Lawrence P. Markowitz

How master frames mislead: the division and eclipse of nationalist movements in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan

Abstract This article examines how a successful master frame in one location can promote mobilization failure in another by misleading movement entrepreneurs. It revisits two cases of low nationalist mobilization in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to demonstrate that a fuller explanation should include the tactical choices – good and bad – of movement leaders. In both cases, a transnational anti-imperial master frame misled separatist nationalists, causing them to undervalue critical shifts in the political environments in their republics. In Uzbekistan, this frame left the Birlik nationalist movement open to division by the state in the aftermath of inter-ethnic violence, while it made Tajikistans Rastokhez movement susceptible to eclipse by regionalist mobilization in Tajikistan.

Unlootable Resources and State Security Institutions in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan

Why, when faced with similar conditions of weakening central control, do some institutions of state security fragment into autonomous agents of organized violence whereas others cohere around coercive rent seeking without challenging the central government? Focusing on Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, this article explains these divergent state security outcomes as a consequence of resource concentrations and patronage pressures that influence the political elites who leverage local offices of state security. The article finds that privatizing violence within state apparatuses of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan took very different forms in the 1990s.

Tajikistan: authoritarian reaction in a postwar state

Why and how has Tajikistan responded to the threat of democratic revolution? In this article, I argue that state failure and civil war in Tajikistan have imposed limitations on the countrys emergent path of authoritarian development. Scarce resources and limited rent-seeking opportunities in postwar Tajikistan weakened the informal bases of presidential power and fragmented the countrys state security institutions. As a consequence of its weakened presidential power and fragmented coercive capacity, Tajikistans leadership has taken a moderated response to the threat of democratic revolution and pursued a slow, graduated strengthening of authoritarian rule. While electoral reforms were reversed, restrictions imposed on the media and on non-governmental organizations were selective and temporary and the use of force has been relatively circumscribed.

The evolution of violence within far-right mobilization: evidence from Russia

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the temporal variation in far-right violence by examining it as a series of interrelated attacks that are embedded within and arising out of a broader cycle of far-right mobilization. It argues that the changing nature of far-right violence occurs as a trial-and-error process – what Sidney Tarrow terms “tactical innovation” – within a mobilizational cycle. As we demonstrate below, far-right mobilization is characterized by innovation, experimentation, and selection of specific types of attacks and particular targets that are deemed likely to garner public support and increase pressure on state officials. Consequently, over the course of the mobilizational cycle, far-right violence employed more organized forms of violence and increasingly targeted ethnic minorities and migrants. We find empirical support for this argument in the case of Russia, using event analysis of a ten-year span of mass violent attacks and an in-depth examination of selected riots.

The Resource Curse Reconsidered: Cash Crops and Local Violence in Kyrgyzstan

It is often noted in resource curse literature that agricultural economies are less conflict-prone than countries managing mobile, high-value resources. In the vast literature linking resource endowment and conflict, cash crop economies are often considered immune to civil violence, believed to stand apart from the many horrific episodes of violence and civil war centered on “lootable” wealth (such as alluvial diamonds, tin, tungsten, or other conflict minerals). But many incidents of violence—especially local violence—are in fact occurring in cash crop economies. Drawing on newspaper accounts, policy analyses, ethnographic interviews, and in-depth reports by international organizations, I examine an episode of local violence in 2010 in Kyrgyzstan. Through this case study, the article provides a better understanding of local violence in cash crop economies that can apply to other weak states.

Anti-immigrant mobilization in Russia's regions: local movements and framing processes

This article argues that increased anti-immigrant mobilization (the targeting of ethnic migrants to limit their rights and/or promote their resettlement) in Russias regions is a consequence of local social movements adopting an anti-immigrant frame as part of their efforts to promote recruitment, acquire resources, and advance their movements particular cause. Using the cases of Sverdlovsks Gorod Bez Narkotikov (City Without Drugs) and Krasnodars Cossack groups, it develops the argument and demonstrates specific ways in which an anti-immigrant frame is taken up by local movements. As a complement to existing studies of anti-immigrant sentiment or far right ideology, these cases highlight the practical politics of mobilizing support for anti-immigration causes in contemporary Russia.

Rural economies and leadership change in Central Asia

ABSTRACT This article applies a political economy approach to questions of presidential succession in Central Asia. Using the cases of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, it examines how institutions governing rural economies generate, channel and distribute rents within these authoritarian regimes. In some, these institutions concentrate rents under long-standing rulers; in others they diffuse rents away from rulers. The article then specifies obstacles to leadership change that arise from these rural economies, and the crises those obstacles may pose for authoritarian regimes in the region.

Corruption as a last resort: adapting to the market in Central Asia

democracy. Regional analysts and scholars of Central Asia, politics, economics and international relations will benefit from McGlinchey’s insights. Its reasonable length and jargon-free language make Chaos, Violence, and Dynasty accessible to undergraduate students as well as to the general public. Western, Russian and Chinese geopolitical interests in Central Asia have not democratized these states but further enhanced existing authoritarianism. An understanding of the inner workings of autocratic regimes and politics can help the international community ‘make autocracies more tolerable and less violent’, not only in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan (xiii).