Post-Liberal Statebuilding in Central Asia

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Drawing on decolonial perspectives on peace, statehood and development, this illuminating book examines post-liberal statebuilding in Central Asia. It uses ethnographic fieldwork in Southern Kyrgyzstan to offer a detailed examination of community security and peacebuilding discourses and practices. Through its analysis, the book highlights the problem with assumptions about liberal democracy, modern statehood and capitalist development as the standard template for post-conflict countries, which is widespread and rarely reflected upon

Post-liberal statebuilding in Central Asia: A decolonial perspective on community security practices and imaginaries of social order in Kyrgyzstan

This thesis presents a development of the concept of post-liberalism to analyse processes of statebuilding in Central Asia by the example of Kyrgyzstan from a decolonial angle. Recent debates in peace, conflict and intervention studies have conceived of ‘post-liberal’ and ‘hybrid forms of peace’ as modalities of resistance against and re-negotiation of a globally dominant ‘liberal peace’ template promoted by Western governments and the international intervention architecture. This research proposes to critically reconsider these debates by introducing ‘imaginaries of statebuilding’ – understood as mental constructs structuring people’s thoughts and actions – through which the study captures the complex and contradictory processes of reception, adoption and resistance against globally dominant notions of capitalist economic development, democracy, and peacebuilding and security practices. Practices of peacebuilding and community security – and their embeddedness in the post-liberal trajectory of statebuilding – are analysed by the example of local crime prevention centres, territorial youth councils, and a national level NGO network working on police reform and participatory provision of public security. The research demonstrates how exclusion, structural violence and precarity are reproduced and feed into patterns of post-conflict governmentality which exist in sync with seemingly emancipatory and contextually meaningful ways of coexistence and steps towards institutional reform

Negotiating Unfreedom: An (Auto-) Ethnography of Life at the Forefront of Academic Knowledge Production

This article analyses the negotiated and contingent nature of research access and limitations in a cooperative research project in Kyrgyzstan, Central Asia. It argues that even technically and legally ‘free’ academic research is often subject to a number of restrictions emanating from the politicization of research at the so-called frontiers of the global political economy of academic knowledge production. This frontier status and contested nature of knowledge and research is especially marked in Kyrgyzstan, where recent revolutions and social conflict have created a tense climate amidst authorities’ attempts to reassert their epistemic dominance. Against this background, the article analyses how the ‘politics of sovereignty’ employed in state actors’ attempts to curb intrusive research are equally present in the realization of cooperative research projects with different national and international (non-governmental) organizations/networks, whose members enact the research cooperation or hamper it in different ways, sometimes in ambiguous, sometimes in obvious manner. Further reflection is provided on the emotional and psychological factors which playing a role in the negotiation of access and the shaping of the overall research project. In conclusion, it is argued that the decisions, views and behaviour of people at the forefront of knowledge production in the global periphery cannot be subjected to moral binaries but need to be understood in terms of the role played by spontaneous reactions, inter-subjective sense-making processes and evaluations of people and projects over time

Negotiating Unfreedom: An (Auto-) Ethnography of Life at the Forefront of Academic Knowledge Production

This article analyses the negotiated and contingent nature of research access and limitations in a cooperative research project in Kyrgyzstan, Central Asia. It argues that even technically and legally ‘free’ academic research is often subject to a number of restrictions emanating from the politicization of research at the so-called frontiers of the global political economy of academic knowledge production. This frontier status and contested nature of knowledge and research is especially marked in Kyrgyzstan, where recent revolutions and social conflict have created a tense climate amidst authorities’ attempts to reassert their epistemic dominance. Against this background, the article analyses how the ‘politics of sovereignty’ employed in state actors’ attempts to curb intrusive research are equally present in the realization of cooperative research projects with different national and international (non-governmental) organizations/networks, whose members enact the research cooperation or hamper it in different ways, sometimes in ambiguous, sometimes in obvious manner. Further reflection is provided on the emotional and psychological factors which playing a role in the negotiation of access and the shaping of the overall research project. In conclusion, it is argued that the decisions, views and behaviour of people at the forefront of knowledge production in the global periphery cannot be subjected to moral binaries but need to be understood in terms of the role played by spontaneous reactions, inter-subjective sense-making processes and evaluations of people and projects over time

Polizeireform in Kirgistan: Mechanismen der Gemeindesicherheit als Schritt zum fundamentalen Wandel?

