With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, former Communist Party leaders in Central Asia were faced with the daunting task of building states where they previously had not existed: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Their task was complicated by the institutional and ideological legacy of the Soviet system as well as by a more actively engaged international community. These nascent states inherited a set of institutions that included bloated bureaucracies, centralized economic planning, and patronage networks. Some of these institutions survived, others have mutated, and new institutions have been created.
Experts on Central Asia here examine the emerging relationship between state actors and social forces in the region. Through the prism of local institutions, the authors reassess both our understanding of Central Asia and of the state-building process more broadly. They scrutinize a wide array of institutional actors, ranging from regional governments and neighborhood committees to transnational and non-governmental organizations. With original empirical research and theoretical insight, the volume's contributors illuminate an obscure but resource-rich and strategically significant region.
Pauline Jones Luong is Associate Professor of Political Science at Yale University. She is the author of Institutional Change and Political Continuity in Post-Soviet Central Asia: Power, Perceptions, and Pacts.
What People are Saying About This
Ronald Suny
In this superb collection of essays eight scholars bring new data and fresh insights to key questions of the relationship of state and society in post-Soviet Central Asia that require us to rethink conventional understandings of the region. Instead of a simple rejection of the Communist past and a return to traditionalism or Islam, the transformation has incorporated large doses of the Soviet experience. What look from afar like powerful centralized authoritarian states are on closer examination weak states in disaggregated societies. Rather than being opposed by the cultural elite, the 'non-transition' to democracy is explained in part by intellectuals' collaboration with the heirs of the ancien regime. The Transformation of Central Asia is based on extensive field work, deep local knowledge, and conceptual sophistication. It is a major contribution both to our knowledge of Central Asia and to the theoretical discussion of the state.
Philip G. Roeder
At a time when we are starved for information about these newly independent countries, The Transformation of Central Asia makes a welcome contribution with rich, thoughtful essays on diverse aspects of political and social life. The authors, all experts with extensive research experience in the region, share their insights into the many ways that Central Asian states, societies, and state-society relations have and have not changed since independence.
Douglas Blum
Pauline Jones Luong teases out numerous important theoretical issues raised by the authors, juxtaposes them with the state of the art in the extant literature on Central Asia and comparative politics, and skillfully weaves the whole together. This is a pathbreaking collective effort in the emerging scholarship on Central Asia.
Valerie Bunce
The contributors to this volume compare state-building and state-society interactions in the five post-Soviet Central Asian states. In the process, they offer us some surprising and compelling insights about national, religious, gender, and regional identities in Central Asia; about political and economic relations between the center and the regions; and about the impact of the international system on the development of these states, societies, and economies. This story of a Soviet past that shapes politics, culture, and economics is a convincing one, because the scholars writing in this volume combine deep knowledge of the region with a commitment to comparative theory.
