As the war in Ukraine continues and Russia remains under heavy international sanctions, its political allies, economic partners, and geographic as well as cultural neighbors in Central Asia are being engaged in incredible levels of diplomatic activity. In recent months, the region has been visited by Vladimir Putin, Emmanuel Macron, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and a number of other high-ranking international officials, who have discussed their competing visions for the region’s energy, as well as diverse transportation and investment projects. The countries of Central Asia are using these new opportunities to rebalance their global relationships and secure their own interests. The flurry of international interest has opened up the prospect of a new future for these states—potentially with much less dependency on their former metropole, Russia.

Is Central Asia moving beyond Russia? How can Russkii Mir be viewed through the lens of decolonization? Has populism won in Kyrgyzstan? And finally, what is the outlook for Central Asia? We discuss these questions in an interview with Dr. Johan Engvall from the Swedish Institute of International Affairs.

An Interview with Johan Engvall

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Johan Engvall, PhD, works at the Swedish Centre for Eastern European Studies (SCEEUS), based at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs. He is also a non-resident senior fellow of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute. He holds a PhD in political science from the Department of Government at Uppsala University. His dissertation dealt with corruption and the state in Kyrgyzstan.

The war in Ukraine has shifted some patterns in Eurasia. We see a lot of worries in Central Asia, where the war represents a great challenge from various angles: security, economics, transportation, trade, labor migration, and of course geopolitics. These states’ relations with Russia are also changing, as you mention in your recent article “Central Asia Moves Beyond Russia.” How are they are changing and in what domains? Do you think this change is temporary or long-term?

The Central Asian states have to walk a fine line in trying to distance themselves from Russia’s actions. They are all under intense pressure from Moscow, and Russia-Central Asia relations run deep. Military, political, economic, and cultural links between the Central Asian countries and Russia developed over a long period and will not disappear overnight.

It is also evident that Central Asia is becoming more important for Russia, not least economically, as other trade routes have been closed off and redrawn. Since 2022, an increasingly politically isolated Vladimir Putin has been on something of a charm offensive in the region, holding numerous meetings with national leaders in an obvious attempt to tie the countries closer to Russia. For their part, national leaders are trying to take advantage of Russia’s political and economic isolation and the newfound international attention to the region.

Since February 24, 2022, Russia-Central Asia relations have not so much been ruptured as seen trends accelerate. The developments in this period have reinforced the gradual but steady weakening of Russia’s hard and soft power in the region. Preoccupied as it is in Ukraine, Russia’s role as the dominant security actor in Central Asia is being eroded. The CSTO has proven toothless when it comes to addressing security concerns—and not only between Armenia and Azerbaijan, but also between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, both members of the alliance. The Eurasian Economic Union is becoming less popular among member states and ever more unattractive to prospective members like Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. So Russia is definitely losing some of its appeal in the region. Putin’s privileged position in Central Asia is now challenged by other leaders, chief among them the Chinese and Turkish leaders.

How has the war in Ukraine affected identity? We hear a lot of opinions and debates about colonialism and identity, and these debates long predate the war—arguably, they were among the reasons why the Soviet Union collapsed. From that perspective, it was no surprise that President Tokayev recently chose to open a joint conference with Vladimir Putin in Kazakh. At the same time, however, Tokayev has promised to support the Russian language in Central Asia. How do the decolonization lens and Russkii Mir interact in Central Asia? Can they coexist?

To my mind, there are several mutually reinforcing processes at play that are contributing to the gradual removal of the colonial yoke in Central Asia. First, it has now been more than 30 years since these states became independent. After 70 years of uniformity under Soviet socialist rule, they are finally becoming themselves. They have embarked on their own paths, developing distinct national identities and protecting their sovereignties.

Second, if anything, Russia’s aggression and denial of Ukraine’s right to independent statehood have provided the impetus for a re-examination of colonial legacies in Central Asia as well. A critical look at the past is now reaching broader segments of the public in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, two countries that have never constituted their independent statehood on an anti-colonial basis. And in Uzbekistan, President Mirziyoyev has become increasingly assertive in addressing the injustices that Moscow inflicted on the country during the Soviet era.

Third, like a thread through these transformative processes runs a generational divide. Central Asia is undergoing rapid societal and demographic transformations with an impact on identity formation. More than 70 percent of the region’s population is under the age of 40. A large post-Soviet generation with no personal experience of the Soviet Union is now coming to the fore. This generation, formed by developments since independence, is changing the countries of the region both politically and culturally. For this generation, the attractiveness of Russia is less ideological and sentimental than it is related to Russia’s status as a source of employment and material opportunities.

No doubt, Russia is hyper-sensitive about these developments and is constantly taking steps to reverse them. Russian media are the Kremlin’s main tool for shaping public opinion in Central Asia: they are effective at hammering home messages on everything from Ukraine’s alleged status as a Nazi state to the evils of the West. In this civilizational confrontation, Russian propaganda depicts the Central Asian countries as brotherly nations of Russia, extensions of the “Russian world” that share Russian values and norms.

Since the lingering role of the Russian language undergirds Russia’s influence in the region, every attempt to downgrade Russian is taken as an act of hostility. In the same way, any attempt to uncover national traumas and critically review aspects of Soviet colonial rule is feverishly rejected by Moscow. Russia uses various tools to advance its cultural influence, especially targeting Central Asia’s youth. In this context, Rossotrudnichestvo is the main organization financing modern Russian schools and other institutions to ensure that Russian culture retains its presence.

Accordingly, we see an increasingly uneasy mixture of liberation and reclaiming the past, on the one hand, and continued subjugation and a sense of an unbreakable historical bond, on the other hand. A step in one direction tends to be followed by a corrective step in the other direction. Taking a long-term view, however, there is little doubt that Russia’s influence over domestic processes in Central Asia is waning. Moreover, this process is hardly reversible; instead, Moscow is forced to rely ever more on invoking fear.

We in Central Asia generally do not like talk about the Great Game, but it inevitably recurs, especially in the current context, where Central Asia again appears important as an energy resource and a crossing space. On that point, we saw European leaders visit Central Asia more frequently this year. What is your view of Central Asia’s geopolitical importance and the room for maneuver of its foreign policy? Do you think the Central Asian states have done a good job, over the past three decades, of leveraging their foreign policy to cement their independence?

The Central Asian states all understand the risks of leaving the fate of their economies, their national security, and their sovereignty in the hands of an unreliable and revisionist Russia. We have already seen the Central Asian states push to create—or resurrect—various initiatives in the spheres of trade and transportation, as well as intensify their search for alternative security partnerships. The Caspian Sea is becoming increasingly important as the region’s window to the West, and European leaders have probably never been as welcomed in the region as they have during the past year.

All countries in the region continue to strengthen their economic ties to China, and Russia’s growing dependence on China is likely to have consequences for Central Asia too. Meanwhile, Turkey is expanding its geopolitical role not only in the South Caucasus, but also in Central Asia. Ankara’s economic and cultural ties to the region are now complemented by a stronger security partnership, as the Organization of Turkic States is transforming into more of a security organization. Investments are sought from many different sources, including the Gulf countries. Finally, to build security and stability from within, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are pushing to further strengthen regional collaboration.

So we see a flurry of activities pointing in the direction of balancing their external relations. Building on their longstanding multi-vector foreign policies, the Central Asian states are trying to take advantage of the geopolitical void resulting from Russia’s weakness by doubling down on their efforts to build alternative diplomatic alliances that would serve their own interests. In this sense, multivectorism has turned out to be a very useful policy idea, as it has laid the foundation for the Central Asian states to carve out some room for agency in a very difficult geopolitical situation. This would not have been possible if they were Russian satellites, as they are often erroneously depicted in Western media.

Religion is another marker of identity—and, as you wrote in an article on Kyrgyzstan, it has increased in importance in the region. In that article, you posed the interesting question of what will happen as a new generation comes to power, specifically whether they will maintain the separation between politics and religion. Do you have any possible answers to this question?

Central Asia is an outlier in the Muslim world, going against the tide of mixing religion and politics. The steady religious revival since independence, however, poses a challenge for the Central Asian states’ secular systems of government. As societies become more religious, the role of Islam—as a factor in political legitimization and a resource for mobilizing and attracting voters—is increasing. Symptomatically, in Kyrgyzstan, mosques are no longer built by foreign sponsors, but by local businessmen involved in politics. There is also a trend toward deeper ties between politicians and clerics, with politicians using clerical support to strengthen their local electoral bases. In this light, secular statehood cannot be taken for granted.

The future of secularism in Central Asia will likely depend on several factors. One of these is the developments of religious ideas in the rest of the Muslim world. But from a regional perspective, it will depend on the policies that governments pursue in the coming years. Moving forward, it will be critical for the countries to build stronger ties between state and society. Corrupt governments perceived as unjust and as failing to respond to public expectations would likely increase the risk of religious movements being able to tap into people’s frustration and call for an entirely different type of social and political order.

It is also questionable whether the restrictive and repressive approach to maintaining secularism on which the Central Asian states predominantly rely will be sustainable in the long run. It is necessary to break away from the Soviet legacy of relying on controlling society through the security services. Here, some differences are emerging between the states of the region. Whereas Uzbekistan is embracing a more positive approach, focusing on promoting traditional and tolerant Islam in society, Tajikistan retains a strictly defensive approach where the relationship between the state and religion continues to center on restrictive and repressive measures.

Then there is the issue of broader societal transformations. For example, in Kyrgyz society, three main attitudes can be identified in the religious sphere (even if this is admittedly an oversimplification). First, there is the predominantly secular political, economic, and intellectual elite in Bishkek. This group is gradually losing its position as society becomes less secular. Second, there is a large group of nationalist-minded citizens who increasingly embrace moderate Hanafi Islam as part of that identity. Third, there are Islamic currents—generally influenced by foreign Islamic ideas—that try to convert existing Muslims to more conservative versions of Islam. The outcome will depend in part on which one of these “groups” will constitute the key pillar of future decisionmakers.

You mostly specialize in Kyrgyzstan and its domestic politics—in particular its parliamentary model, which you describe as a struggle or interplay between “bandits and bureaucrats.” The presidency of Sadyr Japarov has been surprisingly stable, despite elevating its base to the detriment of the (smaller) liberal segment of society. What are your views on the current politics of Kyrgyzstan? Has populism won and is there any way to reverse some of the democratic losses?

Unfortunately, democracy and effective governance are not synonyms. A country can be democratic but have terrible governance—and vice versa. Kyrgyzstan’s decade-long parliamentary experiment failed to live up to expectations. It proved ineffective, fragmenting political power and weakening the country’s governance. More political competition translated into more competition over corruption. The parliament, which should have been the main political body, became paralyzed by competing economic interests. Among ordinary citizens, it was seen more as a club for shady business executives than as a responsible institution concerned with the country’s development. Paradoxically, therefore, this system further alienated citizens from the political elite.

I believe it is against this background that Sadyr Japarov’s meteoric rise to power needs to be understood. There was a demand for a new kind of political leadership, and Japarov portrayed himself as something new, an alternative to the discredited political class that had dominated the country in recent decades. His populist platform appeals especially to traditional and nationalist-oriented segments of the population, particularly among youth and the rural population. As scholar Aksana Ismailbekova has shown, Japarov established himself as an authentic representative of the people, someone who stood in contrast to the corrupt former leaders.

It is clear that political changes under the current leadership have set the country on a more authoritarian path. However, returning to the earlier distinction between type of political system and governmental effectiveness, some would definitely argue that while Kyrgyzstan’s democracy rating has plummeted, decision-making processes have improved in the sense that government bodies are working more effectively, which is obviously something ordinary citizens appreciate when it comes to accessing public goods and services.

That said, Kyrgyzstan’s civil society is under a worrying amount of pressure. But Kyrgyzstan’s civil society, including Western-financed NGOs as well as more indigenous forms of voluntary collective mobilization, has proven to be remarkably resilient despite recurring oppression from the state in recent decades. In fact, in times of crisis, Kyrgyz society has often compensated for an incapacitated state. Spontaneous collective action has a long track record of resolving social problems and providing goods and services. Citizens, not least youth groups, have voluntarily organized to uphold law and order amid recurring political upheavals, dragged the country out of the Covid-19 pandemic, and effectively provided humanitarian support to people affected by the violence along the border with Tajikistan.

There is also a new form of democratic activism emerging among the youth. This new form of activism differs from Western-financed civil society organizations, for it is organized through social media, using art and other forms of resistance. Thus, civil society is not standing still; engagement is simply taking other forms than the nongovernmental organizations associated with an older generation. For Western partners, there therefore seems to be room to devise new ways of interacting with and supporting Kyrgyzstan’s younger generation.

In conclusion, what is your outlook on Central Asia in light of the war in Ukraine? Will any of the impacts of the war—Russian relocation, the decline in Central Asian labor migration, or any other societal change that is occurring right now—have a longer-term impact?

The only thing we can be sure about is that there will be unanticipated changes. For example, when the war broke out and Western sanctions were imposed on the Russian economy, the immediate projection was that many Central Asian labor migrants would have to return home, carrying the risks of increased unemployment, a decline in remittances, and the overall destabilization of society. But despite growing challenges, Central Asian laborers continue to arrive in Russia. In fact, because of the war, Russia’s own supply of labor is shrinking dramatically, which might even reinforce the need for labor migrants to fill the shortages.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine represents a watershed moment, an event likely to produce a new geopolitical landscape. Even though regional political rearrangements are visible in the form of new and renewed initiatives, the full implications of these developments are yet to be seen. Ultimately, much depends on the outcome of the war. If Russia loses in Ukraine, this could cause a seismic shift in Central Asia as well. But the region’s leaders are hedging their bets. Indeed, many in the region cannot imagine that Russia will lose; they therefore need to be as well prepared for a Russian victory as possible. Regardless, there is no returning back to business as usual. Thus, to quote the Canadian hockey legend Wayne Gretzky, the challenge for them is to anticipate “where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”

I was nineteen years old when I left the US to study for the first time. I spent five weeks on a summer exchange program at the International University in Moscow, sponsored by my home university in Texas. With twenty or so other students, I listened to lectures, watched Russian films, and went on various tours of museums and historical sites. As part of the program, we were assigned local students—native Russian-speakers—as tutors.

The minute my tutor and I met, we clicked. It was instant—we were sisters. Just like me, she was one of the only Asian people in her group. I am Cantonese-American, with both parents from Hong Kong. My tutor is part Kazakh. Unlike most of the other pairings, we remain close friends long after the end of the program.

Author

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Katherine Leung

Katherine Leung is an independent researcher specializing in youth culture and contemporary art in Tuva. She publishes her work in New Research of Tuva, reviews books for Lossi 36, and has curated multiple art exhibitions showcasing emerging artists from Kalmyk, Tatar, and Central Asian communities. She taught English in Samara, Russia as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in 2014 and at English camps in Tuva, Buryatia, and Primorsky Krai in 2015. She holds dual degrees, having earned a Bachelor of Arts in Russian and a Bachelor of Science in Education from the University of Texas at Austin.

While abroad, I found that I received discreetly preferential treatment from the Central Asian shopkeepers—a smile, an extra piece of candy slipped into my bag. I frequently received dinner on the house from workers at the shawarma stand. I soon realized that my experience was different from that of the other students. While every American was firmly warned against getting into an unlicensed taxi—so-called “gypsy cabs”—I realized that those rules did not apply to people who looked like me. As they did for Uzbek, Kyrgyz, and Tajik people, cars would stop for me, the driver frequently slowing down just to ask if I needed a lift. It was a constant, and it was safe—even in the bustling expanse that is Moscow.

Three years later, I returned to Russia, this time to a small city in a southwestern province. I was a part of a group of American English teachers sent to work in every corner of the country. The town in which I was placed relied on hundreds of marshrutki, vans driving specific routes and charging ten rubles a ride, as the main method of transportation. These vans were driven by Central Asians blasting their own music, to the chagrin of elderly riders. Frequently, drivers instructed me to climb into the elusive front passenger seat when the cab was full. Nobody else got to sit in the front. The drivers rarely accepted my fare.

I wasn’t prepared for my first winter. A Kazakh beautician struck up a conversation with me on social media, and the next day she helped me pick out a real jacket at a mall to which I would have never ventured on my own. My experience in other cities mirrored this kindness. On my way home on a minus-twenty-degree night, a Bashkir guy picked me up and took me to the city center in Ufa, saving me from a two-hour wait for the next bus. In Novosibirsk, a Kalmyk and Tuvan couple waited for me at the train station with snacks, just because some fellow Asian friends in Buryatia had mentioned to them that I would be in town (for half an hour, the entirety of the train’s stop in that city). On the road from Abakan to Kyzyl, a Tuvan woman took me under her wing, going so far as to order my meal for me at the sole rest stop in the 400-kilometer stretch between the republics of Khakassia and Tuva. In Tuva, strangers declared that I was Tuvan just because I look Tuvan.

With white Russians, I faced prejudice, whether it was the police profiling me as a sex worker or uninhibited drunks shouting “China!” or “Kazakhstan!” at me on the street. But in reflecting on the hospitality I experienced, as an outsider, from people who look similar to me, I couldn’t help but wonder what aspect of my privilege spoke to other Asian people. Obviously, I was a young female with youth on my side. Maybe it was naive to accept free food and bus rides, embedded in cultural routines and stigmas I didn’t understand. I didn’t exactly wear my Americanness on the outside, though my innate financial capital must have helped.

Perhaps it’s a trait of diasporic peoples, a minority outside our “homeland.” I was a perpetual foreigner in Russia, just as I had been my entire life in the US. I was used to this community care in the homes and worship centers of my pan-Asian immigrant community—and found it replicated on Russian soil.

Being Asian in the US

In the US, Asian American political movements are taking hold. Asian Americans are winning key political offices. Our vice-president is Indian-American. Simultaneously, media representation is starting to be noticed by non-Asian audiences. Films and media created by Asian Americans are gaining recognition from white Americans. On the surface, we are having a moment.

The US has always been a mixing pot of cultures and our mainstream media are trying to show that. In large cities, foods served in immigrant-owned restaurants are a mainstay of American life. Crimes against Asian immigrants are no longer ignored.

Absent from these narratives and cultural representations are Central Asians. The consumables to which Westerners have grown accustomed favor Eastern Asian diasporic narratives and the stories of Southern Asian creators over anything else. The ethnic groups originating from East and South Asia are much more populous than Central Asian countries, and the global immigrant diaspora reflects that. But let’s get real: even many Russians are not familiar with the Asian republics within their country’s borders.

Mainstream discourse centering on identity politics really falls short when it comes to Central Asian representation. Conversations about diversity or “seeing yourself represented” in the media are self-absorbed at best and a sinister commodification at worst. Much like the co-opted LGBTQ+ movement, Asians represent a growing market share that capitalism has opportunistically included without any real sense of solidarity.

Yet I still vividly remember the first time I saw a Central Asian character on American TV. It was a Netflix reality show based on the lives of New York socialites, Bling Empire. Released just a few years after Crazy Rich Asians, it was clearly riding the coattails of that phenomenon. The show featured a Thai heiress; a Taiwanese billionaire’s daughter; a Cantonese-American influencer; and a Taiwanese ABC entrepreneur dating a Kalmyk-Korean model, Vika Abbyaeva from Russia. At first quiet and often talked over, Vika slowly came into her own during the arc of the season (but not enough to break up with her lame boyfriend).

