John Heathershaw

Towards better theories of peacebuilding: beyond the liberal peace debate

A spectre has haunted European scholars of peace and conflict studies since the end of the cold war. This spectre is the liberal peace. Scholars from Germany to the UK, from doctoral students to full professors, have allied to exorcise the spectre of rushed liberal democratisation and capitalist restructuring in post-conflict environments. Where is the case of international intervention that has not been labelled ‘liberal peacebuilding’ by a critical scholar? Where is the so-called orthodox scholar or policy-practitioner who has not questioned this naming of their work and aims? Two things result from this fact: first, the liberal peace (in its various forms) is with us and is not going away; second, it is high time that critical scholars developed sharper theoretical tools to understand and explain the complex empirical cases that are thrown up by the liberal peace. Three recently published books each represent attempts to break down some of the boundaries and overgeneralisations that have beset the scholarly study of peacebuilding over the last two decades. The liberal peace debate has reached something of an impasse. On the one hand, the crisis of the liberal peace has not led to a paradigm shift away from broadly liberal frameworks. In recent years European-based academics (including the author of this review) working in critical and interpretivist traditions have offered new conceptualisations of peacebuilding based on their empirical research – the post-liberal, the everyday, welfare, the virtual, hybridity, the indigenous – but have done little to develop explanatory theory or influence policy. On the other hand, this oft-diagnosed crisis has been shrugged

Tajikistan amidst globalization: state failure or state transformation?

This paper considers the nature of Tajikistani statehood in an era of globalization. It takes as its foil a recent report of the International Crisis Group, ‘Tajikistan: on the road to failure’. The paper interrogates this claim and finds that it is based on a poor conceptualization of the state which disregards advances in state theory made in the last two decades. However, this problematic declaration cannot simply be dismissed but, being from an authoritative source, must be considered for its constitutive functions for Tajikistani statehood. The paper thus considers Tajikistans position in world politics theoretically in terms of the sociological and anthropological literature on global assemblages, particularly Sassens concept of denationalization. It goes on to investigate a single case of the contemporary Tajikistani state: the state-owned Tajik Aluminium Companys (Talco) international trading arrangements and tolling agreements. The paper argues that the post-Soviet, post-conflict Tajikistani state is not simply captured by elite networks or a shell for the personnel of the regime. Rather, whilst an explicitly ‘nationalizing state’, it has been transformed along the lines of denationalization. Tajikistans official institutions, in cooperation with global actors from multinational corporations to donor agencies, have been incorporated within certain global economic and political assemblages. The paper discusses the implications of all this in terms of the consequent hollowing out of the national-territorial state model and the establishing of lines of economics and politics which make the state, in parts, global.

Worlds apart: the making and remaking of geopolitical space in the US–Uzbekistani strategic partnership

Many recent journalistic and policy-practitioner analyses of geopolitics have discussed the rise and fall of the USA in Central Asia. For US policy-makers, the region gained increased importance after 9/11. It has been described as a ‘key theatre in the war on terror’, which according to analyst, Richard Giragosian, ‘has acquired a new strategic relevance’. In the months following 9/11, US interest in the region as a whole increased dramatically. Given the establishment of US bases in Kyrgyzstan (Ganci) and Uzbekistan (Kharshi-Khanabad, so-called ‘K2’), and the establishment of over-flight rights across other countries, events seemed to bear witness to the place power of the USA, which was able to inflict a ‘strategic reversal’ on Russia in its backyard of Central Asia. However, more recent developments, not least the sudden breakdown in the US–Uzbek strategic alliance, seem to indicate the precariousness of the US place in the region. Often such scholars are left to describe ‘swings’ of a pendulum, or ‘tilts’ of strategic balance in describing how Central Asian governments lurch between assertions of cooperation and acts of discord. However, these orthodox approaches consistently overlook or under-estimate crucial differences in how the region’s elites imagine politics within the region and how they view the Western ‘other’. This article will consider this role of representation in Central Asia’s international politics through a short study of the US–Uzbek ‘partnership’ and its demise. In studying strategic partnerships we must, in contrast to much of the strategic studies literature, address questions of political community and identity. This links security to sovereignty. Barker reminds us that legitimacy is ‘sustained to a greater or lesser degree by the depiction of enemies’. The Copenhagen School of security studies and the more radical critical security studies literature both see the presence or absence of security as a socially constructed phenomenon. Security and sovereignty are not merely about the acquisition of an enormous arsenal of defence and offence, or the structural conditions of balancing or bandwaggoning that might provide protection from an outside power. Rather security/sovereignty Central Asian Survey (March 2007) 26(1), 123–140

The affective politics of sovereignty: reflecting on the 2010 conflict in Kyrgyzstan

This article examines the concept of sovereignty in elite and popular affection during the violent and turbulent events from April to October 2010 in the Kyrgyz Republic. Nationalist leaders promoted Kyrgyz ethnic values and ideals as the center of sovereignty held by some to be under threat. These events exemplify what we describe as the affective politics of sovereignty. We explore how emotion, in particular, serves as an important component of the constitution of sovereignty as both an international and popular institution. We explore how Kyrgyz identity has become intertwined with the sovereignty of Kyrgyzstan and clashes with Western multi-ethnic conceptions and practices.

