stability and collapse, might we use to assess the pulse of authoritarianism? And might these indicators actually help us, ex-ante, predict political change? In this essay I illustrate that we can evaluate the health and, furthermore, the likely longevity of autocracy. More specifically, by taking seriously that which political scientists often do not—symbols, spectacle and discourse—we can identify the stress points where authoritarian governments are most likely to crack. The spectacles I study involve the Karimov government’s efforts to mobilise the soon-to-be majority of the Uzbek population through the youth group Kamalot. To a certain degree, this study parallels the familiar social science model of inquiry; Kamalot became suddenly prominent in the early 2000s and one of the essay’s goals is to explain this variation. At the same time, though, this analysis of past variation is decidedly forward looking. I argue that by understanding the causal factors behind changes in symbolic politics, we can understand the processes and the likelihood of Uzbek regime change. That is, I argue, the same factor that is driving symbolic politics in the Kamalot case—the spreading failure of patronage-based politics in the regions— will lead Uzbek regime change in the near future. That this is a case study need not lessen the implication of the essay’s broader methodological findings. Political change and revolutions are seldom ‘now out of never’ (Kuran 1991, p. 7). Just the opposite, as I demonstrate here, political change is almost always foreshadowed by identifiable changes in discourse, symbols and EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES Vol. 61, No. 7, September 2009, 1137–1150

Islamic Revivalism and State Failure in Kyrgyzstan

Many are quick to see Islamic revivalism as a threat, but close examination suggests that the turn to Muslim institutions can be a way of coping with an increasingly ineffective central state. The author uses survey data from Kyrgyzstan to assess competing theories of Islamic revivalism from Rashid, Cohen, Chaudet, Huntington, Kepel, and Khalid.

Exploring Regime Instability and Ethnic Violence in Kyrgyzstan

This article explores the causes of Kyrgyzstans enduring political instability and periodic ethnic violence.

Fast Forwarding the Brezhnev Years

Summers in southern Kyrgyzstan can be deadly. In June 1990 hundreds of ethnic Kyrgyz from outlying villages clashed with ethnic Uzbeks living in Osh, Uzgen and Jalalabad. In June 2010 the sons of these 1990 rioters clashed in a renewed wave of ethnic riots in Osh, Jalalabad and Bazar-Korgan. This paper investigates the 1990 and 2010 riots and asks if these two conflicts, in addition to sharing similar protagonists, share similar causes. I find that, while one can identify proximate causes of these riots, more distant processes, namely the titular indigenization of Osh during the Brezhnev period, engendered a demographic shift permissive of ethnic conflict.

Leadership Succession, Great Power Ambitions, and the Future of Central Asia

Two uncertainties will reshape inter- and intra-state governance in Eurasia over the next five to twenty years. First, the stabilizing anchors of Central Asia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, will see their first leadership change since independence. Second, it is unclear if and how the region’s two great powers, Russia and China, will accommodate one another’s expanding interests. This paper explores these two uncertainties, their potential to reshape Central Asian politics, and scenarios that may emerge should the current, now quarter century status quo be disrupted.