Decolonizing Central Asian International Relations

Beyond Empires

Timur Dadabaev

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000458794
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book unpacks the main narratives used in international relations to depict and explain existing inter-state relations in Central Asia, with a focus on the construction of fairer international relations along the Silk Road.

The book points to the need to decolonize international relations in the Central Asian region to present a fair representation of the regional states in international affairs. In doing so, the book exposes the concepts and stereotypes that have been imposed on the Central Asian region by dominant assumptions in contemporary international relations. Offering empirical grounding for alternative views, the author suggests that Western international relations make the same mistakes in the Central Asian region that the Russian Marxists made when they attributed a narrative of modernity along the lines of the progress made in Germany and Russia. In such a structure, both Russian Marxist attempts and liberalist Western ideas disregard the fact that the region has its own model of modernity and progress, which does not necessarily involve an appeal to the modern nation state, ethnicity and state building. The book sheds lights on the prospects of coordinated development of Central Asia and Afghanistan. It also provides insights into the development of post-Socialist Asia in its relations with Russia, China, Japan and South Korea.

Contributing to the task of placing Central Asia in discussions in the discipline of international relations, this book will be of interest to academics working in the fields of international relations and Asian politics, in particular Central Asian studies.

1 Towards decolonizing Central Asian international relations

DOI: 10.4324/9781003176459-1

International relations (IR) in Central Asia (CA) after the collapse of the Soviet Union have consistently been a matter of diverse interpretations and discussions. Theoretically, the choice often lies between ‘rationalism’ and ‘reflectivism’, as elegantly defined by Robert Keohane in his presidential address to the International Studies Association in 1988 (Keohane 1988).

The Central Asia (CA) region has been one of the Asian regions most exposed to the changes in modern history, such as the collapse of the Soviet Union, the retreat and return of the Eurasian ambitions of Russia, and the rise of China. However, there are debates about how to narrate these developments and place the CA states in this international context. Some studies have attributed agency to smaller CA states to trade on their loyalties (or other currency) to Russia, the US, and China (Cooley 2015; Heathershaw, Owen and Cooley 2019). Few studies feature references to Mackinder and Central Asia as a part of the imagined ‘heartland’, which is applied to the region in different connotations (Megoran and Sharipova 2013). Recent studies also attempt to narrate the CA behaviours from the perspective of the English School (Costa Buranelli 2019), inquiry into the meaning of power (Fazendeiro 2020) or the nation-state in the region (Akchurina 2019; Insebayeva 2019; Isaacs and Polese 2015). Others have called for a departure from the CA regional framing altogether and referred to it as a ‘territorial trap’ (Azizov 2015, 2017) towards an issue-specific and country-specific focus.

While these theoretical frames, which emphasise the physical capacity, territorial size, resource-based strength, order, justice, values and identities provide useful accounts of international relations, they often result in a dichotomy of images related to the evaluation of the role, evolution and place of CA states in international and regional politics.

One perspective is projected from the local/regional CA studies that emphasise the centrality of the CA region in launching ambitious international organisations such as Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Chinese BRI initiative, Russian Eurasian Economic Cooperation and Eurasian Union constructs (Alimov 2018; Chen and Fazilov 2018; Tolipov 2018, 2010). However, at the global level, the agency of CA states in these studies is questioned and often denied, where the aforementioned institutions are discursively attributed to Russia, China or alternative power domination (Freeman 2018; Kirkham 2016).

In addressing the complexity and treatment of the CA region in contemporary International Relations (IR), this study raises the following questions. What are the major current theoretical approaches to help narrate the CA region and its resilient development in IR? What features of Central Asian IR are currently unaccounted for and overlooked by mainstream theories?

What is Central Asia for international relations?

The post-Soviet CA region consists of five states, whose total population is approximately 72 million: 18 million in Kazakhstan, 6 million in Kyrgyzstan, 9 million in Tajikistan, 6 million in Turkmenistan and 33 million in Uzbekistan. The region stretches for 4 million km² across Eurasia and is strategically located among Russia, China, Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan and others. The regional states in their current shape and form were first created as republics of the Soviet Union from 1917 to approximately 1936. While regional states have long histories of various forms of self-governance, as indicated below, immediately prior to the Russian revolution, the states in the region were either vassals under the protection of imperial tsarist Russia (from approximately 1867 onward) or included in its administrative structure under the Turkistan governor generalship (Russian Turkestan). Thus, establishing the Soviet Union has had a partly decolonising impact on the Russian colonies because it turned them into semi-self-governed republics. Simultaneously, inclusion into the USSR has turned them into parts of what have been called an ‘affirmative action Empire’, which neo-colonised them under the Marxist ideological pretext (Martin 2001).