Introduction: the sources of statehood in Tajikistan

In Djamshed Usmonov’s 2005 film Farishtaii Kitfi Rost (Angel on the Right), the lead character, Hamro, returns to his hometown of Asht in Khujand Province after 10 years in Russia, where he had fled during the civil war, leaving behind debts and enemies. Having spent time in prison, Hamro is lured back to Tajikistan on the premise that his mother is on her deathbed – a ruse concocted by his mother and the head of local state administration (raisi hokimiiat). Whilst Hamro’s mother simply wishes her son to get his affairs in order, the raisi hokimiiat has a less benevolent aim. It transpires that he has bought Hamro’s debts (a total of US

Tajikistan's Virtual Politics of Peace

15,000) from his creditors (various local gangsters) and is now overseeing debt collection – demanding that Hamro’s mother’s house be sold and she return with him to Russia. Hamro is threatened by the raisi hokimiiat and the gangsters, badly injured in an attack and ultimately flees the village with his recently discovered 10-year-old son. The newly pregnant nurse with whom he has had an affair is left trailing in the wake of the bus which takes Hamro and his son out of the village (presumably back to Russia) giving the impression that this cycle of human despair will once again be repeated. Farishtaii Kitfi Rost is an insightful study of criminality, hardship and everyday life in postconflict Tajikistan. However, it is Usmonov’s portrayal of the state that is of most interest here. On the one hand, the state, through its agent in the person of the raisi hokimiiat, intrudes into everyday life in ways that illustrate the pervasiveness of statehood in Tajikistan. The state provides a debt-collection agency and resolves disputes within and between families. On the other hand, the state appears captured by opportunists using their official status to accrue personal wealth. The raisi hokimiiat acts as if he is mediating social problems yet is shown to work in tandem with the gangsters who kill and injure their debtors and rivals. Moreover, the film offers no fuel for the fire of those who would see such a state-regime, which habitually acts illegally, as necessarily illegitimate. There is no wider dissent against the rais despite his abuse of power and ill-gotten gains. This story, whilst a work of fiction, will sound familiar to both researchers and citizens of post-Soviet Tajikistan. It is almost 20 years since the Central Asian republics attained independent statehood amidst the crisis of the fall of the Soviet Union. Since that time, these states have defied various predictions of their collapse or fears of irredentism such as those which were realized in the South Caucasus and Moldova. The state in Central Asia which has been called into question most often, both from inside and outside the region, is the Republic of Tajikistan. There were both good historical and contemporary reasons to fear for the survival of the new state in 1991. Tajikistan’s emergence as one of the constituent republics of the USSR during the early Soviet period of national territorial delimitation (NTD) was fraught with difficulty. The one none-Turkic republic of Central Asia, Tajikistan was created first as an autonomous region within Uzbekistan (1924), achieving full ‘Union’ republic status only in 1929. In forming the republic,

Offshore Central Asia: an introduction

SINCE THE FORMAL END OF ITS POST-SOVIET CIVIL war in 1997, Tajikistan has found something proximate to peace and simultaneously been the object of international peacebuilding. Yet peace and peacebuilding are practically related in complex ways. It is problematic to simply assume that the partial achievement of the former is due to the partial completion of the latter. Moreover, the practices and discourses of this peace are far removed from both negative peace (the simple absence of war) and positive peace (the existence of emancipatory structures and cultures of non-violence). It is perhaps better to discuss not the building of peace but the emergence of legitimate order (Heathershaw 2009). Tajikistan has order in that it has established of rules and practices of governance. This order is legitimate in that it is widely resigned to in public discourses and practices which accept its basic validity. It is emergent in that it is not a state but a process and thus incomplete and highly contingent. This emergence of legitimate order has taken place despite a lack of the very things that both rational choice institutionalists and liberal peace theorists would expect to see. That is, it has taken place amidst the breakdown of the power-sharing mechanisms that were introduced in the 1997 peace agreement (as opposition commanders have gradually been removed from their positions), the absence of formal institutional structures of conflict management (substantial regional autonomy or consociational arrangements for example) and the increasing concentration of power to President Emomali Rahmon, his family and his inner circle fromDanghara.Moreover, the interregional, ideological and inter-personal conflicts of the 1992–1997 civil war have not simply disappeared, nor have they been channelled into formal institutions, but they have nevertheless been superseded by a ‘peace’—a new order of hegemonic governance. This peace is in part sustained by an informal economic order of exchange founded on corrupt privatisation and land reform (Zürcher 2004), the capture and reappropriation of international aid (Nakaya 2008) and the enormous social impact of seasonal labour migration (Olimova & Bosc 2003). However, what such materialist