Upon seeing her face on TV, I wondered if this was the representation we all hoped for. Suddenly, more shades of the world’s largest continent were being shown to us in the mass media. But Vika was a beautiful supermodel—hardly relatable to the average diasporic Asian. She wasn’t a representative for all of us, and she shouldn’t have that responsibility placed upon her.

One character on a reality show isn’t an attempt to rectify the countless injustices perpetrated against Central Asians by colonizers in the last century. Leaving aside the complication that Kalmykia is presently located in Europe, Asians—or rather, Asian-looking peoples—in Russia have long had a complex relationship with Russian colonization.

Kalmyks found temporary solace under the Russian Empire but experienced mass atrocities and forced migration under Stalin with Operation Ulusy. In American academic discourse surrounding decolonization, researchers focus on Native Americans and enslaved Africans because of the clear power imbalance and bloodshed. It’s difficult for the average diasporic Asian person to place oneself in that colonizer/colonized dichotomy. Identifying the colonizer and source of oppression is not always clear when there have been long centuries of conflict, immigration, and colonization between historic people groups. Vika from Netflix’s Bling Empire is not the amalgamation of her ancestors dating back to the Kalmyk Khanate, nor am I the direct product of the civilizations before me. Dominant perceptions of identity politics can be inconsistent and exhausting.

Diasporic Solidarity

I feel kindred to other Asians, and while I don’t speak for the people I met while studying and working in Russia, I imagine they might have as well. The way nomadic peoples have historically been welcoming to guests probably influenced the generosity with which I was treated while living in Russia: attributing hospitality to a shared Asian bloodline and hypothetical “big Asian family” are remnants of old customs still present today. Language barriers, including sometimes not even having Russian as a mutual language, didn’t impact understanding for me.

Leaving behind capitalistic definitions of representation and diversity, I often wonder how to consolidate shared experiences with identity politics and history. We are not black or white, but occupy a third space left out of academic discourse on race, class, and power in the white-majority countries in which diasporic Asians reside. When white majorities discuss anti-Asian racism, it should be addressed only in combination with community care and mutual aid. Mutual aid between Turkic peoples and Mongol groups within Central Asia is embedded in their customs.

Real solidarity between Asian people is not about parades or visible political offices, but rather about systematically restructuring social norms to support everyone, with an emphasis on the most marginalized. I don’t think people consciously realize that what they seek is an efficient welfare-based social system, instead of citizens building one in the gaps left by existing institutions. Mutual aid is not charity, but the building and continuing of new social relations where people give what they can and get what they need, outside of unjust systems of power. Free shawarma and taxi rides are surely versions of this idealized mutual aid.

Without extrapolating too much from my personal experiences and realizing that I wasn’t able to return the care shown to me, I write from a place of appreciation and the hope to do more. Asian culture could not be any more different across ethnic groups, but there are a few similarities. One is the anti-blackness prevalent in all our societies. It’s reflected in how Asian Americans navigate culture in the West, but it’s also evident in everyday language.

In Buddhist-majority populations, there’s prevailing Islamophobia. In Kyzyl, I was told that the market was dangerous, as Muslims might steal “girls like us” for ISIS brides. In Buryatia, I was praised for my light skin. This behavior is entrenched across Asian society. Addressing it, discussing ways to end it, and ultimately working to end anti-blackness would take us one step closer to a world where all marginalized peoples can live in solidarity.

As diasporic Asians, we cannot give into white supremacist rhetoric that ultimately divides us. The idea of a hierarchy of religions that determines our outcomes is drawn directly from the playbook of white supremacy. Identifying that this exists in our culture and combatting it via education, interfaith meetings, and mutual aid will overcome rigid institutions. Solidarity will look like unity against wars, apartheid, and neocolonialism. The easy answer to the complex issues is to build solidarity networks amongst ourselves first and foremost.

Another factor that turns identity politics on its ugly head is the growing influence of the Chinese government in Central Asia. Old narratives of colonization as the purview of Russians or Western Europeans are changing rapidly as the Chinese government exerts ever more control over Central Asia, building new infrastructure, destabilizing daily life, and using every form of capital to dominate these smaller countries. The Belt and Road Initiative builds infrastructure in the name of development, not unlike British colonization in previous centuries. Journalists and NGOs in Central Asia have been speaking out against this for years, yet governments continue to—and always will—make decisions without the consent of the people.

The Asian solidarity we seek does not entail excluding Asians from more powerful or wealthier groups (i.e. Chinese nationalists), but banding together to understand the presence of real oppression. Authentic solidarity develops when ordinary people work to end oppression together, a charge that is rooted in care and love for one another. Mutual aid has always included taxis and community care, but I know it will ultimately play a huge role in uprooting broken systems.

All photos by
Katherine Leung

In his work—on Central Asia and recently on Ukraine—Jesse Driscoll focuses on war and post-war. The conflicts of the 1990s in Georgia and Tajikistan and the conflict in Donbas that preceded the war in Ukraine can be analyzed from domestic and outside angles and Driscoll has studied both.

Interview with

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Jesse Driscoll

 https://gps.ucsd.edu/faculty-directory/jesse-driscoll.html 

Jesse Driscoll is an area specialist in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Russian-speaking world. He is an associate professor of political science and serves as chair of the Global Leadership Institute at UC San Diego. In his first book, Warlords and Coalition Politics in Post-Soviet States (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Driscoll shows how, after relatively brief periods of anarchic violence in Georgia and Tajikistan, well-functioning internal hierarchies emerged. His more recent book, co-authored with Dominique Arel, Ukraine’s Unnamed War: Before the Russian Invasion of 2022 (Cambridge University Press, 2023), was published shortly after the war between Ukraine and Russia began.

Russia’s invasion on February 24, 2022, did not come out of nowhere, and as it continues to destabilize the regional order, it raises many questions pertaining to Central Asia: How stable are the Central Asian countries and their elites? Could a Donbas scenario take place in Kazakhstan? Are Central Asians susceptible to Russian narratives? Do they need their own security arrangement?

Your first book, Warlords and Coalition Politics in Post-Soviet States (Cambridge University Press, 2015), focused on the processes of state-building after war. Your case studies were Georgia and Tajikistan. Today, a larger war is going on in Eurasia. How do you envision that this will affect the regional order? Some regionalization occurred after the initial post-Soviet breakup—are we now witnessing a complete breakdown of the order centered on Russia?

Obviously, that’s a very big question, and it requires speculating about the future, which is a little irresponsible. As social scientists, we should all begin our answers to questions like this by saying “I don’t know” or “It’s far too early to tell.”

My first book really focuses on the 1990s, as you know. During that time, I think it’s very safe to say that the model of order with Moscow at the center was hegemonic. Hub-and-spoke was a familiar way of thinking. It was how you would naturally want to organize things in terms of an imperial metropolis, and from a practical perspective, it was also necessary. Russia was volatile at the time and keeping good relations with Yeltsin was much more important than, frankly, anything going on in the periphery. For arms control, and for predictability (not having him replaced and having to deal with whoever came after him, which might have been the Communists again in the mid-1990s), this was a major priority—more major than much else. It also deserves to be said that we figured out quickly that something transactional would have to happen with Russia when it came to managing the UN Security Council. I believe that it was in 1994 over Haiti that U.S. and Russian diplomats first had a friendly, but adversarial, conversation about trading votes in the UN Security Council on leadership in UN peacekeeping operations. The US wants Haiti to be led by the United States? “OK, you need to stop talking about Chechnya so much. We, Russia, will be doing our peacekeeping in Tajikistan and Georgia, and you, the US, you’ll be doing your peacekeeping over there in the Caribbean.”

So the language of “spheres of influence” is, of course, nineteenth-century language, and I’m not trying to employ it to offend anyone, but I think that there was a way in which the UN Security Council meshed with the rise of UN peacekeeping operations in the 1990s, and it did, kind of, softly re-enter that, “creeping in” on a spheres-of-influence mode of thinking. And that’s what my first book is about: what happens when the UN is Russia-led. And so when you compare Tajikistan to Georgia, you hold the Russian presence constant but compare Tajik adaptations to Georgian adaptations. It was taken for granted, however, that the UN as a peacekeeping, war-termination machine would be a Russian-led enterprise in the territory that had recently been the Soviet Union. I think most people would remember that they saw that as natural. If there’s one thing that’s clear about the Ukraine war, it’s that a lot of Ukrainians don’t see that as natural.

I guess the other thing that I would say that’s relevant on this point is that in the early and mid-1990s, the period that is the primary focus of my first book, no one was really talking about NATO expansion in the Caucasus or Central Eurasia. Part of why there was such an easy complementarity of interests between the United States and Russia in the -stans was that Russia knew that the United States, after Tajikistan was rebuilt, was never going to try to kick Russia out and invite the Tajiks to join NATO. In Georgia, the competition between the West and Russia was a bit more obvious from the get-go, I think, so the shared interest in just putting anarchy to bed was less clear. Anyway, that was my first book.

Speculating about the future, another important moving part is that in this language about decolonization—which is really at the heart of what you’re asking about with a Russia-centric Eurasia—there are a lot of things that are still very much in flux about how this war is going to be rendered in the historical memory of people who are not Americans, not Russians, and also not Ukrainians. The third parties—those states that are on the, let’s call it the periphery, to use a bit of a loaded term—how are those people going to end up interpreting this? If you get all your news from Al Jazeera, or you live in Mumbai or Lima or Lagos, what are you thinking? What are you going to think happened in this war 10 years from now? This is not something that we can easily see, not yet.

So I’ll give you two examples of how big the split could be. On the one hand, if you are confident that what is going on in Ukraine should be framed as essentially a colonial war and a genocidal war, then you might actually have a moral and legal obligation to do certain things, starting with kicking Russia off the UN Security Council. You might need to get into certain parts of the international law architecture. If you really believe that this is a genocide, and some people really do, then it’s clear what we should be doing. There’s law there. That gives you one toolkit. On the other hand, there are a lot of people who remain very open to the idea that NATO somehow ginned this whole war up and poor little Russia just wants to be left alone. I think both of those narratives are going to stay in circulation. It’s not clear to me how we keep score in the game or how this gets rendered in historical memory. We in the West are sometimes tempted to declare victory early just because we think we know how the story ends.

I doubt Russia is going to disappear. Maybe it doesn’t disappear, but this is how Russia makes a radical break with the unattractive parts of its Putinist past and becomes a more attractive, affluent state. Maybe Russia becomes a better state, and then time passes, and people in Ukraine actually want to be part of a cooperative sphere of influence with a new Russian state voluntarily. I mean, again, I’m just making stuff up here, but the US and Vietnam are actually pretty good allies right now. Now that’s a long way off for Ukraine and Russia, but it’s something that’s dimly visible if you look at certain historical analogies. Decolonization is funny. It’s very violent while it happens, but then once it happens, sometimes you get a feeling of kinship from the violence where we actually have something in common, which is that we both respect each other militarily and we both know that we are worthy of that respect. That doesn’t happen all at once, and sometimes you just end up angry for decades that turn into centuries. Both can happen. There’s a lot of contingency there. Both can even happen at the same time, because those kinds of processes of reconciliation might take a really, really long time—if they occur at all.

Going back to your focus on civil conflicts, do you notice anything troubling in recent conflicts in Kazakhstan, in Uzbekistan or between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan? Could these internal conflicts be ignited just because there is general disorder on a larger scale?

Of course, I’m troubled by the violence. I’m especially troubled by what happened in Kazakhstan. That’s the first thing to say. It’s scary and unsettling.

That said, I don’t actually think that this is because of general disorder on a larger scale. I think that this is actually just the natural friction of complicated countries in a difficult neighborhood. And while every death is a tragedy, the truth is that a hundred people can die for more or less no reason in a messy conflict in a part of the world where angry people are interspersed, state borders are not well demarcated, and social/economic shocks are going to continue. So compared to those shocks, I don’t think it’s useful to talk about Tajikistan invading Kyrgyzstan. There are much bigger problems in Central Asia, potentially. I think the most dangerous, the most likely to lead to mass killing, are problems of an intrastate nature. I don’t know enough about what happened in Kazakhstan to say for sure, but it could have been much worse, I think. I worry about state breakdown in Central Asia, as much as anything else.

I have to say that I’m fairly bullish on the ability of Central Asian countries, at least at the level of their governments, when they have to overcome personal and ethnic differences. Even when the leaders clearly hate each other and their peoples are nationalistic, they can still basically shake hands and make problems go away because of their neighborhood problems. They all understand that the problems that would come from the spillover of a refugee crisis would threaten everybody’s political stability in ways that are not necessarily predictable, and certainly make everyone worse off.

There are many debates about the role of the CSTO. Does the region need a more robust security arrangement?

When it comes to security arrangements, they are all cooperative—that’s what is baked into the language of arrangements in international relations (IR). So let’s talk about demand and supply.

There are several questions here. Armenia flat out refused to host the CSTO just a couple of weeks ago. Kyrgyzstan canceled training drills in October, I believe. Superficially, the issue was Kyrgyzstan using the CSTO as a platform to amplify how mad they were about the Kyrgyz-Tajik border dispute. But it’s fairly clear to me that part of what’s going on is also Kyrgyzstan signaling to the West that “we’re not crazy about the CSTO at all.” Everyone is watching Ukraine very carefully. because it matters what Russia’s capability is going to be, how isolated Russia is going to be, what kind of ally or adversary Russia is going to be. The future of Russian power is being decided on the battlefield in Ukraine. That’s the demand side.

On the supply side, I think that the CSTO or something like it is probably never going to disappear. That’s because Russia is obsessed, and perhaps reasonably so, with its status in the world. That means that if there’s going to be a security-providing alliance that it will never be invited to join—and I’m talking about NATO—then Russia has to have its own security-providing alliance, which it can, in its national narrative, explain as its answer to NATO. Russians really imagine their great-power status as a vital part of their national identity. I’ve heard it said that “If the United States can break international law and invade Iraq, then we Russians should get to break international law and invade Ukraine.” And I think that argument really convinces a lot of Russians who really believe that, or something like it, deep in their spirits. It really convinces people. The best academic work I’ve read on this is Deborah Welch Larson and Alexei Shevchenko—they’ve got a set of articles that came together in a very good book called Quest for Status.

The United States, to be honest with you, has benefitted, at times, quite a bit from Russia having its own network. Sometimes we use that network, like when we needed to get a whole bunch of material out of Afghanistan quickly and couldn’t ask Pakistan, it was done with the cooperation of all the frontline states that are CSTO members. Sometimes multilateral organizations are just the best way to coordinate to get things done. To be clear, that doesn’t mean the US was using the CSTO for logistics, not exactly, but there is some kind of realist argument for cooperation on large problems. Again, to use the jargon of international relations theory, we sometimes talk about solving market failures with cooperation. These market failures are potentially related to some really big stuff that can have really bad implications if we get it wrong: arms control, intelligence-sharing for dark networks in the global war on terror; the nuclear non-proliferation regime; eco-refugees. The last one is especially scary to me with climate change. If there was a sudden shortage of fresh water in Central Asia and people started moving very quickly—10,000 people at a time—you would need to have some sort of transnational framework to stop people from getting crushed to death or dying from exposure. Militaries are the state capacity of last resort in such crises.

Now, does that have to be organized through the CSTO? No. You could imagine a new organization, but imagining it without Russia being a part of it raises the question of who is going to lead it. Is it going to be China? I mean, maybe—it’s not a rhetorical question—maybe it will be China. Will it be the United States? Probably not, actually. We are kind of a long way away. That doesn’t mean that we won’t want to help, but we are a long way away.

Central Asian elites have evolved from the openly criminal or corrupt individuals who captured those states in the early 1990s. At the very least, there has been a transition in almost all countries toward more national and rational state-makers. Do you see it this way? What do you think about the changes in the elites in Central Asia?

I do see it that way. I think you said it pretty well. I should also admit, since we were just talking about admitting uncertainty, I’m not someone who has studied elites in depth, not systematically. I would like to. I think it’s an accessible sample. I’m surprised that there’s not more descriptive work done on elites in Central Asia cross-nationally. It’s a good dissertation topic for someone.

That said, my basic observation in general is that you certainly have broad, sweeping sociological characteristics—more professional, much more likely to have attended schools like Georgetown, Columbia SIPA, Johns Hopkins SAIS, or the Harvard Kennedy School, or be advised by people who are, or have a resume leading to an OSCE Academy, or something like that. I think that they are probably less likely, though I’d need to check this, to have bank accounts in Russia; less likely to have multiple bank accounts in Russia. We could probably make some other sociological generalizations, too.

I will just make two points. First, in all of these societies, there is a great deal of authority that is what Samuel P. Huntington would have called an overlay of “traditional” patrimonial authority over the institutional power of the presidency.

The presidents of the -stans, with no exception I can think of, have a lot of power. It’s not always a cult of personality, but families matter a great deal. And we are talking about a lot of power. The sweeping claims about sociological characteristics of elites that I just gave a couple of moments ago, I don’t think they apply very well to Rustam Emomali in Tajikistan. Rustam is who he is: a 34-year-old bro who is the mayor of Dushanbe. He apparently likes soccer. He’s clearly being groomed for the big chair. And everybody kind of just takes for granted that he is going to end up with a lot of power in Tajikistan, and the reason that he’s going to end up with a lot of power in Tajikistan is that no one is entirely sure who else they are supposed to put in charge.

I’m not trying to trivialize it. That is a real problem that was worth writing a whole book about. Actually, it might be kind of arbitrary who ends up being the face of the franchise, because what you really want is for there to be a face of the franchise. Because the tournament of deciding who gets to be the face of the franchise is more violent than most people can easily imagine. It’s easy to caricature these regimes from a distance as neo-sultanist, and I never liked that. I think that doesn’t give enough dignity to the actual people who lived through some horrible circumstances before realizing that, yes, we don’t actually have a good alternative to letting it be Emomali’s son, because it’s better than nothing. Or consider Turkmenistan, which seems to just default to sultanism. Getting rid of Turkmenbashi when he passes, in favor of some uncharismatic technocrat caretaker? Pick anyone, and make sure it’s clear the process was arbitrary. Literally anyone is better. But then when it comes time for him to move on, it turns out they just pass power on to his son. I’ll admit that was strange to me, but nonetheless it solved a problem I’ll bet Hobbes would have recognized.

Maybe people at the tippy-top of the pyramid play by different rules than the elites you are asking about. They control huge assets. The enforcement of property rights is controlled by certain families, not others, and this is an interesting and noticeable trend in Central Asia.

I think the other thing I will say about elites in Central Asia is that they are increasingly networked into the diaspora outside of their states. The best thing you can do—and this isn’t just in Central Asia! —is get out. There is a huge sociological gap between the people who make it to a point in their lives where they begin to have life opportunities that actually eject them from Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan and let them join a roving cosmopolitan elite. That is what separates the 2% from the 98%. Most people never come close to getting a visa that might turn into a green card.