These republics claimed and attained their sovereignty (within the boundaries of the USSR in the late 1980s) before their formal independence in 1991, which demonstrates the difference that these republics attributed to the notion of sovereignty compared to the Western usage of the term, which is equal to sovereignty and independence, as discussed in subsequent sections.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the independence of these states has been termed in different manners. The projected images included ‘catapult to independence’ (Olcott 1992), ‘thrust back into the international community’ (Gleason 1997), critical evaluation of post-independence path of these states along the lines of ‘getting it wrong’ (Olcott 1999), references to ‘new Afghanistans’ in CA (Olcott 2002), the ‘failing state of CA’ (Hill 2004), the ‘second chances’ (Olcott 2005), etc. With similar scepticism, the authors expressed concern that the so-called ‘stans’ would ‘face serious political upheaval and violent conflict’ following dramatic scenarios such as coups, internal turmoil, instability, Chinese expansionism and international rivalry (Lewis 2008: 126–129). They have also concluded that there is little prospect for gradual reforms for them ‘from within’ (ibid.: 132). Others emphasised the indigenous, informal dynamics of regionalism and regional cooperation but operated with the prepared footprints speculating that CA might be the next ASEAN (Starr 2019).

Despite being endowed with a historical heritage, civilisational richness, transcontinental transportation infrastructure potential and immense oil, natural gas, uranium reserves, and incredible resilience and adaptation to change, this region has remained marginal for IR scholars due to various reasons. First, this region has often been associated with the geopolitical presence of Russia (e.g. descriptions of IR developments by Acharya and Buzan 2019: 187–192). Many scholars have approached this region by analysing Russian and post-Soviet policies, whereas the Asian perspective on the interactions if CA states has been shadowed and largely hijacked by the Russia-related scholarship (Freeman 2018; Kirkham 2016). Second, various studies have paid attention to the interactions of CA states with Asian powerhouses from a comparative perspective and tended to focus on the participation of these states in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) or their foreign policies related to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) (Alimov 2018; Obydenkova 2011). Thus, once again, the framing of the coverage of the CA region within the political space of Asia has been hijacked by the attention to China-related initiatives, which is often rationalised by the rise of China and its global and regional economic influence (Li 2018). Third, studies that intended to cover the engagements of CA states with one another and other countries frequently focused on their relations with the US, the EU, Russia, China, Japan and South Korea through imaginaries of Chinese hegemony, Russian opposition to it, ‘Central Asia’s ASEAN Moment’ (Starr 2019) and Asian linkages and rivalries as the categories of analysis (Fumagalli 2016).

Similarly, Russian geopolitical imaginaries of the CA region and their role in Russian policy impose the Eurasian identity and destiny to the CA region (Dugin 2007). In such image construction, Russia is portrayed as a defender of the CA region against imposing Western standards of democracy and development. Paradoxically, in claiming this role, Russia displays two tendencies. One is related to the Russian mimicry of the Western approaches (Owen, Heathershaw and Savin 2018) to Eastern Europe (Yugoslavia, NATO expansion and others), where the Russian government and President justify their assertion of ‘ownership’ of near abroad (South Caucasus, CA, Ukraine, Moldova and others) by arguing that it is following Western approaches (humanitarian intervention of a kind in the Caucasus, protection of human life in Ukraine, Crimea as Russia’s Kosovo). The other tendency is that by employing such rhetoric, Russia clearly displays the signs of paternalizing CA states, which also significantly informs Russian foreign policy as explained in the section on the Great Game narrative below.

Such frames, which originated in both Western and Russian approaches to the CA region, call for a critical engagement (see Chandler and Reid 2020; Korosteleva and Flockhart 2020), which shows signs of appearing in discussions of CA IR in recent years. In particular, the emerging critical attitude to these images is voiced in works on the discourses of danger (Heathershaw and Megoran 2011; Megoran 2005), which pick and play the images of threat emanating from it. Others attempt to reflect on the aspects of CA IR that detail not only the empirical developments, but also rightfully attempt to place the CA region into theoretical debates (Isaacs and Frigerio 2019). Attempts have been made to position the CA IR between the rationalist schools of realism and liberalism in the established Western norms and theories, such as English school (Flockhart 2016), or to appeal to alternative theoretical interpretations (see Costa Bura...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Towards decolonizing Central Asian international relations
• 2. Critical assessment of contemporary approaches to Central Asia
• 3. Manipulating post-Soviet nostalgia Contrasting political narratives and public recollections in Central Asia
• 4. Emerging Japan–EU strategic partnership and its implications for Central Asia
• 5. De-securitizing the ‘Silk Road’ Uzbekistan's cooperation agenda with Russia, China, Japan and South Korea in the Post-Karimov Era
• 6. Connectivity, energy and decolonization Uzbekistan's strategy vis-à-vis Russia, China, South Korea and Japan
• 7. Decolonizing Afghanistan–Central Asia relations Narrative of events in 2018–2020
• 8. Conclusion Ten points for decolonizing agenda setting in Central Asia
• Index