Abstract:

Recent debates have indicated the limitations of liberal-democratic politics, capitalist development and analytical approaches founded upon them. Prevalent framings on ‘authoritarian’, ‘illiberal’ and otherwise non-democratic governance have faced critique and a call for alternative approaches. The present roundtable engages this emerging debate in the Central Asian and wider global context with a focus on Philipp Lottholz’s monograph on post-liberal statebuilding as a novel way to capture political and social change. Drawing on decolonial perspectives on peace, conflict and intervention and their iterations in the post-Socialist world, this work argues for a more dialogical approach to research and for inquiring the imaginaries, discourses and practices that foreground social order. With its discursive, practice-based and ethnographic inquiry into community security and peacebuilding in Southern Kyrgyzstan, the study demonstrates the continuous co-existence of liberal-democratic discourse with exclusion, marginalisation and violence, and identifies alternative sources and potentials of substantive peace and security in practical and political, but also imaginary and cosmological domains. Participants will critically discuss this work and its overarching argument that socio-political order in the global periphery needs to be understood in terms of its post-liberal character alongside a reconsideration of prevalent assumptions about liberal democracy, modern statehood and capitalist development.