This is the politics of resentment within the societies on the part of the 98% of people who are left behind and do not have that mobility, and probably the resentment that cuts across the elites. So all of them are elite, but only some family members have that real transnational, cosmopolitan mobility that (I suspect) is one of the most interesting questions in these societies—and one that, frankly, outsiders can’t see or study as well as insiders because outsiders, almost by definition, never know exactly what the markers are that families are selecting for that maximize the probability of some kids being able to actually get out and other kids probably not doing, even though they are all elites. That’s all very interesting to me. I haven’t read a good book about that or seen a good paper about that.

What of the role of Russian diasporas in post-Soviet space? They have grown recently because of the new migration, but they also represent a risk, particularly in Kazakhstan: even though the Kazakhs and the Russians seem to be at peace, there are constant calls in Russia to check on the welfare of their fellow Russians in Kazakhstan. Could there be a similar scenario to Donbas in Kazakhstan?

I would honestly be surprised—for a couple of different reasons.

The first is that if there’s one thing I got out of writing this book about Ukraine, it’s that the Donbas problem did not spring into existence overnight. People sometimes forget that the Donbas, on the eve of the Maidan events, had peacefully captured control of the whole state. There were elections that were non-violent—and were basically okay. What happened was that people in the Donbas party were just totally ruthless about power-seeking, and they had, over the course of many years, methodically taken over the Ukrainian state. And then they pushed it a little too hard with the Eurasian Economic Union and you got Maidan—we know how the story ends. But that does not spring into existence. There’s no reason I can see why Kazakhs would be threatened by “their” Russians, and the threat of Russian influence is what got Maidan started in an existential way.

Second, the people I know who are serious observers of Kazakh politics, such as Caress Schenk—I spoke with her just in December, and that conversation is in my mind—what Caress said is that when she talks to her students, she finds a whole bunch of people who are fairly inoculated against the Russian narrative. And this is heartening.

Third, another thing that I will mention is the work of David Laitin from the 1990s. He wrote a book called Identity in Formation that was very influential for me. (What can I say? He was my advisor.) His work on Kazakhstan emphasizes that the choice set for self-identified Russians in Western Kazakhstan is not just whether or not to fight the state to secede, with help from Russia. Often, the choice set is whether or not to exit: “I don’t want to assimilate into Kazakh culture because I’m a Russian and I think being a Russian is cooler than being a Kazakh, and I’m not going to become a Kazakh anyway. They have their Kazakh stuff—it’s cool, they like Genghis Khan. But I’m not someone who likes Genghis Khan. I’m a Russian, so I’m not going to assimilate into that. I’m trying to decide whether I should buy a house in the suburbs of St. Petersburg and leave.”

It’s the exit, or assimilate, or stick around and bargain choice set that is Laitin’s major contribution. He says, look, you’ve got all these Russians. It’s a beached diaspora—the borders of the Soviet Union shrink, and you’ve got all these little tide pools, funny little Russian-speaking, Russian-identifying political ecosystems. In Kazakhstan I think the puzzle is why there are so many who are still there. To the extent that it’s a puzzle at all, from a great distance (and respectfully recognizing that the distance is great), that’s the puzzle for me. I’m a little surprised that the demographics are so resilient that so many people have not voted with their feet and just left. I speculate the reason they have stayed may be straightforward, namely that Putinism is just so unattractive that no one wants to live in Russia! They would much rather be proud Russians who get to live in a place where the taxes are not as extractive and their phones are probably not tapped. They live in a place where they have the least possible amount of government and they also get to act proud to be Russian.

How about your new book, Ukraine’s Unnamed War: Before the Russian Invasion of 2022? Could you tell us what it is about? Is there anything in this war that surprised you or, on the contrary, bore out your earlier thoughts?

The first thing to say is that we did not write it after the invasion. My co-author, Dominique Arel, and I had been writing it for a really long time, and at the very last minute we actually had to make some changes to it because of the invasion. But the book is essentially about the roots of this war.

One of the things we have become accustomed to is that Russia’s invasion on February 24, 2022, was actually not the beginning of this war. War didn’t spring into existence out of nowhere—it emerged from intra-Ukrainian bargaining processes that have been going on for a long time, and into which Russia has often tried to insert itself. So that’s the first thing.

It’s a book that gives an account of the war arguing that the geopolitical crisis emerged, essentially, from the regime change in Maidan in 2013-2014. Then the book is kind of about how people responded to Maidan, and how they responded differently in Crimea, in the DNR and LNR areas (Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic) of the Eastern Donbas. Critically, the rest of the East and the South could have, but did not, tip into violence, so today it looks less like the DNR and LNR than it otherwise would have. That, in a nutshell, is what our book is about. We wanted to write about all the places in Ukraine where you have a lot of people who, on paper, would declare that they were Russian. Even more people in these places speak Russian at home than Ukrainian (or used to, before 2022). So Putin himself, and a lot of people surrounding Putin, see these people as a resource. Putin specifically (who has been clear, in his sinister way, that he views those people as Russian) thinks they should want to be part of his project.

But people are complicated, and they don’t necessarily want what Putin wants them to want. They have strategic abilities to not take part. That’s what the book describes. It gives a lot of agency to Russian-speakers in Ukraine in making a decision about whether they want to define themselves politically as Russians.

Sometimes they want to do this theatrically in order to bargain; sometimes they really want to join Russia and form militias and ask for Russian military help. But often, this can be resolved with institutional compromises that fall short of violence. The puzzle becomes why there’s violence and why there’s not.

Where the book ends up is the end result of a military stalemate and a state that has different de facto borders with Russia. The state of Ukraine has the same de jure borders according to most people’s interpretation of International Law, but different de facto borders. Once Ukrainians actually adapted institutionally to that new demographic reality, supercharged by war, what you ended up with was a state that was more Ukrainian. It was more Ukrainian culturally, linguistically, more Ukrainian in terms of how history is taught, perhaps spiritually, more Ukrainian in various ways. And all of this was a strategic institutional adaptation to choices that Russia made. Then Putin (and this is bizarre to us, but I guess it only matters that it makes sense to him) called those adaptations a genocide and said, “I have to invade Ukraine in order to protect my people.” That’s the move that has justified this entire war.

I guess I’ll just say it’s not a story many people know. In fact, the more of a Ukraine expert you are, the more likely you are to think legitimate Ukrainian history started in February 2014, with the Revolution of Dignity. To understand what people in the Kremlin think they are giving up if they stop fighting, you may have to wind the clock back further. A lot of people don’t, and won’t, because they don’t want to undercut Ukraine’s heroic war effort by trying to give equal time to the Russian position—and I understand that. The goal of our book is not to explain things from Russia’s point of view (pick it up; you’ll see).

Let me answer the questions about what did and did not surprise me about the war.

It didn’t surprise me that Zelensky was unwilling to budge at the last minute, even when the Germans and others were pushing very hard for Ukraine to just implement Minsk in order to try to make the problem go away and let the world move on. Because by that point he understood that Minsk was not really going to provide security guarantees for his country. It has also not surprised me one little bit how hard the Ukrainians have fought or, given all the assistance that they have received, how capable they have been in broad brushstrokes. They do know what to do with the assistance they have received. They are capable, as a society, of making huge sacrifices to protect their sovereignty. And frankly I’d be lying if I said any of that surprised me.

What surprised me? Like most military experts—like Michael Kofman, like Dara Massicot, like a lot of other people—I was caught completely flatfooted by the lack of Russian capability. Russian military ineptitude was revealed in different ways in the opening days, weeks, and months of the war.

Second, relatedly, I was surprised by Russian intelligence failures, their failure to really assess their own capability, and especially Ukraine’s will to fight—what I talked about above. Political scientists and economists have written important books on the dictator’s dilemma, like an important book by Ronald Wintrobe and another by Caitlin Talmadge of Georgetown, formerly of GW. It’s just really hard, when you’ve got a personalist dictator, to get the incentives right for intelligence collection, for giving straight answers to the boss, and so on. I can’t really describe the magnitude of this intelligence failure. It’s one thing for the United States to think we are going to be greeted as liberators in Iraq, but Iraq is kind of far away and we don’t speak Arabic. I don’t really know how Russia got Ukraine so wrong. Every time I think about it, it’s still a surprise to me. But if they knew they were not going to be greeted as liberators, Russian military planners could have done different things in the opening stages of the war. Ukraine hasn’t done everything right, but I’m glad, as a friend of Ukraine and as an American, that Russia did so much wrong.

I have been very surprised—pleasantly surprised—by the U.S. response, which in turn galvanized the European response and the NATO alliance. The United States really does seem to be in this for the long game. The Ukraine war, as an empirical fact, has just stayed in the public eye much longer than I expected it to. I get my news from the New York Times online, and there has not been a single day since the war started in February that it has not been on the front page. We are coming up on the one-year anniversary, and I think we will be able to say that it has been literally on the front page every single day.

On a personal note, for me, as someone who has devoted my adult professional life to writing about places such as Tajikistan, that’s extraordinary. Deeply unexpected. I’m used to thinking of the United States as a very distractible empire. I remember very vividly the 2009 Iranian presidential election protests, where there were people in Tehran holding up signs in English, trying to get people on CNN to pay attention to what was going on in Iran, and then what happened? Americans changed the channel. Michael Jackson died. Everyone switched to watching Neverland Ranch. I remember just having that experience really take the wind out of the sails of my younger self. I had devoted so much of my life, and so much of my energy, to Persian-speaking people in Central Asia. And I kept telling Tajiks’ stories, trying to get it right.

This 2022 war has been horrible in some ways, but it has had the opposite effect on me, and in a surprising way. It has given me a sense that I am part of a country that sometimes can get it right and cares to educate itself for the right reasons.

Dr. Filippo Costa Buranelli from the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom talks about the emerging new regional order in Central Asia, where countries seem to understand that it is necessary to coordinate and cooperate if they want to preserve stability and peace in the region.

How is this sense of regional identity evolving? Does regionalism in Central Asia conflict with the multi-vectorism of the countries’ foreign policies? What roles do China and/or Russia play?

Interview with

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Dr. Filippo Costa Buranelli,

Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) at the University of St. Andrews, United Kingdom.

 Personal page

You are an expert on regionalism. Can you tell us a little bit about where regionalism studies currently stand? Are we living in an era of regionalism or globalism?

I would say that research on regionalism increasingly takes into account the role of non-state actors, local norms, and informal practices. Regionalism as a discipline and as a sub-field of international relations and political science has been concerned for a very long time (some people would say for too long!) with state-centrism and formal regional organizations. Until recently, the model for studying regionalism was often the EU; this model was transplanted to other parts of the world, such as Latin America, Southeast Asia, Eurasia, the Middle East, and Africa, among others. Yet I would say that at the turn of the century, let’s say around the early 2000s, the literature on regionalism started realizing that international relations is more than states and that non-state actors, businesses, civil societies, economic actors, local interpretations of global norms, and transnational linkages have also played a fundamental role in the construction and performance of regions in a more autochthonous, indigenous way. And this is where, I believe, the current literature of regionalism stands—increasingly appreciating the role of non-state actors and the role that informality and “locality” play in the construction of regions.

More specifically, I think that an emphasis on formal integration and on the experience of the European Union even when researching other regional domains is very much some sort of Eurocentric prism of analysis. The assumption is that given that we have the European Union here in Europe, which has integrated fairly well over the course of the past seven decades, regions “need” to have a formal regional organization to exist. And according to this line of thinking, we can study MERCOSUR in Latin America, ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) in Southeast Asia, the African Union in Africa, and the Arab League using the EU as a benchmark. The problem is that any region also has a lot of meaningful political and diplomatic relations that are informal in nature and not integrative in scope—that do not necessarily require the formality of bureaucracy and physical buildings to exist. This is what is happening in Central Asia, which I’ve been exploring in my research—there are ideas of informal regionalism and order that do not necessarily mirror the integrationist dynamics that we have experienced in Europe and other parts of the world. These ideas are indicative of a common understanding around certain norms, rules, and principles that everyone in the region understands and are performed through informal mechanisms, informal meetings, and informal dynamics not only among the presidents, but also among other actors (border agents, elders, families, and transboundary communities).

As to whether we live in a regionalized or a globalized world, I think it’s a mistake to consider these two terms mutually exclusive. I think globalism and regionalism always go hand in hand. Sometimes we may have more globalism and less regionalism or vice versa. But I tend to see regionalism as a product of globalism. You cannot have regions without a global level of relations. I think the pandemic and the economic crisis that the pandemic has created show very well that we still live in a globalized world, but that at the same time, states and societies are taking actions at the regional level to mitigate the harsh impacts of globalization. There are risks of over-globalization and regions are important sites to have more agency—more ownership of processes pertaining to politics, diplomacy, and economy—to foster connectivity and dialogue with neighbors. So we live in an era that is characterized by both globalism and regionalism, but if you were to ask me which one is prevailing right now, then I would say that what we are observing is more attention paid to regional processes.

Central Asia is not always defined as a single region. Some distinguish Central Asia from Kazakhstan; others add Afghanistan or Mongolia to the region. What are your thoughts on the characteristics of the region: Is it shaped by geographical factors or by other identities? And if so, might it change in the future if Kazakhstan, for example, were to become too different from its Central Asian neighbors?

This is a very pertinent question. On the one hand, it touches on how we, as researchers within international relations, define Central Asia in a way that might be different from how researchers in anthropology, geography, archeology or other disciplines define the region. On the other hand, there is also the fundamental question of how people from the area define themselves—about who speaks for what and in the name of whom. My approach to the region is always to pay attention to how the people in the region itself define themselves and how they construct their identities. This is called “interpretivism.” So I pay real attention to how people describe their belonging and frame their sense of commonality with the territory, with the history, with the people of the area in which they live. Something that we need to take into consideration is that despite not being a formalized region, despite having experienced a lot of disagreements, and a lot of competition, Central Asia as a category of analysis and as an expression of a common identity has existed since 1991—since the leaders of the five Central Asian republics gathered first in Ashgabat and then in Tashkent to define as Central Asia the regional space that was previously known as Kazakhstan and Sredniaia Asia. I’m very much aware that other disciplines define this part of the world differently, calling it Eurasia or Central Eurasia. Some researchers and analysts include Central Asia within the remit of South Asia, as some foreign policy departments do in the West, studying these republics alongside Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. That’s the decision of the analyst. In my opinion, when defining a region, there must be certainly geographical commonalities, but we also need to take into consideration history, religion, social ties, families, cultures, and security dynamics. If you take into consideration all these aspects, as if they were different pixels of a digital picture, then the definition of Central Asia still holds.

People from the region do acknowledge that there is a Central Asia. This is true even in Turkmenistan, often considered to be secluded from the region because of its idea of positive neutrality and because it is a very closed country. At the beginning of August, Turkmenistan hosted the summit of Central Asian states, for example. So even the Turkmen government and Turkmens realize that there is something called Central Asia.

“My approach to the region is always to pay attention to how the people in the region itself define themselves and how they construct their identities”

Of course, this does not exclude that the regional states can use other identities as well. For example, Kazakhstan is very keen on exploring the idea of a Eurasian country; Uzbekistan speaks of itself as the heart of Asia, because it is located at the very heart of the Silk Road; the Turkmens may speak of themselves as a Caspian country whenever they deal with Azerbaijan, Iran or Russia on matters related to the management of the Caspian Sea. You also sometimes hear Tajikistan being described as a Persian country because they speak Farsi. So this all shows that it’s difficult to pin down a single identity and definition. But I do think that Central Asia still has some analytical value and message in terms of identity for the people there.

In terms of whether the region may change, the answer is: yes, of course. Absolutely. For example, the Europe of 1957 is not the Europe of 2021. And other regions in previous centuries were very different from the regions we have nowadays. So the region can change, because it is not static or monolithic. Your example of Kazakhstan is very important, because I remember some 7-8 years ago, there was the idea of even changing the name of the country—removing the “-stan” ending and calling it “Kazakh Eli.” My impression is that, first of all, that didn’t happen, which says something, but had it happened, it would not have fundamentally changed relations with the country’s neighbors. There is a very important Central Asian proverb that goes along the lines of “a good neighbor is better than a distant relative.” So you can change your name, in the same way you can change the clothes you wear, but ultimately the people surrounding you will still be there and you will have to find a way to relate to them. So here is the last thing to answer the question: the region can change, but at the same time, these societies, these territories, these communities will nonetheless be tied together because of the proximity, their past, and also their social linkages. I think of families, for example, existing on two sides of the border, and this is the case in the whole region. Moreover, what I want to say is that for a region to exist, not all states have to be identical and not all states have to be the same, akin to what in political science is called isomorphism. If you look at Europe, it is difficult to compare a country like Latvia with Germany, or if you look at East Asia you may not easily compare South Korea to Japan or Vietnam to Indonesia. But nonetheless, they may have some similarities, and more importantly some common understandings, norms or sense of being in the same regional order, and they all need to manage somehow to avoid conflict, cooperate, and live together. Ultimately, to me region-making and region-building are not about being, but about speaking and practicing.

Is there such a phenomenon as regional nationalism? Something good about Central Asian countries is that they often feel pride for each other (cultural achievements, etc.) Does this represent a sound basis on which to build a stronger regional identity?

If what you mean here is that Central Asian countries can sometimes be a bit narcissistic, preoccupied with self-praise and self-congratulation, I would say that these things certainly exist in Central Asia, but at the same time, it is important to note that this is not specific to Central Asia; it is also prevalent in other regions of the world. For example, in the past year the states of Europe have competed over who best managed the pandemic. Unfortunately, more often than not, Central Asia is somehow orientalized and described as if it’s something unique, where you have five Napoleons that want to be the leaders. Yet there are similar examples in the rest of the world—this is an aspect of politics.

At the same time, the Central Asian states are still in the process of state- and nation-building. So the idea of self-praise and self-congratulation, I would say, is meant to show the world that they are doing well. Even when sometimes they are not doing well, this is part of the rhetorical and diplomatic process affirming their existence and their sovereign prerogatives: “we are legitimate states, we exist.” It is a logic of performativity. The other important thing that is that there have been instances of the Central Asian states helping each other out, congratulating each other, and praising each other for their achievements. The period of the pandemic was illustrative of how regional states were able to coordinate and help each other out: a few weeks ago, Kazakhstan gave a lot of vaccine doses to Kyrgyzstan, transit routes were opened for the transit of medical goods between the republics, and so forth. Even when a social order is imposed that we sometimes call authoritarianism or repression, presidents often congratulate each other—you know, they say “well done” to each other for maintaining stability in the region.

I recently wrote an open-access article on how in Central Asia there is a sense of what I have previously called “a regional order.” States are very much aware of themselves and they are aware that somehow there is a sense of a lack of a strong regional identity—states do come first. But at the same time, I do think, and my research makes the case, that they also understand that they need to play by some rules, such as non-interference, non-intervention, respect of the diplomatic protocol, basic rules of international law, and respect for seniority, among others. They cannot do exactly what they please—they are in the same regional order and they need to coordinate and cooperate on some things if they want to preserve stability and peace in the region.

