Sébastien Peyrouse

Nationhood and the minority question in Central Asia. The Russians in Kazakhstan

Abstract This article aims to present the situation of the Russian minority in Kazakhstan and to stress the political, social and identity evolutions in this country since independence in 1991. It develops three main points: the non-homogeneous nature of Russians in Kazakhstan; the development of non-ethnic allegiances that could explain the failure of the local Russian political parties; and the difficulties the leaders have in choosing between the defence of the political rights and the cultural rights of the countrys first minority. In order to examine these issues, this article focuses on a series of issues: the place of the national question in the Kazakh public debate; the process of linguistic and ethnic Kazakhisation; the political activities of the Russian minority; the Cossack issue and the stakes of autonomist claims; and, finally, the issue of emigration and the narrative of the ‘return’ to Russia.

Islam in Central Asia: National Specificities and Postsoviet Globalisation

In the former USSR, as anywhere else, Islam is not a cultural isolate, but is bound up with globalisation and the phenomena of the reconstitution of the religious experience such as the individualisation of belief, the part it plays in ‘neo-ethnic’ identities and its formulation in terms of anti-internationalism. The liberalisation of political life since perestroika has been parallel to religious ‘renewal’, or at least the sentiment of religious ‘renewal’. The political, national and religious spheres are now combined in varied reconstitutions: religion is one of the elements legitimising national identity that are considered as ‘natural’: that is, as part of a community’s ‘traditions’ rather than as a matter of individual choice. The new Central Asian states have thus seized their religious identity in order to turn it into an element of national assertion as well as one of the social bases of political power. This overlapping of religion, politics and nation is neither new nor specific to this regional space. It is part of a more general process, with reference to which postsoviet societies have been only too rarely analysed so far. These sets of themes enable us to start thinking more generally about the paradoxical links between religion and politics that are currently coming out, as religion learns how to take advantage of the current ‘globalisation’ phenomenon to invest new public spaces and to present itself as one of the matrices of collective and individual identities. In this article I aim to think over the transformations of postsoviet Islam in Central Asia and to point to the interactions between national and regional specificities on the one hand, and the involvement in global evolutions on the other.

Globalizing Central Asia : Geopolitics and the Challenges of Economic Development

This collection of the correspondence of Mao Zedong during the period 1956 to 1957 explores the question of legitimatizing the leadership of the CCP, the pace of the socialist transformation of Chinas economy, and the issue of the divergence of ideological opinion over the strategy of revolution.

The “Imperial Minority”: An Interpretative Framework of the Russians in Kazakhstan in the 1990s

This paper is devoted to the Russian minorities living in Central Asia (nearly 10 million people in 1989, about 5.5 million today), and more specifically to the Russians living in Kazakhstan, who constitute the main Russian minority in the near abroad, apart from Ukraine. Unlike the Russians living in the other Central Asian republics, Russians in Kazakhstan created political parties. Kazakhstan even experienced some significant secessionist trends in the mid-1990s. Today, the political, social and economic situation of the Russian minority is rather different. Since about 2 million Russians have left the country, those who remain have tried to find their niche within the economic growth that Kazakhstan has experienced since the 2000s. The political parties and associations that represented the interests of the Russian minority have largely disappeared from the political scene. The “Russian question” no longer threatens to destabilize the territorial integrity of the country. Thus it is now possible to study the changes of the 1990s as historical phenomena. A new analysis allows for better understanding of the effects of “nationalization” of the new states, as described by Rogers Brubaker, and how the “minority” populations perceived them. The definition of a titular nation “forming the statehood” (gosudarstvoobrazuyushchaya), development of symbols referencing Kazakh traditions and history, ethnicization of the public administration, linguistic nationalization and the system of national preference in obtaining posts exacerbate feelings of interethnic tension. Having conceived of Kazakhstan as a majority Slavic state, the Russians have poorly accepted their relegation to minority status. This paper thus argues that the Russian minority had a negative vision of Kazakh history and culture that affected the way it interpreted its contemporary situation within the new independent state. Questions it posed include how to pass from the status of a people representing the Soviet state to a minority symbolizing the former colonizer, and how Russians analyzed phenomena such as nepotism, authoritarianism, corruption and cooptation of the Kazakhs. Finally, how so-called “Kazakh specificities” serve the goals of the Russian associations, which seek to demonstrate the illegitimacy of independent Kazakhstan’s identity and culture.

The Partnership between Islam and Orthodox Christianity in Central Asia

Abstract This article examines the motives behind the partnership between Islam and Orthodox Christianity in postsoviet Central Asia. In fact, since the 1990s there has been a notable development in strategies of alliance between Orthodox and Muslim hierarchies, strategies that aim at reducing religious freedoms and countering the so-called ‘untraditional’ movements: the proselytising Protestant and Islamic currents. In order to shed light on this situation, which might at first seem quite paradoxical, I will first examine Orthodoxys claims to autochthonism in Central Asia; second, I will look at its rereading of the past as an attempt to erase specific moments of conflict with Islam; and third, I will discuss the common struggle of Orthodoxy and Islam against proselytising by Christian movements and their influence over the political authorities. Contrary to the situation in many states in the Middle East, there is no discrimination against Christianity as a whole in Central Asia, since all five states fully recognise Orthodoxy, but there is discrimination against confessions perceived as foreign or as liable to undermine the religious status quo by their proselytism. Religious alterity in Central Asia as well as across the entire former Soviet Union continues to be subject to national identification.

