Critical Approaches to Security in Central Asia

Edward Lemon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429656903
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

Central Asia remains on the periphery, both spatially and in people's imaginations. When the region does attract international attention, it is often related to security issues, including terrorism, ethnic conflict and drug trafficking. This book brings together leading specialists from a range of disciplines including geography, anthropology, sociology and political science to discuss how citizens and governments within Central Asia think about and practise security.

The authors explore how governments use fears of instability to bolster their rule, and how securitized populations cope with (and resist) being labelled threats through strategies that are rarely associated with security, including marriage and changing their appearance. This collection examines a wide range of security issues including Islamic extremism, small arms, interethnic relations and border regions. While coverage of the region often departs from preconceived notions of the region as dangerous, obscure and volatile, the chapters in this book all place emphasis on the way local people understand security and harmony in their daily lives.

This book will be of interest to students and researchers of Central Asian Studies as well as Security Studies and Political Science. The chapters were originally published in the journal Central Asian Survey.

Introduction: critical approaches to security in Central Asia

Edward Lemon

From the days of the ‘Great Game,’ when the British government was concerned over the threat to India resulting from Russian expansion into Central Asia, to Soviet fears about the emergence of parallel Islam in the region and contemporary concerns about the threat of conflict over water, Central Asia has often been viewed through the prism of security.¹ Central Asia is often portrayed by governments and the media, in academia and policy circles, as a region that is endangered by a host of crises (Heathershaw and Megoran 2011). Building upon previous work challenging this “discourse of danger” in Central Asia, this edited volume critically assesses questions of how security is imagined, how it is practised and how it is experienced in the region. Despite adopting different theoretical approaches and examining different cases, all of the authors take a critical approach to the study of security. In doing so, their approach runs counter to assumptions engendered in many analyses of security in the region.

Inspired by realist approaches, many accounts of security in Central Asia take security to be an objectively measurable phenomenon (Brzezinski 1997; Menon and Spruyt 1999; Menon 2003; Oliker and Szayna 2003; Rumer 2006). As a field of inquiry, ‘traditional’ security studies limit itself to “the study of the threat, use and control of military force” (Walt 1991: 212). ‘Traditional,’ realist-inspired scholars of security focus on the ways in which rational, self-interested states, existing in an anarchical system, use military force to pursue their political aims, the most important of which is survival. The state thus constitutes the referent object of security, and warfare constitutes the main threat to the security of the state system (Baldwin 1995). Actors can precisely define security; it exists independently of human interaction rather than being derivative of it. For analysts adopting this approach the goal becomes one of the measuring different threat levels, analysing their causes and drawing inferences about the prospects of instability.

In the past three decades, however, this orthodox approach to studying security has faced criticism from scholars associated with what has come to be known as ‘Critical Security Studies.’²

Scholars have critiqued ‘traditional’ approaches for their rationalism, ontological essentialism and epistemological positivism. Critical approaches to security have challenged traditional conceptualizations of the nature and type of security threats, the narrow definition of security centred on survival and the referent object that security measures seek to protect: the state. By taking security to be a self-evident category of analysis, scholars have paid insufficient attention to the ways that actors themselves understand security and how those in power manipulate the concept of security to pursue their goals. Instead of having a fixed meaning, security is a slippery, essentially contested concept, defined and experienced in varying ways by different actors (Huysmans 1998; Zedner 2009; Valverde 2011). Scholars have called for a widening of security studies to include a greater array of threats such as environmental degradation and migration, and a deepening of security to incorporate a broader spectrum of actors operating at different levels in the international system, including substate groups and supra-state organizations (Krause and Williams 1997).

Drawing from these critical approaches, contributing authors have examined how certain issues have become objects of security, how actors attempt to manage these threats and how the politics of security shapes people’s lives. In other words, the authors engage theoretically and empirically with security discourses, security practices and everyday security.

Security discourses

Inspired by post-structuralist and constructivist thinking, critical scholars argue that, rather than existing independently of social relations, security threats are intersubjectively constituted within discourses (Ashley 1984; Shapiro and Der Derian 1989; Ashley and Walker 1990; Waever et al. 1993; Krause and Williams 1997; Campbell 1998; Weldes et al. 1999; C.A.S.E Collective 2006). Securitization studies, also known as the ‘Copenhagen’ school, have been perhaps the most influential approach to studying security discourses and are referenced by a number of chapters in this book. Rather than taking the meaning of security as a given, securitization places emphasis on the process by which actors label a phenomenon a security threat. In the words of Barry Buzan, Ole Waever and Jaap de Wilde in their seminal work Security: A New Framework of Analysis (1998), “security is thus a self-referential practice because it is in this practice that the issue becomes a security issue – not necessarily because a real existential threat exists” (Buzan, Waever and de Wilde 1998: 24). This process is neither objective nor subjective, but rather is intersubjective. Securitization is only possible when an actor frames an issue as an existential threat and the audience accepts it as such. For example, during the 1980s government agencies in Europe increasingly represented migration as a potential threat to security, emphasizing its potential to destabilize public order and erode national culture (Huysmans 2000). Migration control is imbricated in the language of security; migration has become securitized.