An example of this is the idea of regional sovereignty, which is a little bit oxymoronic, because sovereignty is something we normally attach to states. Regions do not really have sovereignty. But you can increasingly see the idea that there are some problems between Central Asian countries in which not even the great powers should have a say. Nazarbayev was the first one to endorse this principle, then Mirziyoyev, and then others. What concerns the Central Asian republics should be dealt with only by the Central Asian republics without external interference. I believe it is difficult to do, because there are forces at the global level that bring the great powers to Central Asia very prominently, but the Central Asian states have somehow managed to preserve their agency and their autonomy despite the dynamics of the great powers. So maybe this does not fully answer your question, but there is what you called a form of regional nationalism, but at the same time there is also regional sovereignty, which, I think, is worth exploring and developing.

Do you envision increased regional cooperation—or even integration—in Central Asia in the future? If so, what factors will be influential?

I think this question is really important to defining, studying, and analyzing current trends in the region. In my opinion, the fact that Central Asian leaders decided to meet in Turkmenistan for the Third Consultative Meeting on August 5-6, 2021, is very important. It shows a certain degree of institutionalization, diplomatic resilience, and the fact that trust is being built. I know that some analysts and scholars dismiss it. But in my opinion, this is not the case. I’ve been visiting Central Asia for 10 years. I know how the mentality and diplomacy works in the region. I know the importance of what is said, what is not said—the informal mechanisms I mentioned above. And for me this is all very important and it’s been captured very well by these informal summits. So if you ask me is there scope to increase regional cooperation in the region, I would say that the climate already seems to be better than it was five years ago. In my opinion, the key will be coordination and cooperation, maybe on issues such as security, climate change, economic corporation, and soft sectors like culture or tourism. Integration, if you ask me, is not in sight, at least not in the near future. I know it is a buzzword. I know that every three or four months you have a new article that asks “Will Central Asia integrate? Where is Central Asian integration?” Again, this is a little bit of a Eurocentric narrative, if you ask me. But the states themselves, the presidents, have been very clear that pluralism will be preserved, state- and nation-building processes will continue, and the creation of a Central Asian organization is not on the table. I think for the next 5-7 years what they will seek to do is to build dialogue, to achieve concrete and pragmatic results in the areas we mentioned before, and to rebuild political trust, especially after what happened between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, for example. What is the point of creating a regional organization if two neighbors have a war on a border that hasn’t been delimited for more than 30 years?

The best solution is to continue to have these low-key, low-profile meetings and multilateral and bilateral engagements to foster pragmatism and trust-building. What this will hopefully lead to is a change in the perception of the security dilemma in the region. In this respect, some states are doing better than others. For example, if you were to ask me to alter the security dilemma in the region, I would say that Uzbekistan is doing great. Uzbekistan is now seen as a good-neighborly country by all Central Asian states. Turkmenistan is increasingly involved in projects and in a growing regional dialogue. Kazakhstan has generally enjoyed good relations within the region. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, conversely, have never been more in competition or in conflict with each other. So that would be interesting to see, but this is why I’m more skeptical about integration. Yet I see positive trends for coordination and cooperation on non-sensitive issues.

In a nutshell, is it good to be part of the region and if so, is it better to be part of a region with stronger countries like China and/or Russia? How do these great powers shape regionalism in Central Asia?

With respect to the first question—whether it is good to be part of the region—that is a very difficult question to answer. Because it requires a consideration of what is good and what is bad. That is a normative statement that I do not have an answer to. What I do feel is worth saying is that the people of Central Asia know this much better than anyone else. So even if there are scholars in the West, Asia or Russia that somehow push the regionalist agenda by saying “you have to integrate, being a region is good,” ultimately it is up to the societies and communities of Central Asia to decide whether this is a good political arrangement for them or not. I should say and can say is that there is nothing bad in having good relations with neighbors and in creating a sense of regional commonality that may help Central Asian societies—not just states, but societies at large—navigate the difficult phases of globalization and great-power competition. So if you ask me, it would be a great idea to have an Erasmus Program for Central Asian universities to create spaces for young people to travel, to meet people from other neighbors, to learn more about each other’s history and also about shared legacies. So in my opinion, belonging to a regional space where common ideas and common world views are nurtured is something good. But I am not advancing any agenda here because, as said, it is ultimately up to Central Asian people to decide what to do with their political arrangements. With respect to great powers, I think that Central Asian governments and diplomats are very pragmatic and very realistic in this respect. The presence of great powers in the area is unavoidable, and this is also why I think the current form of regional dialogue we have is informal—is in the shape of summits—because ultimately great powers will be there anyway. Great powers, by definition, have special rights and special responsibilities. And Central Asian states know this very well; they are very pragmatic, reaping the benefits of the presence of great powers. Alexander Cooley wrote this insightful book Great Games, Local Rules to show how the Central Asian states acknowledge the presence of the great powers, but also have agency and know what to do with the great powers. So you asked me “How do they shape regionalism?” I would say that they try to shape regionalism by fostering a sense of security and economic community. So Russia pushes much more for security cooperation, especially now with the problems on the borders with Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. China is pushing more for economic cooperation and infrastructural and financial convergence in the area.

I think ultimately both Russia and China have an interest in preserving peace and stability in the area, especially in light of the recent events in Afghanistan. And this is why they have managed so far to coexist, more or less peacefully, through the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, and other platforms. What we need to keep in mind is that great powers are not angels that do good for the sake of good; they also have their own interests. And this is why I think that, even if in two different ways, Russia and China are both promoting a view of regionalism that I would define as hegemonic. So Russia is pushing for a version of regionalism that formalizes its role as an economic and military power through the Eurasian Economic Union and CSTO, in which the principle of sovereign equality is not always acknowledged. You may remember how many times Russian politicians—not just Zhirinovsky, but also Putin himself—have made, I would say, part jokes, part statements that “Kazakhstan has never been a state,” forgetting Kazakh history, among other examples.

So the issue of sovereign equality with Russia is always a little bit a stake. Conversely, at least on paper China is paying much more attention to this and makes Central Asian republics feel equal, even if economically they are not. But there is nonetheless a sense of equal standing and close partnership. This is also done to enhance its own image in the region, for China is facing backlash at the societal level: sinophobia and mistrust of Chinese businesspeople and economic projects are somehow creating a suspicious atmosphere in Central Asia.

How much influence do political regimes have on international regional organizations, theoretically and in practice? What are the mechanisms for spreading autocracy through regional organizations?

That is a very good question on which I recently did some research. In my opinion, regional organizations in Eurasia serve a lot of purposes. They do not exist only to promote authoritarian rule. But at the same time, they may perform certain mechanisms to consolidate authoritarian rule in their own environment. The first is to provide a venue for the legitimacy of authoritarian regimes. If you have a seat in a regional organization, you can claim to be the legitimate leader of a country, however authoritarian you are. And if you are treated as an equal, you are received as the most important person from that country, you are acknowledged as an international legal diplomatic interlocutor, then this by default means that your rule is legitimate. So that’s one.

The second is the fact that within regional organizations, states can mimic and emulate each other’s practices. So within regional organizations, leaders and their diplomats can update each other on the legislation they’re adopting, the practices they’re implementing, political trends with respect to internal security or regime preservation. They can also exchange experiences, data, information on reciprocal threats or perceived threats.

And the third mechanism that I investigated in my article in International Studies Quarterly is called “praise.” Leaders congratulate each other, praise each other, and reinforce a shared sense of legitimate expectation about how to rule. Holding a tight grip and preserving a form of illiberal governments that prioritizes socio-economic rights over political and civil rights, and creating a sense of order, paternalistic protection for society, I would say, is a norm in Central Asia centered on what I have called illiberal solidarism. It is institutionalized. It is something that every single political leader understands and knows they must present to the others. I somehow anticipated it in my article: I was writing the article right before there was political turmoil in Kyrgyzstan, and I paid attention to the idea that Japarov would win following the lines of regional governments around centralization of power. Because, among other facts, the social pressure that comes from the neighbors and regional organizations somehow allows these mechanisms to exist and be legitimate.

Does regionalism in Central Asia conflict with the multi-vectorism of the countries’ foreign policies? Will regionalism restrict the flexibility that Central Asia currently has?

The short answer to this question is no, I don’t see a contradiction between multi-vectorism and regionalism. If anything, I see complementarity. If you remember, we discussed regionalism in Central Asia at the moment as something very flexible, very informal, very capable of adapting to local circumstances, and very pragmatic. Multi-vectorism is part of this idea of keeping relations pragmatic and informal. So on the one hand, regional leaders understand that they need to consult each other, and this is why you have this informal regionalism—or I prefer the term order-making—in Central Asia. But multi-vectorism is a fundamental part of this order-making process, and this is why I think they are complementary. Because one of the principles of the Central Asian regional order is the idea that no single great power should take over the region.

Great powers exist, but at the same time, the Central Asian states need to preserve their own autonomy as much as they can. So as part of this order-making set of practices and narratives, the idea of multi-vectorism serves exactly this purpose, allowing this regional dialogue in Central Asia to take place without necessarily being too constrained and too directed by external great powers. Then the fact that regional states have other interlocutors—such as the European Union, Japan, Korea, India, Iran, the US or АSEАN—is, in my opinion, absolutely normal. And don’t forget that these are landlocked countries that need to expand their markets, their outreach, their connectivity. Also, they have an interest in having more people coming to balance great powers against each other. So no, I do not see a contradiction here; I only see complementarity.

The mining sector of the Kyrgyz Republic has been attracting a lot of diverse investments even despite frequent conflicts and violence. Investors are advised to consider volatile politics when entering the market. But for communities living in the mining areas, these investments are “life-changing, if not life-destroying”, – says researcher Beril Ocaklı. She believes that mining conflicts in Kyrgyzstan are driven by profound structural factors that are rooted in weak governance, lack of institutional trust, and limited cooperation across national actor groups.

In February 2020, you, together with Tobias Krueger and Jörg Niewöhner, published a research paper on the Kyrgyz mining sector entitled “Shades of Conflict in Kyrgyzstan: National Perceptions and Behaviour in Mining.” In this paper, you take a different approach than many researchers who have studied conflicts in the Kyrgyz mining sector: you focus on national-level actors and their behaviors as well as their beliefs. Could you please elaborate on why you chose to focus on national-level actors and how this helped you to understand the nature of conflicts in the Kyrgyz mining sector?

Most studies intuitively foreground local perspectives and conflict at the community scale. However, gold mining does not start there. Within national borders, it starts instead at a national scale with the licensing transaction, i.e., when a mining company buys the rights to subsoil use for pursuing a mining project from the relevant state agency. From a business perspective, this might be efficient and an attractive way to keep procedures as simple and lean as possible. However, from the perspective of communities living in the vicinity of a planned concession, these transactions and agreements are life-changing, if not life-destroying. We were thus motivated to investigate how the mental models of those national actors that are (in)directly involved in administering licensing transactions shape conflict dynamics in Kyrgyzstan.

Author

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Beril Ocaklı

Beril Ocaklı is a researcher at the Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems (IRI THESys) & Geography Department of the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin, Germany. She holds a BA in International Economics from the Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary (2006) and a MSc in Development Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Sciences (LSE), UK (2007). She has a track record of leading transdisciplinary cooperation projects on behalf of the German Federal Government, EU and other multinational organisations in resource governance in Eurasia. In 2015, she returned to academia for pursuing her doctoral research on resource conflicts in Kyrgyzstan. Beril conducts multi-method research at the intersection of critical institutional economics, geography and anthropology. She is also a proud member of the Novastan family – the only European media entirely dedicated to Central Asia.

 IRI THESys personal page, Twitter, Researchgate, Linkedin,
Novastan page (German edition).

This analytical lens allowed us to reveal a crucial gap in the conflict timeline. We found that these conflicts have structural, institutional roots. The conflicts start with institutional distrust as well as a lack of cooperation and trust between national actors that would allow them to work together to alleviate the adversities created by mining. As a result, the institutions that are supposed to safeguard the means of leading meaningful lives through regulation, monitoring, and sanctions are either not aligned with the critical dimensions of mining operations or are not followed by stringent enforcement. The state actors we conversed with the claim that mining operations impact the natural landscape no differently from any other industrial production. Unfortunately, jocular statements that local communities prefer to live with bad roads but an intact natural world reveal a lack of recognition of the impact of mining and a lack of commitment to taking community concerns seriously.

The communities then resist the ignorance and negligence of their legitimate concerns as mining impinges upon their lives. In sum, the conflicts are not “local” creations or salient feature of the communities. Why should they be? Rather, these contentions are institutionally produced—due not to a dearth of laws or institutional innovation in the country, but to a lack of intrinsic motivation on the part of national actors to actually enforce these rules.

In the paper, you conclude that state actors and private/non-profit actors have different views of the conflict and its drivers. Do you think this plays a crucial role in obviating conflicts? In your opinion, how could the institutional distrust that exists at the local level and among non-profit and private actors be resolved or eased?

For starters, it is promising that private and non-profit actors have a more balanced take on conflict dynamics than state actors, who instead tend to blame local communities—and, to some extent, the mining companies—for the ensuing conflicts. The non-state actors perceive a pervasive lack of competence and enforcement across the country that starts with the state apparatus in Bishkek. They thus recognize the conflicts as community responses to the uncertain futures and irreversibly altered lives that result when mining makes inroads into their homes with limited state efforts to monitor and manage impact. The non-profit actors we interviewed were particularly conversant on the conflict drivers.

While this is a good basis for developing pluralistic, participative approaches to mining projects and community concerns, NGOs and international organizations refrain from making a more active effort to influence governance. They are themselves disillusioned by the state of the rule of law in Kyrgyzstan and thus do not believe that they can formally change the rules of behavior. In other words, while their insights would allow them to make a significant difference by participating in critical public discourse, they unfortunately tend to remain reluctant observers.

This institutional distrust in Kyrgyzstan has been in the making for at least three decades. This is borne out by a recent publication by Foreign Policy Centre, “Retreating Rights,” which brings together numerous critical contributions from Central Asian scholars. In my research on gold extraction in Kyrgyzstan, I repeatedly find that institutional distrust is fed by endemic corruption, abuse of power, and impunity of the ruling elite. The mining disputes, then, are just one manifestation of the extractive order in Kyrgyzstan. Thus, I am afraid I do not have an overly optimistic answer. Building institutional trust will take a serious commitment to rule of law and sanctioning rule-breaking. And by that I do not mean populist promises; I mean taking citizens, their concerns and agency seriously and actually walking the walk. I strongly believe that this is a matter of respect: respect for one another and for divergent exigencies and aspirations.

The Kyrgyz mining sector—partly because it is politicized, partly for other objective reasons—has high conflict potential. As you know, there are a number of mining sites in different regions that are affected by conflicts. Do you think the conflicts over different mines throughout Kyrgyzstan are similar or have unique features?

The expansion of gold mining in Kyrgyzstan and different forms of resistance to it at different sites share global structural drivers. These structural drivers can be traced back to patterns of consumption, production, and accumulation, as well as to the neoliberal governance system that enables this. These global patterns are reinforced nationally by the prevailing institutional framework. Seen from this perspective, resistance to mining is resistance to the illiberality of neoliberal governance, which seeks to forge ahead on extractive projects while ignoring, sidelining, and silencing heterogenous community positions. That being said, the particularities of each community determines how this resistance unfolds and which specific manifestation of this resource governance they resist. Depending on historical and geographical conditions, including how the communities lived during the Soviet era and experienced regime change, they may resist the labor and employment conditions; the lack of participation and transparency in decisions concerning their lives; the continuous breach of environmental regulations; or unfair distribution of the mining burden. They may also resist wholesale the making of gold as a resource on their territories, on their pastures. If you think about it, gold is not out there waiting to be extracted and exchanged. It is “made” through multiple sociomaterial and discursive processes. National narratives of modernity and growth, gold price, geophysical infrastructure, and political fluctuations, to name just a few, are all processes that make gold where communities see and make alternative ways of living beyond extractivist paradigms.

In Kyrgyzstan, there are investors of different origin. It is commonly perceived that Western mining companies are more open than, for instance, Chinese mining companies. What do you make of this?

This is indeed a dominant discourse or assumption that needs to be investigated on a case-by-case basis. In the case of the Taldy-Bulak Levoberezhny gold mine in Orlovka, the license-holder has since 2011 been a Chinese one, namely Zijin Mining Group Co., Ltd. In 2012-2013, following a series of protests by local residents, the Chinese operator endorsed a rather partnership-oriented approach to the community. They signed an agreement with the local administration to ensure investment in social infrastructure, a hiring quota, and environmental monitoring in adherence with the legal framework. After acquiring the social license to operate, however, it became less important to implement the agreement and take the people’s concerns into account. Today, there is no trace of the openness that we saw before the company received Orlovka’s consent. Different segments of society are now working together to access information about the mining plans and to monitor environmental and labor practices. Unfortunately, we do not hear much about the ongoing resistance in Orlovka in the media and public discourse.

In another example, namely the Shambesai gold concession in the Maidan rural community in Batken, the initial mine developer, Z-Explorer was a subsidiary of Australia-based gold developer Manas Resources. The company discovered gold reserves in 2007 and acquired three licenses to prospect, explore, and develop the deposit from 2005 to 2012—all without the communities’ knowledge. People in Maidan did not know who had licensed 87 hectares of their pasture to whom and why. It was only after violent clashes in October 2013, as they brought in the first excavator to start the construction phase, that the company started to engage with the community, putting a lot of effort into outreach—perhaps more than the Chinese operator in Orlovka did in its quest for a social license. It was, however, already too late for Maidan.

Thus, the question is what “openness” means and how and when it is performed by the companies. This openness, which we can describe as corporate social responsibility, is core to business and unfortunately has a short expiration date.

It seems that only foreign mining companies tend to encounter the local community’s resistance and distrust. Meanwhile, Kyrgyzaltyn, a state mining company, is rarely involved in conflicts with local people. Do you think this is accurate? If so, why do you think it happens?

The majority of the gold mines in Kyrgyzstan have foreign operators or investors. According to the official company site, Kyrgyzaltyn is a shareholder only in Centerra Gold Inc., which operates the Kumtor gold mine, and in LLC Altynken, the joint venture that develops the Taldy-Bulak Levoberezhny gold mine in Orlovka. I can try to speak to Orlovka’s experience. According to my local interlocutors, after starting operations in 2015 Kyrgyzaltyn became quite elusive for inhabitants, remaining behind the scenes, so to say. Only on rare occasions, such as when workers strike for equal remuneration of Kyrgyz and Chinese workers, does Kyrgyzaltyn step in for negotiations. Yet disputes between the operating company and the local population have never stopped. Furthermore, since Kyrgyzaltyn is a state-owned enterprise, we can expect different mechanisms of oppression that might more “successfully” conceal such acts of resistance. This is likely to be one of the reasons why Orlovka’s ongoing resistance does not hit media reports: the state is interested in portraying the mine as a case of successful community-company cooperation.

Many researchers conclude that the main drivers of mining conflicts are distrust in the government and foreign companies, a lack of awareness and information, and a lack of cooperation and dialogue. Why do you think government and mining companies are still failing to build dialogue and systematically inform all key stakeholders?

