Unmasking Central Asia's neoliberal judges

Despite claims of impartiality, judges in Central Asia often incorporate neoliberal economic and moral values into their judgements on illegal settlements

Economic dystopia in Kyrgyzstan

Hailed as a success story for liberal market reforms, Kyrgyzstan in fact provides an example of how the rentier class have become an integral part of the economy, and how democracy has given way to plutocracy

Emotions as evaluative judgements: understanding volunteers’ evaluative feelings about things that matter to them

This article examines people’s emotional experience of volunteering. It offers an account of emotions as first person evaluative judgements about things that are important to people. People’s relation to the world is one of concern, and they continually have to monitor and evaluate how the things they care about are faring, and decide what to do. The article moves away from accounts that either treat emotions as merely subjective, or as only a product of social conventions. It will discuss how volunteers’ emotions are evaluative feelings about the nature of their voluntary tasks and roles, their social relationships with fellow volunteers, and their orientation to the world. It will also explore how social positions can affect emotions

Selling debt: interrogating the moral claims of the financial elites in Central Asia

This article critically examines how banks and microfinance companies morally construed and evaluated their lending practices and income in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Banks occupy a powerful position in a monetary economy, because they do not merely create money ‘out of thin air’, but can charge for it, that is, interest. In doing so, they obtain unearned income and extract wealth. The article examines how banks and microfinance companies used myths, ideals, discourses, norms and emotions to justify and de-politicise their unequal power, unearned income and damaging effects. The study draws on the moral economy perspective and the post-Keynesian theory of money to understand financial institutions’ moral justifications and rationalisations of their position and power. This article contributes to a wider literature on neoliberalism and morality in post- socialist economies

How the free market created rentiers and plutocracy in post-Soviet Central Asian countries

In a reversal of the classical ideal of a ‘free market’ (a market free from land rent, monopoly rent and interest), neoliberalism celebrates and promotes rent extraction, sometimes over wealth creation. Neoliberalism has created and expanded the role of rent and unearned income in post-Soviet economies. The article argues that the top 20 richest individuals in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan extract income based on their ownership and control of scarce assets, and thereby obtain unearned income. They also have considerable political power and influence. Neoliberalism has concentrated wealth and power into the hands of a few, and has emerged economic and political elites into the rentier class

Charitable giving and reflexive individuals: How personal reflexivity mediates between structure and agency

This article examines how individuals are reflexive beings who interpret the world in relation to things that matter to them, and how charitable acts are evaluated and embedded in their lives with different degrees of meaning and importance. Rather than framing the discussion of charitable practices in terms of an altruism/egoism binary or imputing motivations and values to social structures, the article explains how reflexivity is an important and neglected dimension of social practices, and how it interacts with sympathy, sentiments and discourses to shape giving. The study also shows that there are different modes of reflexivity, which have varied effects on charity and volunteering

Contributive injustice and unequal division of labour in the voluntary sector

This article examines how the unequal division of unpaid labour within voluntary organisations can produce contributive injustice. Contributive injustice occurs when people are denied the opportunity to have meaningful work and the recognition associated with it. The unequal social division of labour affects people’s opportunities to access complex and routine tasks, shaping their capacity to develop their own abilities, respect and self-esteem, and hence the meaningfulness of their work. The study uses the moral economy of labour perspective to understand and evaluate how the unequal division of labour can shape people’s capabilities and well-being. While the article is sympathetic to Eliasoph’s symbolic interactionist approach to volunteering, which seeks to focus on the quality of civic engagement and public dialogue, it reveals this framework to have some shortcomings. This empirical study is based upon an analysis of 41 participants’ volunteering activities

Global capitalism in Central Asia and competing economic imaginaries

This article examines how the US, Russia and China have proposed different visions and strategies of economic development (including neoliberalism, economic union and trade corridors) for Central Asia. It will argue that these different economic imaginaries reflect the global powers’ imperative to manage contradictions and crises inherent in advanced and emerging capitalist economies. The global powers’ attempts to fix Central Asia are partly based on past failures to regulate their own economic problems and contradictions

Central Asia is the new economic battleground for the US, China and Russia

As the threat of a trade war escalates between the US and China, all the talk has centred on the tariffs that each side might impose on the other. But another important battleground is in Central Asia where both are fighting for strategic control