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- Convenors:
-
Christopher Atwood
(University of Pennsylvania)
Henry Hale (George Washington University)
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- Theme:
- REG
- Location:
- Posvar 3911
- Start time:
- 25 October, 2018 at
Time zone: America/New_York
- Session slots:
- 1
Long Abstract:
Central Eurasia has been variously portrayed as a marginal zone across which migrations occur, a contested "game" between empires, or (more recently) a nexus of outside interventions seeking to promote democracy, extend markets, spread Islamism, or extract oil. These portrayals share an assumption that Central Eurasia is defined by outside interests and that consequential power is situated outside of the region. This session seeks to theorize Eurasian formations of power differently, via a set of cases situated in different times and places. We ask, are there notable patterns in the configurations and material mechanisms by which political, economic, or social power is organized, displayed, perpetuated, or legitimated in Central Eurasia from 4000 years ago until today? Can we approach an account of Central Eurasia's deep history as multiple, overlapping socio-political networks of various scales and spans that constitute the function of states and societies? How did personal networks scale up to create society, and how are larger social structures enacted or resisted in day-to-day interactions at the local level?
This panel assembles comparative, interdisciplinary, and longue duree thinking from archaeology, climate science, history, anthropology, and geography. We challenge participants to address what (if anything) makes their case notably "Central Eurasian", even as we acknowledge the multiple connections the region has had with broader cultural, political, financial, and environmental contexts.
Tekla Schmaus's paper discusses the spatial organization of non-state power as enacted and negotiated between households in agro-pastoral communities during the Bronze Age of Central Eurasia. Natalie Koch's paper theorizes connections between Central Asia and Arab Gulf states as a complex form of geo-power exercised through discourse and materialities. Morgan Liu's paper looks critically at the literature of patronage networks globally to illuminate the operation and significance of "informal", non-state formations of power in Soviet and post-Soviet Central Asia and Caucasus.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Natalie Koch (Syracuse University)
Paper long abstract:
In "Critical Geopolitics," Gearóid Ó Tuathail (1996, 7) forcefully shows how geography is not "an innocent body of knowledge," but "an ensemble of technologies of power." Since the publication of this seminal book, the field of critical geopolitics has become a widely influential, and it has increasingly shaped research on power and politics in Central Asia. The grounded analyses that have accompanied this shift have challenged classical accounts that reduce the region to a homogeneous and essentialist metaphors like the "heartland" or a "chessboard" for Great Power politics. Yet the new "critical" literature on geopolitics in Central Eurasia still frequently slides into conventional ways of thinking about the region as a zone falling into one "sphere of influence" or another (e.g. that of Russia, China, or the West). Yet viewed through a poststructuralist lens to regional geopolitics as "ensembles of technologies of power," it is clear that Central Asia - like any world region - has always been subject to the simultaneous push and pull toward multiple regional blocs. Although scholars and policymakers often want to spatially fix allegiances to explain local political patterns and predict future development, the constant overlap of technologies of power, originating both within and beyond Central Eurasia, defies any simple categorization.
This paper illustrates this complex form of geo-power, based on ebbs and flows, rhetoric and materialities, and ultimately overlapping lines of global connection, by examining the case of expanding relations between Central Asian states and the Gulf Arab monarchies. In particular, I focus on the Qatar's bilateral cooperation with Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. Qatar has established embassies in these states only within the past 10 years and its growing political and economic ties with Central Asian states, cities, and actors raise a number of questions. Why is Qatar - a country of only 260,000 citizens and 2.6 million total residents - interested in developing bilateral relations in the region? What is at stake for Qatari leaders and their counterparts in Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan? What do expanding relations mean for the ever-shifting geopolitical landscape in Central Asia? And how can we place connections with actors in the Arabian Peninsula in a more complex picture of space that acknowledges Central Eurasia's deep history of being shaped by overlapping networks of power?
Tekla Schmaus (Washington State University)
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I consider the spatial and material manifestations of power relationships in a Bronze Age community in Kyrgyzstan. This period in Central Eurasia was traditionally considered to be a time when most communities had an egalitarian social structure. However, recent research from across the mountainous zones of the region has complicated our picture of Bronze Age economies, suggesting that many places had mixed agro-pastoral systems rather than relying on strict pastoralism. The presence of agriculture during this early period clearly indicates contact with states to the west and the east. In addition, such a mixed system would require a division of labor within the community, as the herds would not have been kept in the fields. I question how decisions were made about the allocation of labor, both at the level of the household and at the level of the community. Were decisions truly collaborative and egalitarian, or did some people have more power and authority in the decision-making process than others? Who negotiated relationships with neighboring states?
To begin to answer these questions, I will discuss preliminary results from and future plans for an excavation targeted at finding the remains of households in a Bronze Age settlement in the Naryn Valley. If some people or households had more power than others, one might expect to find evidence of those social relationships in the materials left behind, the spatial organization of a house, or even the spatial organization of the community as a whole. I argue that a better understanding of the way power was enacted and negotiated in communities in the mountains of Central Eurasia in Bronze Age will help us to understand the political economy of the region as a whole. Ultimately, a better understanding of Bronze Age social organization might even help to explain the seemingly sudden emergence of Scythian elites in the region during in the first millennium BCE.
Jesse Swann-Quinn (Syracuse University)
Paper long abstract:
Foreign observers often view the Republic of Georgia as a model of democratic and capitalist transition in the formerly Soviet region. However, this push to decentralize and deregulate nearly all sectors has produced a new, territorially-based system of resource governance there, forming new configurations and relations among state, society, and corporations. Similar patterns of de- and re-centralization within the extractive industries are visible in contexts throughout Central Asia and the Caucasus. While scholars of such political ecologies at times frame their analyses with somewhat static assumptions about the natures of capital, society, and the material environment, the region’s hybrid formations suggest much more complicated sets of relations as contemporary environmental governance patterns emerge from Central Asia’s unique economic and environmental histories. Such developments raise many questions: How do Soviet environmental legacies shape current resource governance practices? How do shifting political identities influence the contours of these new regimes? What might these patterns of extraction, dispossession, and resulting toxic ecologies suggest about forms of power within the region?
In this paper I consider the case of a gold and copper mining complex in southern Georgia, assessed through a range of mixed empirics collected during Summers 2015-2017. In doing so I propose that the political geographies of extractive industries here can be understood as a window in to shifting power geometries in the region. Such emerging dimensions are apparent in the Georgian case as a range of sub-state and informal bordering practices, simultaneously material and symbolic: unequal levels of socio-economic access, exposure to toxic plumes, and contours of degraded citizenship. Such borders produce contingent, often ambiguous, territorial power geometries that citizens must navigate during their everyday lives. These alternative, sub-state bordering practices often exist as alternatingly visible and invisible, building asymmetrical political relationships of exclusion, inclusion, and dispossession. In laying bare and contextualizing these contemporary practices and effects of extraction within the region, I demonstrate how scholars may consider resource governance as a useful lens for analyzing power configurations in Central Asia and the Caucasus.