It is a matter of recognition, scale, and cost. The first step toward preventing conflicts is really acknowledging that these contentions have genuine drivers. The sustained disconcertment of the communities is known in Bishkek. The authenticity and validity of underlying concerns, however, are not recognized by state and corporate actors. They continue to claim that anti-gold protests are stirred up by local elites that allegedly instrumentalize the ecological concerns of uninformed dwellers in pursuit of material motives. We know this is not true; they know this is not true. Yet, it is expedient to turn a blind eye and call resistance “loud acts of rent-seeking” instead of actually listening to voices echoing across the country. With acknowledgment comes action. So we are stuck at step 1.

There are, of course, cases of operational mines, such as the soon-to-be-operational Jerooy gold deposit or Taldy-Bulak in Orlovka, in which scale—these deposits are the second- and third-largest gold deposits in the country, respectively—predetermines the state’s engagement. The expected rents that can be misappropriated from these mines are higher than the costs of paying at least lip service to engagement with communities and momentarily heeding the regulations. The cost argument applies to companies too. As in the case of “openness,” companies make an effort when it affects their operations and the cost of doing business. This is mostly “too little, too late” for the communities to develop any kind of trustworthy relationship. Having seen what has happened in and around Kumtor over and over again, many communities view mining as trusting the companies and the state with their lives. Understandably, the basis for such a relationship is remarkably thin and shaky.

Compared to 2011-2015 (the peak of mining conflicts), do you think the situation in Kyrgyzstan’s mining sector has changed for better or for worse in the past three years? Why?

Let’s see. I started working on mineral resource governance in Kyrgyzstan in 2012. After a period of observing contradictory discourses about and practices in gold mining, in 2015 I decided to put on another hat and to follow and unpack some of these phenomena as an academician. Looking back, in the last 8-9 years, some companies have left and others entered Kyrgyzstan. The cyanide accident of 1998 was the first industrial accident of post-independence-era gold mining but unfortunately, it was not the last toxic spill. A number of licenses changed hands. Taldy-Bulak Levoberezhny, known colloquially as Altynken, started producing gold; the endless Jerooy licensing controversy has only recently been put to an end. Contentions around Kumtor continue.

While we observed a surge in conflicts during the period starting in 2010, there were conflicts before then and there continue to be. In 2018 alone, different protests brought seven mining concessions to a halt, at least temporarily, including the Shambesai gold project in Maidan under the new investor.

In sum, I would say that the mining sector is in constant flux and remains very dynamic, in Kyrgyzstan as elsewhere. At this point, resistance and contentions around gold mining are part of the political economy of resource extraction. The resistance and activism we observe challenges the expansion of mining projects, putting state and corporate actors under pressure to legitimize their agendas. As a result, strategies to make mining happen adapt and evolve, becoming increasingly subtle in their oppression.

In February 2021, newly elected President Sadyr Zhaparov signed a degree on reformation of the Kyrgyz mining sector in which he stated that the government will:

• – Adopt a new so-called Mining Code
• – Conduct an audit of geological information and database
• – Make sure 90% of employees are hired from among local people
• – Make sure 80% of the purchases of mining companies are made from local enterprises

Do you think this will change the behavior of national actors significantly? It may impose new rules for all actors you mentioned in the paper.

I truly wish I could give you a hopeful answer. But none of these elements are really new measures. The hiring quota stipulating that 90% of production employees are to be Kyrgyz citizens was part of the partnership agreement between the Altynken management and Orlovka in 2013, and local activists and deputies believe that it has been violated. The mining code has been regularly revised since 2012. The need for local procurement has been part of the discourse for as long as I can remember. As we argue in our “Shades of Conflict” paper, to cite one of my favorite institutional economists, Geoffrey Hodgson (2006: 6), “ignored laws aren’t rules.” This applies so very well to the institutional context in Kyrgyzstan, where decision-making mechanisms are at the discretion of rule of power instead of the rule of law. Thus, we might adopt a new law every so often or come up with strict quotas and regulations, but as long as the rules are not enforced and rule-breaking is not monitored and sanctioned, behavioral change will not automatically ensue.

What is the role of the national top management (President, Prime Minister, MPs) in conflict resolution in the mining sector? Is it different from what you have described in your paper about national actors?

I find that the president and prime minister play an important role. Their endorsements of mining projects certainly make a difference and increase the legitimacy of the concessions. These performances are, however, related to scale along the lines we discussed previously. Not once has a prime minister been to Maidan in Batken, although the conflict has been going on for a decade now. This is likely because the Shambesai gold mine has around 7.8 tons of gold reserves that were originally planned to be extracted in 5 years—i.e., it is a small-scale deposit. By contrast, high-ranking politicians were much more involved with the Altynken mine, which has gold reserves of 60-70 tons, to make sure that the mine really functions.

Moreover, these political figures—from Akayev to Japarov—set examples of rule-following or impunity in cases of rule-breaking. They thus exercise significant influence on the institutional morale in the country and showcase what one can get away with.

Members of parliament can and do play a crucial role, in both productive and polarizing ways. Activists in affected communities certainly try to reach out to MPs and hope for their support in bringing justice to their communities. Yet we also know that MPs can co-opt genuine concerns for their own political, populist goals. The 2013 discussions on nationalizing Kumtor, in which Japarov and Tashiyev were actively involved back when they were MPs, are a case in point. This is, of course, doing more harm than good to ordinary citizens’ activism and is shifting attention away from the underlying problems.

What are your future research plans? I am aware that you are working on several papers on Altynken and Shambesai—what will this research be on?

I have referred to my research on both gold mines in Orlovka and Maidan throughout our interview but perhaps I can briefly summarize what I focused on in these research projects.

In Orlovka, drawing on empirical research I conducted in 2018, I asked how a gold project in such a conflict-laden sector has come to be lauded in official state releases and media discourse as an exemplary case of “cooperation.” Beneath this image of Orlovka, my co-authors and I found an Orlovka that has not stopped resisting how mining has unfolded since they agreed to the opening of the Altynken mine. Due to the mine’s significant scale, however, the concerns of people in Orlovka are delegitimized and silenced.

In Maidan, I tried to unravel the processes and practices that led to the escalation of the October 2013 “excavator” event and continue to sustain Maidan’s resistance to the Shambesai gold mine. There, based on my fieldwork in 2016, I traced and reconstructed the socionatural conditions that culminated in Maidan’s decade-long resistance, finding that Maidan’s resistance is against the making of gold as a resource on their territory. Based on how they have known, experienced, and observed gold mining in their country, gold entails extractive relations in which they do not want to participate. Against the backdrop of the extractive order that has prevailed in recent decades, Maidan’s struggle is about leading meaningful and just lives.

As we speak, I am wrapping up my doctoral thesis, making sense of different findings from the national level and the Orlovka and Maidan communities. One thing is clear: we do not face an agentless resource capitalism; there are practices and processes that actively push for Kyrgyzstan’s gold rush, enable it, and benefit from it. And there are different forms of genuine resistance that push back, trying to unmake these processes.

Beyond my doctoral research on Kyrgyzstan, I would like to continue studying different extractivisms. Extractivism really transcends mining: it has come to be understood as an ideological paradigm that underpins the intensive remaking of nature into commodities for exchange while perpetuating troubled interdependencies within and among nations. I am interested in working on how the notion has unfolded under different regimes (Soviet, capitalist neoliberal, state-capitalist neo-extractivism) and how different resources and meanings are literally extracted from people’s lives. Mega-projects such as hydropower plants and resistance thereto can be also studied through the lens of extractivism and environmental justice. We see the controversies and grievances caused by the planned construction of the large Namakhvani dam in Georgia’s Rioni valley that entails flooding a number of villages, cultural heritage, unique biodiversity, and some of the country’s precious wine-producing micro-zones. Georgia is just one recent example; other struggles abound, from Turkey to Colombia.

An interesting, conflicted configuration to look at, then, is the incessant push for resource extraction for alleged growth and development amid commitments to substantially reducing our burden on the planet, the material transition to renewable energy, and safeguarding biodiversity. We are mining the world’s driest deserts, flooding villages, and displacing people in the name of sustainable development. The question is, then: whose development are we forging ahead with, what does development mean to different people, and are we really developing? Communities like Maidan have answered these questions for themselves and are resisting becoming instrumentalized in tactical development narratives.

These are all contradictory objectives based on strong modernist assumptions about what nature, resources, livelihoods, and life are, leaving little room for alternative grassroots imaginations of desirable futures. I hope to continue my research on the nature of extractivisms and resistance to them. One aspect that I am increasingly interested in is intersectional analyses of extractivism, and especially how women’s engagement shapes the emergence and endurance of struggles against extractive projects. Specifically, in Kyrgyzstan, women have been breaking ground against patriarchal elites and mechanisms since the inception of anti-gold activism. This is not only an interesting research inquiry, but also a great source of inspiration for me.

References:

Dzhumashova, Aida. 2020. “Семь акций протеста, после которых инвесторы прекратили работу в Кыргызстане [Seven protests, after which investors stopped working in Kyrgyzstan].” 24.kg, February 18. Accessed 25.01.2021.https://24.kg/obschestvo/144008_sem_aktsiy_protesta_posle_kotoryih_investoryi_prekratili_rabotu_vkyirgyizstan.

Hodgson, G. M. (2006). What Are Institutions? Journal of Economic Issues, 40(1), 1–25. DOI: https://doi. org/10.1080/00213624.2006.11506879

Hug, Adam, ed. 2021. Retreating Rights: Examining the pressure on human rights in Kyrgyzstan. London, UK: The Foreign Policy Centre.

Kyrgyzaltyn. n.d. “ОАО Кыргызалтын [Kyrgyzaltyn OJSC].” Kyrgyzaltyn OJSC, accessed 15.04.2021. http://kyrgyzaltyn.kg/%d0%be-%d0%bd%d0%b0%d1%81/

Ocaklı, Beril, Tobias Krueger, and Jörg Niewöhner. 2020. “Shades of Conflict in Kyrgyzstan: National Actor Perceptions and Behaviour in Mining.” International Journal of the Commons 14 (1):191-207. doi: 10.5334/ijc.988.

Panozishvili, Rusudan. 2021. “Saving ‘private’ Rioni: Georgia’s growing environmental protest.” CEE Bankwatch Network, April 9. Accessed 09.04.2021. https://bankwatch.org/blog/saving-private-rioni-georgia-s-growing-environmental-protest

Interview with

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Niva Yau

Niva Yau is a resident researcher at the OSCE Academy in Bishkek and a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. Her work focuses on China’s foreign policy, trade, and security postures on its western periphery, including Central Asia and Afghanistan. Originally from Hong Kong, Ms. Yau has been based in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, since 2018, and was recently awarded the Albie award for the best political economy writing in 2020 by The Washington Post.

China’s presence in Central Asia is mainly viewed through the prism of economic cooperation. Its political influence in the region, meanwhile, is not often considered. But Niva Yau, a research fellow at the OSCE Academy in Bishkek, believes Beijing has long asserted its political presence in the region.

China’s presence in Central Asia is mainly viewed through the prism of economic cooperation. Its political influence in the region, meanwhile, is not often considered. Can we already say that Beijing is exerting political influence on the Central Asian countries? Is there evidence that China is building closer ties with the political elites of Central Asia?

The political influence has been there since the beginning. In fact, economic cooperation is one way of inducing this political influence, working with businesses related to the political elites and keeping the political elites happy—cultivating a rent-seeking culture among the political leaders. This is the main reason why there is consensus support in Central Asia for China’s anti-separatism activities in Xinjiang against the Uyghurs.

China began building these political ties very early. In the 1990s and early 2000s, a lot of Central Asian leaders visited China regularly, at least once per year, on official visits or simply for vacation. Long-term leaders like Nazarbayev and Rahmon are known to have visited the famous traditional Chinese medicine resort in Sanya, Hainan province, which is a tourism hub catering to Russian-speaking tourists. On top of this, since the early 2000s, there have been many Chinese-sponsored training programs that support Central Asian officials who wish to visit and train in China. These trips are very luxurious, showing how successful China is, how Central Asian officials can adopt these policies, etc. They have been very influential: “smart cities”/Huawei’s surveillance regime, for example, have been adapted to the Central Asian context due to these trainings in China.

How is Beijing’s political influence in Central Asia expressed?

We just have to look at how China is getting what it wants in Central Asia. Primarily, this is Central Asia’s support in managing the Xinjiang problem. It means deporting any requested ethnic Chinese nationals, Uyghurs, Kazakhs, or Kyrgyz back to China. Individuals who crossed illegally are usually sent back immediately, without looking into whether that person is seeking refugee status. This has been very successful. At the same time, however, domestic Kazakh pressure has also persuaded the Kazakh government to open up a bit to ethnic Kazakhs. This has put Kazakh political elites in a very difficult position.

China also values this regional support of the Xinjiang problem on the international stage. Central Asian signatures of approval were important instruments against Western countries, making it clear that Central Asian countries would rather side with China than the West. From time to time, we see Central Asian politicians speaking to Chinese newspapers in support of China’s Taiwan policy or its national security law in Hong Kong. These statements are a pure product of Beijing’s political influence, allowing it to fabricate support for itself: Central Asian leaders neither know nor care about Taiwan and Hong Kong, but they just go along with it.

Beijing’s political influence is about making sure Beijing gets what it wants. For a long time, what it wanted was support for its domestic issues, but this is changing. Now, China is unhappy with anti-China sentiment among the local populations in Central Asia and is asking political leaders to do something about it. This meddling is polarizing relations between Central Asian political elites and ordinary people. On several occasions, representatives of the Chinese Embassy have complained about how negatively China is portrayed in the Kyrgyz media, telling Kyrgyz politicians that this is not in line with the practice of good-neighborliness. Police also arrest and threaten the leaders of anti-China protests. Likewise, in Tajikistan, there is an implicit understanding that anti-China sentiment is criminal; there are no protests whatsoever, as people would be arrested for protesting. People can still complain about China to some degree, but China is already demanding that Central Asian governments not allow this.

What influence does China have on the legal systems of the Central Asian countries? What lobbying mechanisms can it use to exert influence in this area? Or does China do everything informally?

Influence on legal systems is mainly exerted through the training programs I mentioned above. Through a program targeting Central Asian judges, for example, China is trying to influence Central Asian countries to adopt the “Smart Court” system. This entails using a lot of different technologies to gather information, putting this evidence into an algorithm, and making a standardized court ruling on the basis of artificial intelligence. This will supposedly save the Central Asian legal system a lot of time and money in the long run.

Secondarily, influence is exerted through multilateral organizations such as the SCO. For example, China has successfully lobbied for some trade-related logistics management through the SCO.

And, of course, China also does some lobbying informally. Central Asian employees of Chinese companies have told me that their Chinese employers lobby by bribing local politicians. At higher levels, there was a case in Kazakhstan where efforts were made to persuade the Kazakh government to allow the entry of a Chinese private security company, but the Kazakh government pushed back hard on this.

In recent years, there have been several cases in Kazakhstan of ethnic Kazakhs who left China and applied for refugee status or citizenship of Kazakhstan. Some activists have written that Beijing is putting pressure on the judicial system in Kazakhstan. Can we assume that these cases are a form of influence?

Of course, China put pressure on Kazakhstan not to accept them as refugees, because to do so would be to confirm that the situation in Xinjiang is bad. From the mid-2010s, ethnic minorities began fleeing Xinjiang illegally because their passports had been taken away and oppressive policies were being expanded. In Kyrgyzstan, there were several cases where Kyrgyz border guards who caught these “escapees” returned them immediately to China without going through the legal procedure of informing the ministry of migration as they were supposed to. I am sure that this also happened in Kazakhstan.

The export of tracking technologies from China to Central Asian countries is already being actively discussed. What important problems in this area would you single out? Is it possible to say that China is ready to exchange technologies with Central Asian countries in other, less controversial areas?

There are a number of areas, including technology transfer, where Central Asian countries could benefit from working with China. In the 1990s, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan transferred a variety of core Soviet military equipment knowledge to China because the Soviet factories had been in these territories. This helped China because Russia refused to give such assistance. Now, China is willing to give Central Asia some technologies that Russia has refused to share because of trade protection reasons. For example, Kazakhstan’s aluminum processing capacity and plastic production capacity are both thanks to China, as are the related increases in human capacity: the Kazakh engineers were trained by the Chinese. This is something to keep in mind, to request the Chinese company to transfer knowledge and skill to local counterpart.

What problems may result from the application of Chinese “Smart Cities” technology in Central Asia?

This technology is beneficial for monitoring traffic and improving road safety, no doubt about it. The problems are long-term. First, this is foundational technology that Central Asian governments depend on China to provide. This means that in the years to come, Central Asian governments will have to keep buying from China and will never be able to monitor their own technology and craft their own rules for it. This is going to have deep consequences in cyber law in the next 10 years. Second, this is a technology that has military implications: it is likely to give China access to population statistics and real-time information about movement. On top of this, it is China’s technology: they know how to exploit it, hack it, and control it. When it comes to cyber-attacks, they will be able to jam the traffic lights in the capitals without Central Asians even being able to tell that the attack is coming from China. Countries should have core infrastructure like this secured by their own IT professionals and have the basic capacity to manage it themselves.

What are the “invisible” and positive aspects of China’s soft power? To what extent can Central Asians acquire more knowledge and skills using their proximity to China?

I think my above example is one “invisible” aspect of China’s soft power. In several industries, China is transferring knowledge to local engineers and experts, including by training them in China and then giving them traineeships and jobs back home—this is positive. Most Central Asian countries have a lot of options when it comes to soft power, but for Turkmenistan China is one of the most rare and positive ones when it comes to youth. Young people in Turkmenistan do not have many options for studying abroad, but China offers study and then employment in Turkmenistan funded by CNPC. This is attractive to many young, educated Turkmens.

How about in other Central Asian countries?

In Kazakhstan, too, this CNPC scholarship program exists, specifically in Aktobe. Usually, 16-year-old high school students are recruited to go to China; they get scholarships to study energy science and then return to Aktobe after graduation to work at the China-owned AktobeMunaiGas. This has been going on since 2002. Ivan, who is now a manager there, went to China at 16, returned to Aktobe at 25, and has now been working at the company for over 10 years. We hear a lot about the bad side of Chinese companies, but this is due to sensationalism; there are also positive cases. For example, in Kenkiyak village, near the oil field managed by AktobeMunaiGas, the Chinese company built a transmission network for supplying gas and offers gas at a discount.

There is a lot in these up-close work relations between Chinese and Kazakhs that locals can learn from. Andrei, a manager at a Pavlodar refinery that is undergoing modernization by Chinese company, said that the Kazakhs are learning about management from the Chinese: the Chinese schedule their work on an hour-by-hour basis, not a day-by-day basis. These interactions with Chinese companies have helped a lot of Kazakh companies and people understand the work culture that allowed the Chinese economy to grow so fast—this is soft power at the technocratic level.

In Uzbekistan, I heard similar stories. In Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, there are not a lot of China-led value-added/processing industries, so I cannot go into much detail. But I know that the Chinese companies there do a lot of training of locals and bring a similar Chinese work culture to the workplace.

Do you think that Central Asian elites adequately understand the risks and benefits of close cooperation with China?

Unfortunately, I think Central Asia lacks independent or even critical China studies. For many years, China has maintained close ties with Sinologists in Central Asia, conducting many annual forums, etc. This has been another way of influencing or inducing Central Asian thought about China. Elites to some extent accept the views of these Sinologists uncritically, without perhaps looking to independent or critical China-watchers elsewhere in the world. China is playing the long game; the strategies we see now are only steps toward something larger in the future. But most countries, including those in Central Asia, only look at China’s present. We need to look and think ahead of China.