Christianity and nationality in Soviet and post‐Soviet Central Asia: mutual intrusions and instrumentalizations

The five Central Asian Muslim republics (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan) count many Christian—Orthodox, Catholic, Armenian and Protestant—minorities. Unlike the religious communities in the Near and Middle East, most Christians in Central Asia consist of Slavic/European minorities (Russians, Germans, Poles, Armenians, Greeks, etc.), which came in the area during the Russian colonization in the eighteenth–nineteenth centuries. The main traditionally Christian nationalities living in Central Asia are Slavs and Germans. Today, Russians are mainly present in Kazakhstan (4.5 million), in Kyrgyzstan (600,000) and in Uzbekistan (at least half a million). There are only several tens of thousand Russians in Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. Like Russians, the number of the other Slavic nationalities has considerably decreased in Central Asia since the last three decades. There are 50,000 Ukrainians in Kyrgyzstan, 500,000 in Kazakhstan and about 100,000 in Uzbekistan. Byelorussians number 111,000 in Kazakhstan, and about 20,000 in Uzbekistan. According to the 1999 census, there are only 47,000 Poles in Kazakhstan. Today there are 353,000 Germans in Kazakhstan, 21,000 in Kyrgyzstan, and less than 8,000 in Uzbekistan, and their community is nearly nonexistent in Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. Other nationalities are also present in the Christian communities, though more modestly: among them, Koreans (about 160,000 in Uzbekistan, close to 100,000 in Kazakhstan in 1999), Greeks (10,000 in Uzbekistan), Tatars (248,000 in Kazakhstan) as well as Armenians (there remained 40,000 Armenians in Turkmenistan in 1995, with 42,000 in Uzbekistan today). Armenians have only one cult building in Samarkand. Moreover, after the fall of the USSR, more and more natives have been converted to Christianity: many—especially Protestant—missions, are now acting among Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, etc. As everywhere in the Eastern bloc during the Soviet Era, the act of faith in Central Asia was subjected to many consequences. Unlike Russia, the cultural significance of religion was greatly amplified by the minority situation of the European populations. The Christian feeling there can have multiple meanings: Christianity was not only a faith persecuted by the atheist regime but also a minority religion in a Muslim area. Moreover, after independence in 1991, the ethno-national character of a minority faith more obviously appeared within the framework of the Muslim majority and of the new State-nation building. We will try to study in this article the

Why Central Asia? The Strategic Rationale of Indian and Chinese Involvement in the Region

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the rediscovery of Central Asia by the international community has placed this region in a specific intellectual context, one marked by a return of geopolitical theories and debates around the “end of history” and the “clash of civilizations.” The revival of geopolitical theory, especially Sir Halford Mackinder’s idea that one who controls the Heartland controls the world, has profoundly shaped the new frameworks applied to the post-Soviet states of Central Asia and to Afghanistan. In contrast to the geographical and economic isolation of the region, theories about the revival of the Silk Road flourished in the West and in Asia. The United States and the European Union have used them to promote the release of Central Asia from the Russian sphere of influence by opening toward the south. Turkey, Iran, Japan, South Korea, China, India, and Pakistan have made references to their historical ties with the region, beyond the years of the Iron Curtain.

Logiques et acteurs du présidentialisme au Kazakhstan La « Famille », les technocrates et les oligarques

Cet article constitue une analyse des principaux traits du systeme presidentialiste mis en place au Kazakhstan depuis le debut des annees 1990. Apres avoir rapidement retrace la formation du regime politique kazakhstanais, l’auteur se concentre sur les acteurs de ce systeme ou interets politiques et economiques sont etroitement imbriques, en particulier les rapports de concurrence qui opposent les membres de la « Famille » presidentielle, les technocrates de l’Administration presidentielle et les oligarques. En mettant en lumiere les logiques sous-jacentes, il cherche a montrer combien l’acces aux ressources et le controle des richesses accumulees se trouvent au cœur des luttes politiques qui entourent la future succession presidentielle.

The United States in Central Asia: Reassessing a Challenging Partnership

Abstract This article focuses on the evolving place of the US in the Central Asian arena, analysing how US interests have changed in this region since the 1990s. It studies how strategic relations were transformed around the NATO Partnership for Peace, the growing cooperation in the Caspian Sea, and the building of a regional security architecture surrounding Afghanistan. It also analyses Washingtons difficulties in promoting ‘civil society’ and the limits of the US economic engagement in the region. It concludes that the United States must show more interest in societal development, and demonstrate its willingness to respond to Central Asian needs and perspectives.