Islam, secularism and danger: a reconsideration of the link between religiosity, radicalism and rebellion in Central Asia

For the first two decades of independence, most academics and policy analysts viewed Central Asia as detached from the global economy and immune to the diffusion of globalization trends. The apparent failure of ‘transition’ – allegedly manifest in high levels of corruption, elite control of critical industries and assets, and low levels of formal intra-regional trade – has been interpreted as further evidence of Central Asia’s distance from the world economy and has led to new initiatives to bridge the gap. This is most evident in US State Department’s recent vision of creating a New Silk Road that would increase trade and infrastructure linkages between Afghanistan and the Central Asian states. But this assumption of Central Asia’s economic isolation is highly selective and largely inaccurate. As Nicholas Shaxson (2011, 70) notes, ‘Capital no longer flows to where it gets the best return but to where it can get the best tax subsidies, the deepest secrecy, and to where it can best evade the laws, rules and regulations it does not like.’ More than half of world trade, half of all banking assets and a third of foreign direct investment are routed offshore (Palan, Murphy, and Chavagneux 2009; Shaxson 2011), yet rarely do we associate these offshore trends with Central Asia. Re-orienting our focus away from formal trade flows to the more hidden offshore world and institutions of contemporary finance, we see, in fact, multiple connections between the Central Asian region and the global economy, often via post-Soviet business networks and global legal institutions. Whilst this interconnectedness may begin in the financial realm, it has economic and political, domestic and international ramifications. Over the past two decades, Central Asian elites have learned to use global financial institutions and offshore vehicles to split the legal personality of nominally state-controlled assets. They have also laundered money through shell companies and structured side payments from their dealings with external actors, including telecommunications companies, energy multinationals and even foreign militaries. Far from operating in isolation, the Central Asian states, even those with more closed national economic systems (Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) have embedded their transactions, or at least their most significant transactions, in a set of informal transnational networks with global reach. As researchers, we are only now beginning to comprehend the breath-taking scope and analytical import of these activities. An increasing number of cases have come before Western courts or parliamentary investigations or appeared in the international press. In Central Asia these include the Giffen Affair and the Baker Hughes and Kazakhmys cases in Kazakhstan (Levine 2007; Global Witness 2010), the Asia Universal Bank and Manas jet fuel contracts in Kyrgyzstan (Cooley 2012; Global Witness 2012), the National Bank and Talco cases in Tajikistan (Helmer 2008; 2013; Nakaya 2009; Heathershaw 2011), various examples from Turkmenistan’s

Identity Politics and Statebuilding in Post-Bonn Afghanistan: The 2009 Presidential Election

ABSTRACT In equating political Islam with radicalism and rebellion against the state, security analysts make a number of assumptions about the religious, the secular and security. Within the Central Asian context, the discursive fusing of religiosity with radicalism produces a bogeyman in which national and foreign governments, although offering quite different countermeasures, have found a common enemy. This securitisation of Islam distorts our understanding of these movements whose approach is seldom ‘radical’ in form. We identify six claims which are axiomatic to both international and national secularist security discourses with respect to Islam in the region. We then demonstrate that popular Muslim discourse and political practice – in the findings of an original survey and ethnographic research in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan – provide a more complex picture than that found in elite discourses. While the six propositions can be refuted in objective terms, they remain relevant to how the problem is subjectively produced and reproduced in elite discourse and practice. As particular secularist claims about Islam, they inform national and international policies towards religious freedom and Islamic movements across Central Asia. Many of these themes appear in weaker and ambiguous forms in popular discourse and continue to limit Muslim political participation.

Illiberal Peace? Authoritarian Modes of Conflict Management

International statebuilding in Afghanistan must be considered in terms of identity politics as they have emerged since the Bonn Agreement of 2001. In light of this, Afghanistans 2009 presidential election serves as a window on the broader post-Bonn statebuilding process in which factionalized elite networks have constituted an internationally supported regime that masquerades as a state. Comparing political cultural and political economic explanations for the factionalism that was widespread during the elections, the paper demonstrates that the identity politics were contingent on the business of vote-rigging. In this light, the internationally assisted state is shown to be a site for inter-factional and inter-elite competition. This is a fundamentally unstable outcome that highlights the role of Western-led statebuilding in consolidating the ethno-regional and factional divisions in Afghanistans state.