What is the future of China-Central Asia relations?

We are at a turning point. Specifically, Central Asian leaders are at a turning point. They have been working closely with China for 30 years and it has brought them to where they are now. We can see all the benefits and problems; now it’s time to choose. Are the benefits great enough to outweigh the problems?

The biggest problem between China and the Central Asian countries at present is the fact that China has fueled the rise of corrupt politicians, China is at the center of locals’ dissatisfaction with local politicians. This association is making any kind of cooperation between China and Central Asia—no matter its benefits—undesirable in the eyes of locals. Elite-centric diplomacy is the core of China’s foreign policy; this will not change. What can change is the commitment of Central Asian leaders: they can commit to develop and think independently, not allowing China’s interest to get in the way.

The future of China-Central Asia relations will be influenced by leaders’ decisions over the next decade. COVID-19 has shifted the world order; Central Asia can now choose. Turkmenistan has already started looking West. It’s working with Azerbaijan and Turkey to sell gas to Europe, a project that is moving forward. Uzbekistan is looking to integrate with South Asia—that is, to work more with India and even with textile giant Bangladesh. Kazakhstan is stuck; it still hasn’t made up its mind. Either way, this is a decade of decision. Central Asia needs to take a side.

Read in Russian: Элитноцентричная дипломатия – стержень внешней политики Китая. Интервью с Нивой Яу

In 2020, Tajikistan overtook Kazakhstan on the list of countries whose citizens received Russian passports in 2020, coming second behind only Ukraine. Last year, a record number of Tajiks—more than 63,000—received citizenship of the country where many of them have been working for three decades.

2020 has seriously disrupted the mobility of people around the world, with knock-on effects for migration and the legalization thereof—that is, the receipt of documents regulating legal residence. The closure of borders, including between Russia and the Central Asian republics, meant that more than half of all labor migrants were unable to enter Russia, while those who lost their jobs had to return to their home countries. Fortunately for those who remained, the Russian authorities, facing a labor shortage, provided migration relief, extended the validity of documents, and also halted deportations.

Thus, while the pandemic may have impacted the number of migrants in Russia, the fact remains that in 2020, the Russian Federation provided a record number of passports to new citizens—almost 660,000!

Here is a look at the official migration figures published by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation, which shows some interesting trends for Central Asians in Russia.

New Russians

Some 145,000 people from Central Asia became citizens of the Russian Federation in 2020. This is about 20,000 more than a year earlier. The growth came among Tajik citizens, who overtook citizens of Kazakhstan on the list of Central Asian countries whose citizens received the highest number of Russian passports in a year. On this peculiar ranking, Tajikistan is second only to Ukraine, hundreds of thousands of whose former and current citizens become Russians every year. In 2020, almost 410,000 Ukrainians received a Russian passport through a simplified process; they comprised 63% of all new Russians in 2020.

The former Soviet republics (excluding the Baltic states, Georgia, and Turkmenistan) retain their traditional interest in Russian citizenship, reflected in five-digit numbers of applications. Among the Central Asian republics, more citizens became new Russians in 2020 than in 2019 in all the republics other than Kazakhstan, which saw a decline of 7,000 compared to 2019. In Kazakhstan, it is ethnic Russians who most often apply for Russian citizenship.

If some simplified schemes for legal labor migration are created, it is possible that the number of Central Asians who wish to obtain Russian citizenship will decline. After all, the reason to apply for citizenship is to be able to work legally in the Russian Federation without any constraints or the need to pay for a costly patent (work authorization). This may explain, for example, the comparatively lower numbers of Kyrgyzstanis applying for Russian citizenship, as they can already work in Russia on their own passports as part of the Eurasian Economic Union.

The relatively small number of Uzbeks among those receiving Russian citizenship (there are fewer of them than, for example, Armenians, and almost as many as Moldovans and Azerbaijanis) may be explained by Uzbekistan’s strict prohibition on dual citizenship—which comes with a requirement that the decree renouncing Uzbek citizenship be signed by the president himself. Moreover, those Uzbeks and Turkmens who apply for foreign citizenship usually do so in non-CIS countries. Some Turkmens held dual citizenship with the Russian Federation until 2003, but now they cannot even enter the country without a visa.

Russians-to-Be

In Russia, a prospective citizen must get a residence permit before attaining Russian citizenship. In 2020, almost 225,000 foreign citizens received their first Russian residence permit (Vid na Zhitelstvo), which is 40,000 more than the previous year. This growth was mainly due to Central Asians, in particular citizens of Tajikistan, who led the pack with almost 50,000 residence permits. Ukrainians received fewer than 37,000, followed by Kazakhstanis and Uzbekistanis at about 25,000 each.

Counting those who were living in Russia on a valid residence permit by the end of the year, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan ranked second and third, respectively, behind Ukraine. By the New Year, less than 125,000 Ukrainians had a residence permit in Russia (this is 30,000 fewer than last year). Azerbaijanis (60,000) and Armenians (56,000) rounded out the top five. More Kazakhstanis have a Russian residence permit than Belarusians (35,000), though fewer Turkmens hold these permits than Vietnamese (11,000).

Since the end of 2019, the Russian residence permit has been issued with no expiration date (previously, this document had to be renewed every five years). If there is no strong imperative to do so, the holders of this document no longer need to spend time and energy on the stressful process of obtaining citizenship, which was probably the intent of the new rule.

The same is true of the temporary residence permit (Razreshenie na vremennoe prozhivanie, RVP). Tajikistan and Kazakhstan are ahead of Ukraine in terms of the number of their citizens who received RVP last year. But if we take into account the total number of foreign citizens who were living on temporary residence permits in the Russian Federation by the end of 2020, all the Central Asian republics are lagging behind Ukraine.

In 2021, Russia lowered the quotas for the number of foreign citizens who could receive an RVP by 35%. Whereas in 2020 there were more than 60,000 such permits available, in 2021 there will be just 40,000. That being said, there is also a category of foreign citizens who can apply for RVP without being limited by the quota.

Working in Russia

… was difficult last year. Borders were closed; businesses and enterprises were on lockdown. The borders of the Russian Federation remain closed to citizens of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, and it is not yet known when they will reopen.

Accordingly, the number of legal labor migrants from Central Asian countries to Russia decreased by more than half—by 58% in Kyrgyzstan, 57% in Tajikistan, 56% in Kazakhstan, and 52% in Uzbekistan.

Nevertheless, more than 2.3 million people—many of them Central Asians—managed to enter Russia in 2020, whether before the borders were closed in the spring of 2020 or after their opening.

In 2020, 145,000 Central Asian residents of Russia received Russian passports. Almost 400,000 more live in Russia on residence permits and can potentially apply for Russian citizenship in the future. Millions of young workers are looking for work in Russia.

What do these numbers suggest? Does it look like a mass migration from the Central Asian region? Yes. Will Central Asia lose its population? No.

Demographics in Central Asia are still coping with massive population outflows due to the high birth rate in the region, but it is obvious that more massive diasporas of immigrants from Central Asia are already appearing in Russia, given the number of those who work in Russia legally and illegally. We will learn about the total number of Russians of Central Asian origin next year, when the results of the census, which is scheduled for this fall, will be made available.

Uzbekistan has announced plans to develop its nuclear energy capacities to support economic growth and development.

The advantages, risks, and threats that nuclear power can bring are discussed in this interview with Margarita Kalinina-Pohl.

Interview with

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Margarita Kalinina-Pohl

Ms. Margarita Kalinina-Pohl (formerly, Sevcik) is a senior program manager and research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS), Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California. During her 22-year career at CNS, Ms. Kalinina-Pohl held various administrative and research positions at CNS, including managing CNS regional office in Almaty, Kazakhstan (1999-2001). In the past five years she has been conducting research related to nuclear and radiological security with a special focus on Central Asia and other former Soviet states. She also works on promoting gender equality and increasing representation of women in the field of nuclear security worldwide. She authored and co-authored articles and reports on uranium tailings, security of radiological sources, applications of open source tools to nuclear security and empowering women in the nuclear field.

What is the state of the global nuclear energy industry today? Has coronavirus had any effect on the nuclear energy, or brought any disruptions, slowdowns, or cancellations of nuclear power plant construction in some countries of the world?

We have yet to fully understand the full scope of economic, societal, and environmental impacts of the coronavirus on individual countries and the world. To me, this pandemic revealed how vulnerable and ill-prepared we are to deal with a world-wide calamity. On one side, we see reports that the pandemic has some positive impacts on the global environment, as seen with the global shelter-in-place and the levels of air pollution that have dropped because of the overall decline in world travel. On the other side, countries’ efforts to curb the spread of the virus have led to significant increases in consumer and medical waste of single-use and disposable items, many of them containing chlorine and other harmful chemicals.

National recycling programs and waste disposal facilities either halted their operations or operate in limited capacity. The temporary decline in air pollution cannot compensate for the exacerbation of other environmental problems, such as the increased levels of toxins, plastic and other harmful materials piling up in our landfills and oceans during the pandemic. Much like the coronavirus, nuclear power has a mixed relationship with the environment. The main argument in support of nuclear energy is that it is considered a clean and sustainable energy. Nuclear power plants (NPPs) are believed to have a minimal carbon footprint, unlike fossil fuel plants. NPPs also operate at a significantly higher capacity than other renewable energy sources (wind, solar). However, NPPs produce nuclear waste, and the nuclear energy industry is yet to come up with a sustainable way to permanently dispose of radioactive waste, which can remain dangerous for thousands of years. NPPs are also expensive to build, costing as much as $10 billion.

International security expert communities, especially those focusing on nuclear security, examine the safety and security of NPPs. The Three Mile Island (USA), Chernobyl (Ukraine, USSR), and Fukushima (Japan) accidents cannot be ignored when the safety of NPPs is discussed. Another important issue surrounding the nuclear power controversy is the security of NPPs and their vulnerability to terrorist attacks or sabotage. Despite its low probability, this kind of action can lead to high-consequence disasters. Another concern is that a peaceful nuclear program can provide the basic foundation for a nuclear weapons program because of the scientific principles and technologies involved.

When it comes to the energy production at operational NPPs, I think that it may be premature to provide an accurate assessment of the pandemic’s effect on nuclear energy. There are general concerns of disruptions in global supply networks, which can be caused by the virus. With this in mind, there may be a hiccup in the initial phase of nuclear fuel cycle – uranium mining – as top uranium producers, Kazakhstan and Canada, have either reduced or suspended their uranium production during the virus outbreak. NPPs are considered a part of critical infrastructure and they have safety and security cultures instilled among their personnel, as well as contingency plans on how to ensure smooth reactor operation in case of emergency. Essential staff remain on-site and, most importantly, NPP operators take necessary measures to ensure that there are no breaches in physical security at their facilities and that all security procedures remain in place.

One can certainly expect slowdowns or cancellations of nuclear power plant construction, as the COVID-19 pandemic has caused a general economic slowdown across the globe. According to the World Nuclear Association, about 30 countries are considering, planning, or starting nuclear power programs. Uzbekistan is one of these countries. I anticipate that some countries, which considered embarking on nuclear energy programs before COVID 19, may reassess their plans to continue construction, or postpone such plans indefinitely. Countries may also refuse to develop a nuclear energy program for other reasons. For example, Vietnam, after signing an agreement on cooperation with Russia and Japan, providing for the start of construction of the first NPP in 2014, first postponed this plan until 2019 and then suspended the construction of two planned NPPs until 2030. One of the reasons for this decision given by Hanoi was the high cost of nuclear power plants compared to the cost of traditional fuels, including coal plants.

On October 19th, 2018, the Russian President, Vladimir Putin and the President of Uzbekistan, Shavkat Mirziyoyev celebrated their agreement in establishing the pathway for the construction of the first nuclear power plant (NPP). This power station would not only be the 1 first one built in the country of Uzbekistan, but in the entire region of Central Asia. The 2.4 gigawatt plant will contain two, 3rd generation, VVER-1200 reactors, which are expected to be completed by 2028, and are estimated to supply the country with 15% of its electricity by 2030

Timeline of Uzbekistan’s NPP construction

Data compiled by Robert Gluzman

President of Uzbekistan, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, approved the conception for the development of nuclear energy in the country for 2019-2029, according to which it is planned to build nuclear power plants with a total capacity of 2.4 GW. Rosatom State Atomiс Energy Corporation plans to begin construction of a nuclear power plant with credit terms in 2022 near Lake Tuzkan in the Jizzakh region of Uzbekistan. Does Uzbekistan really need nuclear power? How is this decision justified?

This is a great question. I will start with an official version. According to “Uzatom” officials, there are two main motivations for Uzbekistan to develop nuclear power. These are economic growth and their wish to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels. Most of Uzbekistan’s electricity (about 85%) is generated by thermal power plants running on natural gas, while the rest comes from hydropower (imported from Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan) and coal. Furthermore, “Uzatom” officials state that investing in the nuclear sector will help Uzbekistan minimize its reliance of fossil fuels. It is estimated that, by 2030, about 15% of Uzbekistan’s energy will come from nuclear sources.

While the main reasons for the NPP construction in Uzbekistan are depicted as economic and environmental, an additional analysis of why nations choose to pursue nuclear power programs reveals that political motivations play an important part in this decision. For many nations, having nuclear technologies is a matter of prestige. It shows that they belong to the “elite club” – a country with advanced technologies. So, what makes this project a political priority for Uzbekistan is that, if completed, it would be the first nuclear power plant not only in Uzbekistan but in the entire post-Soviet Central Asian region. Operating the first nuclear power plant in Central Asia will make Uzbekistan a “nuclear pioneer” and a regional leader in the area of nuclear power energy and technologies. I think that this “prestige” factor has a lot to do with Uzbekistan’s decision to develop its own nuclear energy capacity.

On April 3, 2019, Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed to the head of Kazakhstan, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, to build a nuclear power plant using Russian technologies. Further, the authorities of Kazakhstan stated that the preliminary place for the construction of the nuclear power plant was the village of Ulken in the Almaty region, but a final decision has not yet been made. What advantages can bring CA nuclear energy? Are there any alternatives to nuclear power plants?

The idea of building a NPP in Kazakhstan is not new. As a matter of fact, as a part of the Soviet nuclear program, Kazakhstan hosted the first world’s commercial-size sodium cooled reactor BN-350 (constructed in 1972), which was located near the city of Aktau on the Caspian Sea and was used for the saltwater desalination and electric power production. The reactor was permanently shut down in 1999. Since the 1990s, the idea of building a new nuclear power plant in Kazakhstan has been debated.

Searching for the construction site of Uzbekistan’s NPP: Despite that the plant has not yet been officially named nor are there any specific details about its location, via open source and geospatial analysis, its placemanet can be estimated, and therefore monitored.

Open source and geospatial analysis suggests that the construction will progress within the circled area, found in Figure 2. B.

Data compiled by Robert Gluzman

This issue is complex for this nation. During the Soviet regime, a large territory in Kazakhstan near the town of Semipalatinsk was used for nuclear testing. Between 1949 and 1989 a total of 456 nuclear tests were conducted at the Semipalatinsk Testing Site with devastating impacts on the local population and environment. As such, there is a general sense of antipathy and resistance to anything nuclear. One of the most notable achievements of Kazakhstan in the first years of its independence was its decision to give up the Soviet nuclear weapons remaining on its territory and dismantle its expansive nuclear testing infrastructure.

However, being the world’s largest uranium producer and having nuclear fuel assembly capacities, Kazakhstan has been nurturing the idea of its own nuclear energy program, and it is not a surprise that this discussion has been revived last year between Putin and Kazakhstan’s new president Kassym-Jomart Tokayev. I think that Uzbekistan’s decision to develop its own nuclear energy program has also contributed to this recent development in Kazakhstan. COVID-19 may postpone this plan, like everything else.

As we discussed earlier, countries pursue nuclear energy for a variety of reasons, including economic, environmental, and political reasons. Both Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan’s wish to pursue a peaceful nuclear power program are in accord with these nations’ international nonproliferation commitments. They are non-nuclear weapon state parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). Article IV of this treaty does not exclude the right of state parties to develop, produce, and use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.

These countries are also in good standing with other nonproliferation obligations. They are state parties to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and member states of the International Atomic Energy Agency. They ratified the Central Asian Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone (CANFZ), which disallows the five Central Asian states “to research, develop, manufacture, stockpile, acquire, possess, or have any control over any nuclear weapon or other nuclear explosive device.”

Whether these Central Asian nations, as well as other countries in the region that may follow this path, will benefit from their own national nuclear energy programs is something that continues to be debated. We already discussed the benefits of nuclear energy, so let me focus on concerns. Both countries are prone to earthquakes, a key safety concern for that region. Proliferation of nuclear technologies in Central Asia can have serious security implications, given the region’s location and the rise of religious radicalization which appeals to marginalized youth. There is a whole range of security threats, both conventional (physical attacks, “insider” threats, etc.) and unconventional (emerging technologies such as drone attacks, cyberattacks, and others), which need to be considered and addressed by each country embarking on a path to a nuclear energy program, and each must decide for itself if the benefits of having a NPP on its territory outweigh the risks it may pose.

I am not an expert on renewable energy sources, but I think that solar and wind energy can be used as parts of Central Asian national energy strategies.

Are there any political implications in Russia’s readiness to build nuclear power plants in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan? For example, some years after the agreements on the construction of a nuclear power plant with the Russian Federation, Uzbekistan became an observer in the EAEU. Could Tashkent’s decision to obtain observer status be in any way connected with Moscow’s support with the construction of a nuclear power plant?

Yes, there are political implications for Russia to build nuclear power plants, especially in Central Asian countries like Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. After the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russia found itself in political isolation from the Western world. In response, it increased its efforts to reestablish its interests in its historic sphere of influence, which is Central Asia and other former Soviet republics. Many of these efforts present themselves in the form of economic cooperation, including a relatively new alliance called the Eurasian Economic Union (2015). Nuclear cooperation is another form, one that presents both economic and political opportunities for Russia in this post-Soviet space. A Russian-built NPP in Belarus was scheduled to start its operation this year. Uzbekistan is next in line.

There is a general belief that NPPs can be “geopolitical assets,” since a relationship between a supplier and a buyer can last on average between 30-40 years and can help bolster bilateral relations. In Uzbekistan, this relationship may be even deeper, like a good marriage, as one Uzbek expert jokingly told me. Russian is still widely spoken in Uzbekistan and many technical experts received their education in Russian universities. Moreover, in 2019, Russia’s leading technical school, Moscow Engineering Physics Institute, opened a branch in Tashkent to prepare engineers and technical personnel for the future NPP. Russia has set a footprint in Uzbekistan. Nuclear cooperation is one of the tools to further establish its position in this Central Asian nation and expand its influence in the region.

Uzbekistan is recovering after years of stagnation under the authoritarian rule of the late President Islam Karimov. It has signaled its interest and aspirations to become a key regional player. To achieve this goal, Uzbekistan’s new president, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, set his country on a path of fast-paced reforms aimed at the nation’s robust development and growth. I attribute Uzbekistan’s decision to join the EAUEE as a result of Mirziyoyev’s efforts to integrate his country into the regional and international politics and economics.

