In her introduction to Walter Benjaminās Illuminations, Hannah Arendt writes of how the cultural critic had a passion for small things, even minute things. As she notes, āfor him the size of an object was in an inverse to its significanceā (Arendt 1968, p. 11). That Benjamin passionately believed the complete Shema Israel could be inscribed on just two grains of wheat, suggests that from the smallest appearances, even perhaps perceptibly marginal exteriors, we can ascertain much greater significance. From entities of the tiniest origin we can draw out everything else. We can develop far greater insights than at first sight may seem possible from such small objects, ideas and experiences.
The region of Central Asia is not a tiny object or idea. Yet, too often in popular and policy discourse it is positioned as marginal, obscure, fractious and oriental (Heathershaw and Megoran 2011). Like Benjaminās passion for drawing out deeper more comprehensive understandings of the social, cultural and political world, the history of social sciences alerts us to how some of its greatest advancements in political and social theory are built from the ground up from studies of particular, often non-Western, previously marginalized regions of the world. Pierre Bourdieuās (1977) ground breaking theory on habitus and doxa was inspired through his empirical work in Algeria, while Benedict Andersonās (1983) conceptual formation of the imagined community was developed through his work on South East Asia. Our aim with this volume is to do precisely such theorizing from the position of the Central Asian region.
While there are many works focusing on politics in Central Asia ranging from political science to international relations and from history to anthropology, new perspectives on political theory are currently underdeveloped, if not completely absent in this particular region. The field seems to be reduced to a small space constrained between isolation and colonization: ideas do not rise, flow and circulate; they are only imported and at best adapted. The study of Central Asia seems to be stubbornly resistant to moving beyond a field of Area Studies. It is our contention with this volume that rather than being small in appearance, marginalized and on the periphery, Central Asia can be a rich lode for theorizing the political and social world. Central Asia needs to come in from the margins and be central to how we can understand politics not just in the broader post-Soviet region itself, but far, far beyond.
The idea for this volume derives from an encounter that happened a few years ago between a scholar of Central Asia who works in the United Kingdom and a scholar of political theory who works in Central Asia. As it happens, during a conference we started talking about the difficulties of teaching and undertaking research on political theory in (and often also on) Central Asia because of the absence of academic discussions on theorizing politics in the region. Further, we considered that the region is ideally located for these kinds of reflections because it can be characterized as a central corner. Geographically, Central Asia (to include Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) is in the middle between Europe and Asia and, in this regard, it would be more appropriate to speak of Central Eurasia. Politically, the presence of major players around the region (China, Russia, India, Turkey, Iran, but also the power projections made by the EU and the USA) makes it somewhat a corner around which, and sometimes inside, bigger games are played, even if they have to come to terms with local rules and agency (Cooley 2012). We thought that this combination of a central and a peripheral nature are potentially harbingers of a fruitful vitality, where āusā versus āthemā distinctions get prolifically confused and contested. In this sense, this central corner has the potential to be the place where theoretical experiments could be borne, but we could not proceed any further without involving other scholars who live or come from the region. Therefore, we decided to write this book as an edited volume, involving as many young local researchers as possible.
This collection, therefore, is concerned with exploring the dialecticism between theory and empiricism. Ideally, this volume would not simply involve the transporting or transposing of Western social scientific theories and concepts to the Central Asian region, and that rather we would prefer some form of theory generation derived directly from the region itself. But realistically the application of non-Central Asian concepts and theories is hard to avoid, and theory generation difficult to bring about. Moreover, we are acutely aware as editors of our positionality as non-Central Asian scholars with a background in Western social science and political theory and the ways in which that may well encumber attempts of drawing theorization from the region which fail to privilege the Central Asian perspective. However, this is why we have sought to bring forward the voices of young Central Asian scholars as much as possible. Nevertheless, the central aim of this volume is to bring to bear what the Central Asian experience of politics can speak to us of in terms of theories and concepts within political studies.
Central Asian Politics
Taking the above into account, a brief excavation of scholarly literature on the Central Asian politics highlights the need for greater theorization in relation to the region. During the Soviet period, scholarly works on Central Asia were rare. Either they were exotic accounts of travel in the steppe (Maillart 1934), broad historical treatments of the region (Kolarz 1952; Wheeler 1964; Hambly 1966) or they were largely focused on the question of Muslim identities and the challenge this posed to Moscow (Rywkin 1990), something hitherto was viewed as symptomatic of the Central Asianās peoplesā resistance to Soviet domination through the persistence of traditions and customs (Bennigsen and Broxup 1983; Allworth 1989; Jones Luong 2002, p. 19). Such works fed into scholarly work of the 1990s post-independence period which emphasized the process of nation-building (Akbarzadeh 1996, 1999; Bohr 1998; Roy 2000; Kurzman 1999), the potential for ethnic discord, violence and conflict (Akiner 1993, 1997; Akbarzadeh 1996; Rumer 1993; Rashid 2002) and, because of the failure of democratization, the establishment of authoritarianism and the agential power of the regionās political leaders (Carlisle 1995; Gleason 1997; Kubicek 1998; Cummings and Ochs 2002; Cummings 2002; Huskey 2002; Kangas 2002; Bohr 2003). Such studies were no doubt electrifying in their illumination of a region of the Soviet Union which had long been a darkened, dusty corner of scholarly concern, but still theorization of, in and from the region was few and far between in the 1990s. For instance, analysis on the nature of authoritarianism in the region rarely went beyond attempts of regime typologization as opposed to seeking to theorize the underpinnings of political power and its legitimation. Moreover, much of this work preserved the tendency to obscure and orientalize the region by way of focusing on the potential for conflict and violence and the idiosyncrasies of presidential leadership.
In the early part of the 2000s debate did ensue regarding the extent and durability of traditional politics, social behavioural norms and organizations vis-Ć -vis the rationality of the Soviet experience (Collins 2006; Jones Luong 2002; Gullette 2007), often characterized as a tension between informal and formal forms of political relations and behaviour (Isaacs 2011). The politics of informality has become a central lens through which understanding of politics in Central Asia is viewed especially in terms of the development of neopatrimonialism, clien...