Der folgende Beitrag erörtert die jüngsten Entwicklungen bei der Reformierung der Polizei in Kirgistan. Als Teil des Rahmenkonzepts der Sicherheitssektoren-Reform (Security Sector Reform) ist diese ein mehr oder weniger integraler Bestandteil der Transformationsprozesse in Zentralasien. Der unterschiedliche Grad an Kooperationsbereitschaft in Demokratisierungs- und Reformfragen und spezifische nationale politische Entwicklungspfade in den zentralasiatischen Republiken kristallisieren sich allerdings auch im Bereich der Reform von Polizei und Rechtspflegeorganen heraus. Die Einbindung zivilgesellschaftlicher Organisationen in dieses Feld ist in Kirgistan zwar vergleichsweise groß, doch der Reformprozess ist weiterhin ein zähes Unterfangen, in dem die Regierung und das Innenministerium um die Sicherung der Kontrolle sowie die Begrenzung der Geschwindigkeit und der Reichweite der Reformen bemüht sind. Die folgende Analyse ist auf die Aktivitäten der Bürgervereinigung "Für Reformen und ein Ergebnis" und anderer internationaler Akteure fokussiert. Im Mittelpunkt der Darstellung stehen Versuche, transparentere und partizipatorische Reformpraktiken einzuführen, um Prozesse nachvollziehbarer für die Bürger zu gestalten und deren Beziehung zu Rechtspflegeorganen nachhaltig zu verändern. Neben Erfolgen und Einschränkungen dieser Initiativen werden auch das Potenzial und die Herausforderungen der Arbeit in partizipatorischen Community Security (dt. Gemeindesicherheits)-Projekten diskutiert

Post-Liberal Statebuilding in Central Asia

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Drawing on decolonial perspectives on peace, statehood and development, this illuminating book examines post-liberal statebuilding in Central Asia. It uses ethnographic fieldwork in Southern Kyrgyzstan to offer a detailed examination of community security and peacebuilding discourses and practices. Through its analysis, the book highlights the problem with assumptions about liberal democracy, modern statehood and capitalist development as the standard template for post-conflict countries, which is widespread and rarely reflected upon

Governing, but not Producing Security? Internationalised Community Security Practices in Kyrgyzstan

This article tackles the fraught relationship between security discourse, on the theoretical level, and security experience and practice on the ground. It argues that the efforts of the Kyrgyzstani authorities to reform and thus create sustainable and needs-based community security and law enforcement structures have so far largely been performative or even "virtual", meaning that they have focused on governing, but not producing security. The argument is first developed out of literature on state building, the security sector and police reform from a global perspective and in the context of Central Asia and Kyrgyzstan, more specifically. In a second step, we draw on insights from fieldwork, professional experience and grey literature to examine Local Crime Prevention Centres (LCPCs), which are communal-level public bodies where local administrations and residents potentially co-produce needs-based forms of security. However, we also show that the work of these bodies is still dependent on international support while lacking the conditions and facilitation that only executive actors can provide

Recognizing the never quite absent : de facto usage, ethical issues, and applications of covert research in difficult research contexts

This article scrutinizes and reconceptualizes covert research in social science. Surveying recent literature about this research method, we reflect on the ethical and safety implications stemming from the widespread, even if well-intended, lack of transparency characterizing many research projects, especially ones conducted in difficult research contexts. While the standard definition of covert research holds that researchers deliberately do not declare to research subjects that academic research is taking place, we argue that the remoteness of Western academia from most researched contexts often a priori renders field research at least partially covert, irrespective of the researcher’s intentions. This is because its aims, utility, and expected outputs are hard to understand for research participants unrelated to academia. We illustrate this argument by analyzing our own fieldwork experiences in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. In conclusion, we emphasize the need to critically reflect on the de facto use of covert techniques by social researchers