Over 70,000 people have evacuated their homes in border areas of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan in May 2020 after a reservoir dam failed. This case shows that the country is not safe from technological disasters. Will Uzbekistan be able to ensure security not only in its own state, but also in neighboring states after the completion of the construction of nuclear power plants?

It would be wrong to assume that anyone is safe from technological disasters. They happen across the globe, and what matters is how a country responds to such a disaster. Having a nuclear power plant on its territory obliges a country to follow security procedures to reduce the risk of a nuclear accident. Uzbek’s possible NPP site is near a Kazakh border and this is something that needs to be addressed by both countries.

The problems of uranium tailings are still not fully resolved in Central Asia. Kyrgyzstan was forced to turn to international donors for the reclamation of tailings. For example, work at Min-Kush and Mailuu-Suu was carried out by an Austrian company that developed a technology for transferring waste and controlling the safety of its transportation. Can we suppose that in case of a new nuclear power plant construction in Central Asia, the issues of tailings will again require the participation of international donors?

Unfortunately, problems associated with abandoned uranium mines and uranium tailings, which contain radioactive waste byproducts of uranium mining, in areas of Central Asia (mostly in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan) that are prone to natural disasters and other environmental threats still remain unsolved. This issue has been addressed at high-level international forums, including the UN General Assembly. Currently, there are international efforts to clean up contaminated territories, spearheaded by international organizations like the European Union, at uranium tailings sites in Min-Kush, Mailuu-Suu, and Shekaftar. Russia also stepped in to help with these efforts, including remediation projects at Min-Kush and Kaji-Say.

I do not think that the issue of Soviet-era uranium tailings can be directly linked to the construction of nuclear power plants in Central Asia, but it can stop future uranium ore production. Last year Kyrgyzstan banned uranium mining and exploration after months of the population’s protests against the prospect of renewed uranium mining. The problem of Soviet-era uranium mining and its legacy manifested in uranium tailings has become a contentious issue, influencing Kyrgyzstan’s decision to ban uranium mining for another 50 years, until 2070.

Uzbekistan has considerable uranium reserves and is currently producing it together with foreign investors, including China and Japan. I want to believe that nowadays uranium mining in Central Asia is carried out using new technologies and in accordance with international standards and should not lead to the formation of new “orphan” uranium tailings.

Main photo: Cover photo from a Facebook page of UzAtom

An interview with

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Raffaello Pantucci

Senior Associate Fellow, Royal United Services Institute (RUSI)

Raffaello Pantucci’s research focuses on terrorism and counter-terrorism as well as China’s relations with its Western neighbors. Prior to joining RUSI in London in 2013, Raffaello lived for over three years in Shanghai, where he was a visiting scholar at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (SASS). He is currently completing a writing project looking at Chinese interests in Central Asia under contract to a major publisher. For more information on Raffaello’s work please visit: http://www.raffaellopantucci.com and for his work on China and Central Asia: http://www.chinaincentralasia.com

What has led to the worsening of the US-Chinese relations today? Is this a legacy of unresolved trade issues, the struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, or is it primarily connected to the current US administration?

The almost complete collapse in US-China relations at the moment is a product of a number of trends on both sides. First, in Beijing you have seen rise a government under Xi Jinping that feels far more entitled and firm about its position on the world stage. Shedding the old maxims of ‘hiding and biding time’, Xi Jinping’s China is the end product of decades of economic growth and prosperity that have shot China up from being a developing world country into a global power in two short decades. This has naturally engendered confidence and to some degree arrogance on the world stage and a desire to shape the world order rather than just be dictated by it.

At the same time, this shift in Beijing has followed a growing despondency in Washington regarding China.

This stems from a number of different places. There are those who fear the waning of Pax Americana, following persistent inconclusive wars in the Middle East and a reduced ability to dominate international affairs. From their perspective, a rising China is a clear challenger to the throne who must be aggressively countered. 

And then within the China watching community, there are those more inclined to be dovish towards China from years of sinology and close friends in China. They have watched as the country has gradually increased its political repression under Xi Jinping, crushing hopes that had been raised during the Hu Jintao era of explosive economic growth that prosperity was going to herald a more open and liberal China. The business community has grown increasingly frustrated at the deal they had to strike to make money in China, which was to sacrifice intellectual property for market access. Additionally, they have found over time that they are still not being let into some sectors, and they now have the problem of not only facing Chinese firms that are just as strong, but also state supported challengers around the world. And finally, the China hawks who have long wanted confrontation with Beijing now see an opportunity to lead the debate and push forward their narratives of destroying the CCP.

The narrative of democracy versus authoritarianism is a useful lens for people to try to explain this simply, but it does not accurately capture the discourse, as this really is a conflict about power and norms. Within this, President Trump is a complicating factor, mostly because he has greatly reduced America’s standard (and therefore the democratic ideal) in the world while at the same time shown himself to be quite erratic on China. On the one hand, he is presiding over an administration that is pushing back on China more aggressively than any power before, but at the same time, he is personally praising Xi Jinping. This oscillation causes all sorts of problems. But a key element that American analysts tend to miss is that from Beijing’s perspective, there is a clear continuum between Obama and Trump – they are all articulations of America as an adversary. The fact that in the west we see them as so different is not how they are perceived on the ground. This is important as it further clouds our ability to effectively and realistically frame things as a debate between authoritarians and democrats given the differences we see between Trump and Obama.

What consequences do these US-Chinese contradictions have for the countries of Central Asia?

The clash’s impact on Central Asia is largely one of further marginalizing the United States in the region. Geography means Central Asia will always prioritize its relations with China and Russia, but as the relationship between the US and China sharpens, the challenge for Central Asia will be to continue to find a way of striking a path through the middle (if it wants to). If the US continues down a path of confrontation with China, both sides will start to apply more pressure in an effort to get those in the middle to make a choice between them—something no one really wants to do. This will be a problem for regions like Central Asia, which find themselves with important relationships with neighbouring China.

At the same time, the situation is made even more complicated by the fact that two other countries that Central Asia finds itself next to, Russia and Iran, also find themselves in conflict with the United States. These complications are likely to sharpen as the clash between China and the US gets worse, leaving Central Asia with even fewer options and surrounded by American adversaries.

Can COVID-19 change the role of the USA, Russia, and China in the Eurasian space? Can it, for example, slow down the dynamics of BRI and the EAEU? If Russia faces an economic slowdown and political problems, does this influence its political image and power limits in Eurasia?

The EAEU is likely to continue to face problems as its economic heart, Russia, finds its economy under ever greater pressure. It is hard to see, however, this reducing Moscow’s influence over the former Soviet heartland, given most of these economies’ continued dependency on Russia and their strong links to Moscow. The EAEU’s dynamic was always too ambitious for many of those outside Russia, and the pressure against it was always going to limit how far it could go. The question now, however, is whether it can provide backup or support for economies suffering as a result of COVID-19. The fact that this is unlikely to be possible—thanks to shrunken coffers in Moscow—will only further highlight the institution’s limitations.

BRI was already slowing down before COVID-19. The narrative was one of countries taking on more than they could handle and China increasingly finding itself carrying a lot of bad debt. Kyrgyzstan has already sought some renegotiation of its debt burden with China (amongst others), while China has asked for a slowdown in gas supplies from Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. This is the literal articulation of what a BRI slowdown looks like. It does not mean it is going to stop, but you will see a greater focus on projects that are viable and able to deliver results, with an effort to stop waste—something that will be driven in no small part by growing pressure at home for Beijing to spend its money on China, not on foreign projects of questionable value.

Is the American establishment worrying about China’s growing influence in Central Asia’s security?

I recall having a meeting in Washington about a year ago in which the topic of Chinese security influence in Central Asia came up. I do not recall anyone being particularly interested or concerned about the topic. They see the SCO as one of the main points of security engagement and see it as a fairly impractical and ineffective organization. At the same time, they see Chinese security and bases going up in the region to support countries in counter-terrorism efforts and border protection as a process, which they can just ignore given its marginal impact on their interests. At worst, they imagine that it might lead to China getting dragged into military confrontations in Afghanistan and therefore be a net advantage for the United States. Overall, they see Chinese security encroachment into Central Asia as something which is a problem for Russia and likely to cause tensions between China and Russia—something which, again, is a positive for Washington.

Coronavirus can enhance regionalization processes, since countries may want to protect themselves and create closer production chains. What stakeholders can benefit from this—the five Central Asian countries, or Russia and China? Someone who has clearer goals?

China is most likely to come out of this with the most benefits in the Russia/Central Asia space. Its considerable domestic market size means it will be able to replace regional supply chains domestically and will have the companies that can start to dictate within their regions. Having said that, if Central Asia is dynamic enough, it might be able to take advantage of the fact that there are some things which just do not make economic sense to be done in China anymore. Historically, these have relocated to Southeast Asia, but given that the region is going to find itself even more torn in the US-China clash, if Central Asia could offer itself as a new place to relocate, it might be able to take advantage of the relative stability it could offer Chinese manufacturers.

The United States, Russia, and China want to promote a peaceful and prosperous Eurasia. However, can economic difficulties (including problems faced by migrants) increase instability in the region?

The drop in remittances and employment opportunities that will take place from the slowdown in migrant labour is going to create a real problem in Central Asia. With few immediate prospects at home, it is likely that we are going to see a rise in an idle male workforce, which is a recipe for problems.

Frankly, it is up to Central Asian governments to focus their efforts and take advantage of this situation to offer themselves as places that can offer manufacturing capabilities aligned with the new supply chains that are likely to develop around China as decoupling between the US and China takes greater hold. If they are able to develop this capacity at home, they will be able to create gainful employment for the now idle migrant labor workforce. Otherwise, they will find themselves hit by the triple-whammy of growing numbers of idle men alongside the slump in remittances income and reduced income from rock bottom commodities prices which will resonate across the Eurasian space.

Main photo: President of People’s Republic of China Xi Jinping, source

As the world is now discussing the possible impact of the novel Coronavirus crisis on economies, societies, and lifestyles of people in a post-pandemic world, many Central Asian labor migrants in Russia are trying to figure out if they can make it through the lockdown.

Author

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Sherzod Eraliev

Sherzod Eraliev is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki’s Aleksanteri Institute. He is a member of the Kone Foundation-funded research project “Migration, Shadow Economy and Parallel Legal Orders in Russia“.

As of March 18, Russia had announced a ban of entry to all foreigners for a period lasting until at least May 1. This means that many seasonal labor migrants from Central Asia who come to Russia in the spring months will now have to stay at home (needless to say, Central Asian countries have also closed their borders for international travel). Additionally, many of those who are currently in Russia and employed in the services sectors are facing the loss of their jobs. As the number of new infections began to soar, Russian authorities started to take strict measures of confinement, especially in Moscow, the country’s capital and the largest destination for labor migrants. The so-called ‘non-working week’ at the end of March was followed by a non-working month until the end of April. But the end of a lockdown seems unlikely as the COVID-19 cases in Russia continue to grow fast: there were more than 52,700 reported cases as of April 21, 2020 with 456 deaths.

The coronavirus pandemic put many migrants in Russia into a difficult situation. A significant part of them lost their jobs, but not all of them; some are still working.

There are conflicting figures on the number of labor migrants in Russia. There were around 1.7 million work permit holders by the end of 2019. However, this number does not include hundreds of thousands of undocumented people and citizens of Kyrgyzstan, a member of the Eurasian Economic Union, whose citizens do not need work permits to work in Russia. Overall, there were more than 700,000 Kyrgyz, 1.2 million Tajik and 2.1 million Uzbek citizens in April 2019. According to Russian officials, one third of migrants work in trade, 16% in construction, 14% in transport and communications, 7% in the hotel business, 8% in domestic services (such as cleaning, caring for the elderly).

Migrants are a backbone of the Russian economy. While the number of labor migrants constitutes 7.2% of the country’s total workforce, their economic output is estimated at 10.5% of the Russian economy. The imbalance of the available workforce in Russian regions complicates the situation: an abundant number of jobless migrants have to stay indoors in Moscow and St Petersburg, while spring opens the season for agricultural work in the country’s southern regions; usually, seasonal workers from Central Asia would come to those regions in the springtime. Although migrant workers in Moscow could find ways to physically travel to southern regions amid the lockdown, legally this would be impossible since their work permits are tied to their region of residence.

Businesses have already expressed concerns over the potential deficit of cheap labor as the country remains closed for migrant workers, leading the Russian government to implement measures aimed at keeping migrants employed. On April 18, Russian president Vladimir Putin signed a decree allowing labor migrants to work without work permits (eliminating the need for permit payments) from March 15 to June 15 due to the Covid-19 crisis. This also means their stay in Russia has been automatically prolonged without penalties (i.e. fines/deportation). The unexpected decree has even surprised migrant rights activists, and it has been seen as a proper and humane step for the Russian government. A day before, the Russian president had urged local governors to let migrants return from self-isolation to construction sites, an important sector of Russian economy where the largest share of labor migrants are employed. The Russian government, concerned with the halting of the construction sector, has allowed businesses in this sphere to operate exempt from the countrywide confinement.

Russian president urged local governors to let migrants return from self-isolation to construction sites

But even as migrants have been allowed to stay and work in the country, they might find it problematic to get an actual job that offers the same level of wages. This will depend on which businesses have sustained demand in these difficult times. Those who are employed in food trade and delivery services may keep their jobs. At the same time, thousands of migrants in restaurants and retail trade have already lost their jobs. Although the Russian government has strongly advised businesses not to fire their employees during the crisis, it is clear that private businesses cannot afford to send their workers home on paid leave. Migrants are reporting that, at best, they were sent to unpaid leave without any guarantee of returning to the same job. Thousands of migrants stranded by the lockdown have been left with little to no money to sustain themselves in the coming weeks as they usually send most of their earnings back home and keep few savings. Some Russian media outlets, despite sufficient supporting evidence, have already started to portray migrants as seizing food from locals.

Central Asian economies remain linked to the Russian economy, and one of the most important parts of this connection continues to be the remittances from labor migrants. The loss of jobs and reduction of earnings for many migrants will lead to a sharp decrease in financial remittances to home countries. A freshly released World Bank report predicts that financial remittances in Central Asia will decrease by 50 percent in 2020. The report also states that GDP growth in Eastern Europe and Central Asia in 2020 will decrease to somewhere between 0.4 and 1.6 percent. Given the average regional GDP growth of about 5-6 percent, this is a real downfall. The situation for migrant workers in Russia has been exacerbated by the plummeting of the Russian ruble as oil prices crashed overnight early in March, when the ruble lost almost ten percent of its value against the US dollar, the main currency of remittances.

Countries around the world, including those in the Eurasian space, have announced national programs worth billions to alleviate the negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, migrants all over the world are often excluded from the social benefits, generous economic payments, and even the necessary healthcare in the countries of their destination. But for many Central Asian migrants, staying in Russia with the hope of somehow finding work is still a better option than returning home.

All photos by author

Modern Central Asian regimes remain autocratic, but are they to become hereditary quasi monarchies in the near future? At least the leaders of two countries – Tajikistan and Turkmenistan – seem to be preparing to hand over the power to their sons. How do we investigate political regimes in the region in this context? Did democracy fail in Central Asia? How will the balance of powers will look like after the coronavirus? These and other issues were discussed in an interview with London-based researcher Francisco Olmos.

Francisco Olmos is a research fellow of the Foreign Policy Center and specializes in Central Asian affairs. He recently completed a master’s degree in International Relations with a dissertation on Russian, Chinese, and American influence in the post-Soviet republics of Central Asia. Aside from his interest in the region, he has been working as a management consultant in financial services for the last 8 years.

You have been writing a lot about modern Central Asian regimes, which are mainly autocratic. What helps you to understand them the most: some type of critical/theoretical lens, a historical approach, or a comparative approach? And, generally, how common and different they are in terms of their power structures?

I use the three approaches you have mentioned when looking into the region’s authoritarian regimes to achieve a comprehensive view. A theoretical lens is important to set the principles on how those regimes behave, while the past is always key to understanding why we have arrived at a certain point and it helps us understand future developments; a comparative approach allows us to have a view, which is not limited to a country or geography. And above all, it is important to have a critical perspective.

It would be a mistake to treat the Central Asian regimes as a monolithic block as they all have different characteristics. In Turkmenistan, for instance, power is concentrated mostly in the ruling family and its closest circle and there is virtually no difference between economic and political elite, while in Kazakhstan, on the contrary, the elite is much wider, with a larger number of players. In Uzbekistan, clan politics play a part, potentially including links with organized crime—a feature also common in Kyrgyzstan. There are many reasons that explain the differences in the regimes’ power structures, from historical and cultural reasons to economic and demographic, and while they do have common elements, we should make sure we do not bind them all together.

And another related question: how difficult it is to study them? Do you think you need more insider information on what is going on behind the scenes or is the nature and development of each of these regimes more or less understandable?

Studying them is not an easy task. The lack of transparency and reliable information is a hurdle that sometimes cannot be overcome. In some cases, even information provided by the respective governments cannot be trusted, which poses a problem. Being able to have insider information is key—and if that is not possible, one has to rely on those people and media outlets that do have that information. This makes it difficult to understand the regimes’ motivations and predict what can happen in the future. The decision-making process is in most cases opaque, coming from the ruler himself or his close inner-circle and that is why some events come as a surprise.

This is especially the case when looking into power transition in the region. Last year’s announcement by Nazarbayev on his “resignation” was not expected, and rumors abounded before he de facto chose Kassym-Jomart Tokayev as the next president. Similarly, it is hard to know in detail what happened in the background after Islam Karimov’s demise and the power struggle that followed, let alone what happened in Turkmenistan with Saparmurat Niyazov and Gurbanguly Berdymukhademov’s rise to power. But, this is something which anyone familiar with the region gets accustomed to.

Looking at the family power transition in Azerbaijan, how likely it is that it will be replicated in Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and, maybe with some lag, in Kazakhstan? What do modern family regimes look like and how do they differ from historical monarchies (you made this comparison in one of your articles)? We may not even call them constitutional monarchies as their parliaments (in all three CA republics) carry little power…

Hereditary succession would be a first in modern Central Asia and therefore has attracted a fair amount of attention in the last years. The movements taking place in Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, with the sons of the respective presidents taking more and more responsibilities, coupled with a visible lack of contenders, have fostered such discussions. However, the possibility of hereditary succession can result in simplistic headlines and superficial discussions, and we must therefore be cautious when analyzing it.

To understand what the eventual outcome of such movements will be, we need to ask the following question: is the purpose of the progression of the sons of the presidents of Tajikistan and Turkmenistan to achieve the presidency and succeed their parents, or is it a mechanism to protect them once their fathers are gone? Unlike the Uzbek scenario, in which the late Karimov’s daughter Gulnara is in prison, protecting the wealth and position of the family could be the main driver behind the growing importance of the sons of Rahmon and Berdymukhamedov. However, as with many other aspects of Central Asian politics, it is not easy to come to a definitive answer due to the lack of transparency, and there are diverging opinions on the subject.