By labelling something a threat, it is lifted out of the sphere of criminality or politics and into the sphere of security, thereby allowing for extraordinary measures to be used against its perpetrators. Securitization involves framing issues “as a special kind of politics or as above politics” (Buzan et al. 1998: 23). But beyond acknowledging that actors take actions to address security threats after they have labelled them as such, the ‘first’ generation of securitization scholars did not elaborate further on how security is managed and with what effects. Indeed, a ‘second’ generation of securitization theorists has criticized earlier versions of the theory for neglecting the importance of the social context in which the speech act takes place, for failing to analyse the role of the audience in accepting or rejecting the securitization move, for paying insufficient attention to what takes place after securitization and for failing to appreciate the co-constitutive relationship between the speech act and the speaker’s power (Erikkson 1999; Bigo 2002; Balzacq 2005; Meyer 2009; Stritzel 2011). As a number of the authors in this edited volume highlight, the ability of the elite to label something a security threat constitutes a “ political technology in the hegemonic project of various agents” (Jackson 2007: 421). As Natalie Koch convincingly argues, elites utilize fear and danger to fix the boundaries of national identity and position themselves as protectors of the political community (Koch 2018).

Scholars working on security in Central Asia have not been immune to these developments. Much of the early critical work on security in the region examined the securitization of Islam. An assumption prevailed among many external observers of the Soviet Union that Central Asia was the Union’s soft underbelly by virtue of its recalcitrant Muslim population which was “prepared for the inevitable showdown with its Russian rulers” (Bennigsen and Broxup 1983: 87). Shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, a number of scholars challenged this view. Mark Saroyan argued that by “directly extrapolating” their arguments and assumptions from the Soviet sources themselves, the Sovietologists largely reproduced the Soviet discourse on Islam (Saroyan 1993), a critique that was later echoed by Devin DeWeese in his critique what he termed “Soviet Islamology” (DeWeese 2002). Will Myer took the critique a step further, arguing that “the concept of an Islamic threat to Central Asia is in itself a largely Western construct, serving Western interests” (Myer 2002: 3). Issues surrounding the way actors talk about the Islamic threat in Central Asia prevail to this day. David Montgomery and John Heathershaw have challenged the various “myths” surrounding radicalization in the region, including the idea that the societal Islamization is analogous with political radicalization and that Islam is inherently anti-secular (Heathershaw and Montgomery 2016).

This critique of the way that actors instrumentalized security to serve their interests was not limited to a critique of the Western literature. Governments in the region have also manipulated security discourses relating to terrorism to suit their interests (Horsman 2005). As a result, “whether there really is an Islamic threat […] is perhaps secondary to the leadership’s perception of it” (Kangas 1995: 21). Muriel Atkin, for example, examined the way the government of Tajikistan referred to the civil war-era opposition coalition as simply “Islamic.” This framing “blurred the distinctions among the constituent parts and facilitated the stigmatization of the opposition’s main members as dangerous Islamic extremists” (Atkin 1995: 255).

A second theme around which critical scholars coalesced was the representation of Central Asia as exotic, obscure and fractious in popular culture, or what Anthony Bichel termed the “cinematic erasure of Central Asia” in his pioneering work on the subject (Bichel 1997). Authors examined how Central Asia was presented in films such as Air Force One (1997) and Borat (2006), TV shows such as The West Wing (1999–2006), documentaries such as Holidays in the Danger Zone (2003) and video games such as Operation Flashpoint: Red River (2011) (Bichel 1997; Megoran 2005; Heathershaw and Megoran 2011). The geopolitical vision of Central Asia painted the region as unstable, populated by terrorists and rife with conflict.

Such discourses also spilled into the policy realm. Depicting the region as being on the brink of crisis forms a precursor to interventions to manage and mitigate these risks. Following the publication of Calming the Ferghana Valley, a book about “one of the most explosive” regions of the former Soviet Union, Nick Megoran published a biting rebuttal wittily titled “Calming the Ferghana Valley Experts” (Megoran 2000). Megoran pointed to the gap between the magnitude of the predictions of conflict in the book and the paucity of evidence to back these claims. Building on this, 2005 saw the publication of a special issue of Central Asian Survey edited by John Heathershaw and Stina Torjesen. In the issue, authors critiqued the claims about danger and conflict by various peacebuilders and conflict preventers. Drawing on the work of David Campbell, who argued that danger is discursively produced and premised on the dichotomy between the Self and Other, the authors examined the “discourses of danger” through which actors framed the region as dangerous, the interests underlying this framing, how the language of danger inspires projects and studies and how these interpretations of danger differ from the actual experiences of local people. Such framing “brushes over the particularities and contingencies of Central Asian contexts in favour of an anecdotal and alarmist approach” (Heathershaw 2005: 29).

Taking such a critical approach, authors have also examined how actors have framed violent incidents (Shaykhutdinov 2018; Megoran 2008; Lewis 2016; Lemon 2014), developed amorphous definitions of extremism and terrorism (Bashirov 2018; Horsman 2005; Chernykh and Burnashev 2005), securitized issues ranging from Islam (McBrien 2006; Rasanayagam 2006; Lemon and Thibault 2018; Bashirov 2018; Khalid 2007) to protests (Koch 2018; Wilkinson 2007) and drug trafficking (De Danieli 2011). While these studies have paid close attention to how actors frame security issues in the region, many also place these discourses within the broader social and political context of the region. They examine how security discourses frame the region in particular ways as a prelude to a range of interventions to manage the perceived threat. In other words, they have also examined security practices.

Security practices

We should not think about security as a “thin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Titlepage
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: critical approaches to security in Central Asia
• Part I: State Security Discourses and the Geopolitics of Authoritarianism
• Part II: The Discourses of Danger and Conflict Management in Central Asia
• Part III: Everyday (In)security: Harmony, Accommodation and Resistance
• Index