In terms of the likeliness of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and even Kazakhstan following in Azerbaijan’s footsteps, we should make a differentiation. The personalistic nature of the Turkmen and, to a lesser extent, Taijik regimes, where power belongs to a narrow elite around the ruler’s family, makes it a real possibility as there does not seem to be other obvious contenders—or at least ones that we know of. Kazakhstan’s case is very different. The economic and political elite is much wider; there are more interests and different candidates that could take over the transitory figure that Tokayev represents, so hereditary succession is, in my opinion, not likely to happen there.

In terms of the shape that such regimes will take if hereditary succession does happen, they would have nothing in common with the monarchies that ruled parts of Central Asia until the beginning of the 20th century. Although they cannot be compared entirely, family regimes are in place in Azerbaijan, Syria and North Korea, to name a few, so they would have more in common with them than with the Central Asian khanates and emirates that belong to another time.

Generally, did democracy fail in Central Asia? It seems Kyrgyzstan is going back on an authoritarian track with the planned referendum on the preferable form of rule. If so, what is to blame and what can we expect in the near future?

We cannot say democracy failed in Central Asia because, with the relative exception of Kyrgyzstan, it was never present in the region. It was unrealistic to think that the Central Asian republics would become democracies overnight after independence. They were brand new states that had no democratic tradition and could not benefit from the proximity to established democracies like other former Soviet republics in Eastern Europe.

Kyrgyzstan has not followed in the footsteps of its neighbors, but it has had ups and downs since independence and, with the exception of Roza Otunbayeva, its presidents have been more than reluctant to give up power. To avoid this from happening, institutions have to be strong and independent, but if they are not—as is increasingly the case—it is up to civil society to avoid falling into authoritarianism. While far from perfect, the democracy attained in Kyrgyzstan is the country’s greatest asset. It is hard to predict what will happen in the near future, but October’s parliamentary elections will be another test for the resilience of the country’s democracy.

How do you think the balance of powers will look after the coronavirus? More regionalization in CA will still mean more engagement with direct neighbors such as Russia and China and even less with the US and Europe; what would be the implications of this?

I do not believe the coronavirus crisis will alter significantly the balance of powers in the region. Russia’s political and military influence will remain as will China’s economic ties. What this crisis is already highlighting are the issues that emerge when depending on China for exports, as energy-rich countries like Kazakhstan and, especially, Turkmenistan are already feeling. Hopefully it will be a wake-up call and will encourage diversification in the future. The role of both the US and Europe will remain at similar levels as before.

From a regional perspective, as RFE/RL’s Bruce Pannier pointed out in an article recently, it is Uzbekistan’s Mirziyoyev who is taking the lead, contacting neighbors and delivering humanitarian aid to Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan. The Uzbek president is so far coming out of the crisis as the regional leader—to the detriment of Kazakhstan, which has been slow to react at a time when its leadership is at its lowest, with Nazarbayev almost 80 and “retired” and Tokayev not being a natural leader or having real powers. Uzbekistan’s increasing role as a mediator in regional cooperation, which started a few years ago, will most likely be reinforced.

What positive news do you read about the region? What truly attracts you to it?

While the political and human rights situation in Central Asia is far from ideal, in the recent years we have seen some positive developments. For instance, Uzbekistan’s opening, which, while far from perfect, is a significant improvement when compared to the Karimov era; the emergence of civil society groups in Kazakhstan like Oyan Qazqastan, Qaharman and others; and small victories for human rights like the freeing of Tajik journalist Khayrullo Mirsaidov or the non-deportation to China of Sayragul Sautbay and others fleeing China’s cultural genocide in Xinjiang.

I believe Central Asia is often an overlooked region that most of the time only makes the mainstream news either through one of its dictators’ antics or some tragedy. But, Central Asia has a diverse and rich history and culture that have helped shape the world we currently live in, being the cradle of civilizations and birthplace of scholars. A fascinating place that is worth discovering. But above all, Central Asia’s greatest asset is its people.

Main photo: Central Asian Leaders’ Summit, Tashkent, November 29, 2020 (Source: Eurasia Diary)

“We are scared for the future of our kids.”

A family in Karaul

It has been thirty years since the last Soviet nuclear test rocked the Semipalatinsk Polygon in Kazakhstan, but its dark legacy still haunts people who live nearby. The victims, now in their fourth generation, continue to pay the price for the Soviet nuclear might. Together with two colleagues, we embark to meet them in the villages of Karaul, Znamenka (Kokentau), and Sarzhal.

The first and youngest victim we meet is a sweet six-month-old baby boy named after Kazakhstan’s first president. Nursultan has a benign tumor of bright red color on his head and six fingers on his left hand. His mom, a young woman in her 20s, tells us she heard that the extra limb could be removed with a laser. When I do my research later, I cannot find any references to that being possible with a laser. Instead, traditional surgery is recommended within the first month of birth.

Author

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Dr. Togzhan Kassenova is a senior fellow with the Project on International Security, Commerce, and Economic Statecraft (PISCES) at the Center for Policy Research, SUNY-Albany. She is also a senior non-resident scholar at the Institute for International Science and Technology Policy and adjunct faculty at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, and a nonresident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Dr. Kassenova is an expert on nuclear politics, WMD nonproliferation, and financial crime prevention. She currently works on issues related to proliferation financing controls, exploring ways to minimize the access of proliferators to the global financial system. Kassenova holds a Ph.D. in Politics from the University of Leeds and is a Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist (CAMS). From 2011 to 2015 Kassenova served on the UN secretary general’s Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters.

We do not know if Nursultan’s parents will go for a surgery, but his mom worries that, if left like that, her boy will be teased later in life. Nursultan smiles at us with his happy toothless smile, unaware of his predicament. The disease, known by its scientific name of polydactyly, is caused by a genetic mutation.

The same day we meet a small girl who is missing four fingers on her hand, a genetic mutation similar to Nursultan’s. Her family is kind enough to receive us and share their story. Their other daughter faced cancer and survived after persevering through two years of chemotherapy. Now she is free of cancer but needs regular checks for the benign tumor that remains on her face bone. These checks can only be done in larger cities, and travel requires financial resources that the family does not have. “We reached out to a charity organization, but they told us because she was cancer-free, they couldn’t help,” they tell us. A few years ago, these parents already lost another daughter to sudden pneumonia. She was six.

The elderly couple we visit next appears to be well into their late 70s or early 80s. “At least, they lived to this old age,” I catch myself thinking, knowing that many locals do not live to retirement. They are alive, but their quality of life appalls me. I fight back the tears. There are DIY crutches next to the old man’s bed: they look like they are made of sturdy tree branches. He doesn’t leave the house because he doesn’t have a wheelchair. His wife explains that they lost the documents confirming their status as victims of nuclear testing, and that makes seeking help from the social protection services hard.

From the medics we hear stories of too many people dying young, too many cancers, and too many sick children. With better prenatal screening, doctors can identify pregnancies that will result in the birth of deformed children. “If there is a pathology, the decision how to proceed is made in ‘the city,’” referring to the nearest major city of Semey. In other words, such pregnancies end in abortions in most cases.

It is pretty clear that not all of this devastating data is reflected in official statistics. It is impossible to determine the main culprit of the locals’ poor health: the long-term exposure to radiation during and after the forty years of nuclear tests; the poor environmental situation because of the gold and coal mines nearby; the lack of good medical infrastructure—a problem endemic to both this area and the rest of the rural areas across the country; or all these factors combined. One thing for certain, we see with our own eyes that people continue to suffer.

It is not only the locals’ serious health issues, but also the standard of living that is painful to witness. Locals complain about the lack of jobs, a common problem for the rural areas in Kazakhstan, but especially devastating for places that already suffer so much from the consequences of nuclear testing. In smaller villages that we visit, even the mayors’ offices and clinics do not have modern restrooms but wooden sheds with cesspits outside. For a country that boasts the upper-middle income status and strives to join the thirty most developed nations, this is a shameful sight. We are only about an hour by plane away from Kazakhstan’s glitzy capital, a city that hosts million-dollar international events, including conferences celebrating Kazakhstan’s decision to close the Polygon.

It would be a devastating trip if not for the glimpses of hope, resilience, and love for the native land that we encounter along the way. There is an almost mystical feeling of sacred space when you visit the native land of Kazakhstan’s most revered poets and writers – Abai, Shakarim, and Mukhtar Auezov. Locals are proud to share their roots with these enlightened men and talk about their land with so much love. A phrase we heard often is “Tugan zher,” ‘place of birth’ in Kazakh. The harsh beauty of the endless steppe is mesmerizing.

There is a quiet resilience in the people we meet. They share their stories without drama. The calm voices in which they tell us about the tragedies they continue to endure pierce harder than any scream ever could. They manage to go on despite their losses and hardships. Parents who have lost a child are putting all their heart into bringing up their small daughters – bright and cheery girls who love singing and dancing. A crippled man who cannot stand straight due to a large hump on his back manages to earn a living and support his family. He owns livestock and has learned electric welding. He proudly tells us about a garage he built thanks to his newly acquired skills. The high school teacher who lost his son to suicide and lost numerous classmates, neighbors, and friends to illness, is recording their names and stories so that they are never forgotten. The local medics, the quiet heroes, do what they can to help their fellow villagers, despite their own stories of illnesses, miscarriages, and deaths of loved ones.

Our most memorable encounter happens in the village formerly known as Znamenka (now Kokentau). It is a small rural settlement with just over a thousand residents. Similar to other villages we visited near the Polygon, it struggles. While Znamenka formerly boasted large numbers of livestock, the only current source of employment for its residents is the nearby coal mine – hard labor that comes with a health cost.

We meet an elder, one of the few surviving witnesses of the nuclear tests. His mind is sharp; he remembers all the dates and details of major tests, and his memory never falters. He lost two of his children when they were in their early 50s and tells us about too many funerals that happen in this small community. He is sad his village is no longer what it used to be, but once we switch the subject to the importance of family, he lights up with joy, proud of his big family, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Two of his grandsons play happily nearby as we speak.

I look at them and think about all the kids we have met. I hope against hope that they grow up healthy and happy.

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The author is grateful to the Center for International Security and Policy (CISP), Kazakhstan, for making the trip possible.

All photos by
All photos by: CISP and author

The name of the official news site of the government of Turkmenistan expresses what might be the closest thing to the sealed-off state’s official ideology: Zolotoi Vek, or Golden Age.

In recent years, Turkmens have been constantly reminded that theirs is a country enjoying unprecedented material and spiritual wealth. The latter is, according to the official narrative, helped along mightily by President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, the prolific writer of over 40 books, who has, since taking office, regularly made international news by appearing on stage with his grandson to slightly awkwardly perform Turkmen and international songs.

Author

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Toni Michel

Toni Michel is a Eurasian affairs analyst based at the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy. He holds an M.A. from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) and is the founder of the start-up consultancy Lockbreakers.org. Follow him on Twitter @villageescape.

The ordinary Turkmen is feeling little of the Golden Age his leader keeps talking about, however. With natural gas prices plummeting and only limited revenue reaching state coffers from gas sales to China due to infrastructure debts last year, foreign exchange inflows into the country have declined, leaving the Turkmen manat vulnerable. The artificially inflated fixed exchange rate of 3.5 manats to the dollar, in conjunction with heavily restricted capital freedom, are key factors in the impoverishment that is facing households all over the country, as many products are being imported and hence their cost has increased. Shortages of basic foodstuffs like flour, eggs, and meat are leading to long queues in front of markets and regular scuffles over food, even in the capital, Ashgabat. Unemployment numbers are hard to come by but serious estimates indicate figures of up to 60 percent. The state budget for next year has been reduced by 12 billion manat—in dollar equivalent, state budget revenues in 2019 should reach $29.96 billion if using the official exchange rate (3.5 manat per dollar) or $4.66 billion using the black market rate (18 manat per dollar). Meanwhile, the state is becoming ever more intrusive, cracking down on private alcohol sales and, crucially, foreign currency black markets. Meanwhile, citizens find it increasingly hard to leave the country and the state is keeping tabs on workers and students already abroad.

Turkmenistan’s outlook for 2019 is therefore highly uncertain. Yet three broad trends in the Turkmen state, society, and economy are going to influence life over the next 12 months.

Toward a Potemkin State

The regime rests on two pillars. First, because regional elites and identities are particularly strong in Turkmenistan, Berdymukhamedov’s power is built around a deal between elites from his native Akhal and the eastern Lebap regions to hold down the strategically located region of Mary in the south-east. There is little of substance that binds these strong local leaders to the government apart from the revenue flows that Ashgabat is distributing to key regional clans and powerful families to support their extensive patronage networks. After Russia announced that it would cease buying Turkmen gas in 2016 following a payment dispute and the global plunge in energy prices around the same time, this pillar of the Turkmen regime found itself under acute stress last year, resulting in erratic cadre reshuffles at the national level in order to prevent stable elite coalitions with institutionalized government resources from emerging. Of course, minister demotions also play well on TV, where the President is portrayed as a man of action who displays a hands-on attitude in the interest of his people and good governance.

Higher resource prices and Russia’s decision to resume purchases of Turkmen gas from January 2019 will somewhat alleviate the stress on Turkmenistan’s elite structure this year, as more revenues are again becoming available to distribute to key players in the country.

The second pillar of the regime is a different story. The broader population will continue to be bombarded with propaganda, while the state’s security services will likely be a much bigger presence in the life of the average Turkmen, particularly since open discontent and spontaneous small demonstrations in response to food shortages or abuses of power have been taking place intermittently since 2017.

To safeguard his regime against potential elite rumblings and popular frustration at the living conditions mentioned above, Berdymukhamedov appointed heavyweight security veteran Yaylym Berdiyev as Minister for National Security last summer. A former Defense Minister with a long history of service in the security organs, Berdiyev appears to have gained the President’s trust in the direct aftermath of Berdymukhamedov’s consolidation of power around 2008 and has served him in many roles.

Foreign Policy: Reconciling Isolationism with Reality

Turkmenistan has long been considered something akin to the Switzerland of Central Asia, not in its wealth, but in its foreign policy concept of neutrality: Ashgabat has mostly stayed out of regional political and economic organizations. However, in stark contrast to the small nation in the Alps, Turkmenistan has long been quite literally shut off from the outside world, allowing only a few tourists and a limited number of trusted foreign companies in and keeping economic and people-to-people exchanges with neighboring countries to an absolute minimum. This is set to change in 2019, for a number of reasons.

First, the government has apparently understood that export diversification is crucial if Ashgabat wants to avoid becoming a Chinese economic colony. Russia has most likely realized this as well, and it presumably played a large role in Moscow’s decision to resume gas purchases from Ashgabat this year. Turkmenistan is thus now also scrambling to take advantage of the accord reached in August 2018 on the legal status of the Caspian Sea and explore the possibility of a Trans-Caspian pipeline with Azerbaijan, with an eye to exporting Turkmen gas to Europe through the Southern Gas Corridor that runs through the Caucasus to Turkey. Second, Ashgabat will try to advance its own energy pet project, the $10 billion Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India Pipeline (TAPI) that would make Ashgabat a key energy supplier to booming South-East Asian economies. Even ignoring the collapsing security situation in Afghanistan, this prestige project will run into increasing problems, as Iran is offering India and Pakistan a pipeline that cuts out both risky Afghanistan and the often erratic foreign policy moves of President Berdymukhamedov, who initiated an as yet unexplained economic campaign against neighboring Tajikistan last year while escalating simmering tensions with Iran.

This runs counter to the generally positive trend of intraregional Central Asian relations, which have been improving for some time and were boosted by the major opening-up of Uzbekistan following the death of former President Islam Karimov in September 2016. After skipping a major summit of Central Asian presidents that took place in Astana in March 2018 without any outside power, Berdymukhamedov might, ironically, fear finding himself alone in the isolationist policies; at least, Turkmenistan now seems ready to ride the new wave of Central Asian cooperation. Following several meetings with Uzbek leader Shavkat Mirziyoyev, Berdymukhamedov has taken some steps to liberalize trade at the rather sparsely populated mutual border and has gone even further with Kazakhstan by importing 100,000 tons of grain last year—an affront both to Ashgabat’s previous policy and to its fantastical official data on harvest yields, which belie the floods and storms last year.

Turkmenistan’s next-door neighbor Afghanistan will remain a major hotbed of instability, with its three-tiered conflict between the government, the Taliban, and infiltrating ISIS-affiliated groups. The limited peace talks with the Taliban will also put the internal cohesion of the group under significant strain, as strong regional commanders might well disagree with the wider group leadership’s approach and signal dissatisfaction through larger attacks. Turkmenistan will continue to lobby members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), and particularly Russia, for material military support to secure the country’s long border with Afghanistan. Furthermore, Ashgabat will gain in China a new security partner in combatting radical groups in northern Afghanistan: China seeks to prevent separatist movements in its remote westernmost regions from profiting from this potential hideout.

All of this will require intense diplomatic efforts by Turkmenistan, whose diplomatic corps has been decisively weakened by the departure of a deputy foreign minister who has been tapped to become the head of Akhal Region—and is, incidentally, the President’s own son, Serdar Berdymukhamedov.

Light and Shadow in the Economy

International bodies often put Turkmen GDP growth somewhere between 5-7%. With access to the country and to reliable data heavily restricted, however, such numbers have a credibility problem. At the same time, the expensive new seaport at Turkmenbashi and Ashgabat Airport will continue to report substantive losses due to overcapacity, while unsound economic policies and declining foreign investment in Turkey will pk-callout to the devaluation of remittances from its large diaspora working there.

China’s slowly decelerating economy will likely not impact Turkmen gas export volumes in 2019 (these increased from 29.4 bcm two years ago to 31.7 bcm in 2018). The problem that these exports are not translating into significant budget revenues due to infrastructure debt will be offset by Russia’s aforementioned decision to resume gas imports from Turkmenistan. Russian state mineral and resource companies are also likely to enter the Turkmen market, pending a successful trial period in the energy sphere with timely payments from the Turkmen side.

In the non-energy sector, after a long period of stagnation there will be some new momentum, with several projects for fertilizer and chemical plants planned. In this context, the consolidation of Japan’s Toyo International Corporation in Turkmenistan’s highly unreliable business environment is quite a positive sign. And with the aforementioned imports of Kazakh grain, positive signals to German investors, and the EU’s new connectivity strategy for the region, it seems that Ashgabat really is, to an extent, moving away from its isolationist stance. Yet the volatile investment climate will likely pk-callout to new payment disputes and international arbitration lawsuits, as Minsk-based Belgorkhimprom, the company that built the under-performing potash fertilizer plant in eastern Turkmenistan, recently learned.

Questions Raised for 2019

All in all, it seems that Turkmenistan is changing on a number of fronts. Yet while the government is eager to charge ahead in some areas, it is frantically trying to push back against the new constellation elsewhere.

2019 will be a crucial year for Turkmenistan and the wider region. In it, we should learn the answers to a few crucial questions:

• How much is Russia willing to spend to keep Chinese influence out of Central Asia?

• How sure are regional elites that Berdymukhamedov is still the best person to protect their incomes?

• How long will the Turkmen people put up with the end of subsidies, food shortages, and humiliation?

• And will somebody tell the President that his energy is better spent focusing on reforms than on producing ever more music videos?