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- Convenor:
-
Kuat Akizhanov
(KazGUU)
Send message to Convenor
- Chair:
-
Balihar Sanghera
(University of Kent)
- Discussant:
-
Serik Orazgaliyev
(Nazarbayev University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Theme:
- Public Administration & Public Policy
- Location:
- Lawrence Hall: room 107
- Sessions:
- Saturday 21 October, -
Time zone: America/New_York
Abstract:
More than thirty years of market-oriented development in the post-Soviet Central Asian countries has transformed them into capitalist regimes within global capitalist architecture characterized by Global North and Global South dichotomy. The socio-economic and political processes that have taken place in the region are marked by some idiosyncratic characteristics. However, these peculiarities do not make Kazakhstan very different from Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan too different from Turkmenistan from the perspective of sustainable development. Some countries of the region such as Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan are marked by the dominance of neoliberal ideology in their socio-economic policy governance (Sanghera and Satybaldieva, 2021). Others such as Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan are more authoritarian and have demonstrated autarkic tendencies (Alam and Banerji, 2000). What is common for all Central Asian states is how the concept of development has been negatively transformed over the last thirty years in these resource-abundant countries through the capitalist restructuring resulting in intense inequalities. From the perspective of long-term socio-economic sustainability, numerous signs of disruption are evident. Among the most immediate episodes are the inability of these countries to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic, the vulnerability of their economies in the face of the Russian invasion to Ukraine and rather fragile socio-economic models built around extensive exploitation of their natural resources and migrant remittance. Global development architecture premised on the ‘market episteme’ where market-oriented restructuring and commercial interests are at the center of policy solutions has been adopted and implemented in the region’s countries regardless of their negative impact on social progress (Amin, 2006; Appel and Orenstein, 2016).
Even within recently launched decolonization narratives and scholarship (Gorshenina, 2021; Bichsel, 2022) epistemic injustice is epitomized in the region in countless ‘modernization projects’ that embed Central Asian countries even deeper into the global unequal power relations. This panel seeks to advance scholarship on the critical understanding of the mainstream socio-economic and, more broadly, development policies to launch debates around non-orthodox and heterodox approaches that are aimed to achieve progressive results. While doing so, we attempt to minimize the risk of exoticising, essentialising and pathologising the region. The panel is open to methodological and theoretical perspectives based on interdisciplinary approach and welcomes papers related to all aspects of the alternative socio-economic development. This panel encourages papers that discuss empirical, theoretical and methodological approaches that advance paradigm shift in the current sustainability debate in the Central Asian countries.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Saturday 21 October, 2023, -Paper abstract:
Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is predominantly viewed through a prism of rising power and small-state relations, concentrating on the interests of China to extract resources and create dependency through state-owned companies and financial instruments. In contrast to state-centric approaches, there is an emerging recognition of the role of local day-to-day practices and fragmented, decentralised, and partially internationalised multiple actors who act independently and sometimes contradict state policies. However, there is no empirical study critically assessing BRI projects in small Central Asian states with respect to the role of factors discussed in the literature. In these regards, the study takes Kazakhstan's cooperation with China under BRI to perform a case study. Astana has agreed with Beijing for 55 projects to be implemented jointly between 2015 – 2019. However, by December 2022, no more than one-third of the projects are commissioned, while others are still under implementation or even replaced for being passive. Such inconsistencies lead to the question: “Why are some of Kazakhstan’s BRI projects being successfully implemented while others remain passive or excluded from the list”? To answer the question and fill the gap in the literature, Kazakhstan’s successful BRI projects are systematically compared with failed ones to see what conditions discussed in the academic literature play a decisive role in their implementation. The author designs multi-method research by employing Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) followed by the process tracing method. The former is specifically designed to answer questions looking for causes of effects and determine sufficient causal conditions leading to results. Process tracing, in turn, allows looking closer at those conditions in a causal chain of the process. Findings indicate that along with the availability of Chinese investments and support of the host country’s government, which is more accessible to particular actors, the position of a beneficiary owner of a project in the political-economic system (patron, client, broker/independent business) plays a crucial role. The study contributes to the literature with empirical data on Kazakhstan’s BRI projects and complements emerging discourse based on a critical and decentralised approach to international relations.
Paper abstract:
The paper investigates the relationship between media consumption and political views among citizens in Kazakhstan. Drawing on data from an opinion survey, the authors analyze how exposure to various media sources influences public attitudes towards the events that occurred in January 2022 ("Bloody January"). The study aims to shed light on the ways in which the media landscape in Kazakhstan shapes citizens' perspectives on political issues, and to contribute to our understanding of the factors that influence political polarization in the country.
The research contributes to the studies of political polarization in three aspects:
1. The prior studies have a strong shift of attention towards developed democracies. Despite, in the last years, a certain shift in research in favor of non-democratic regimes and/or the emergence of comparative studies, substantive body of literature is focused on western democratic societies, especially the United States; but these insights are not completely applicable, especially for non-democracies. The focus on Kazakhstan has a potential to make a modest contribution to overcome this limitation, bringing geographical and political diversity of empirical case.
2. Most studies in this field are traditionally centered on monolingual media environment, while multilingual societies do not receive enough attention. Yet states characterized by ethnic diversity and the presence of two or more competing languages are not uncommon and deserve more expertise. There is thus no reason why Western democracies with monolingual media environment should be given more analytical weight than, for instance, bilingual autocracy. Again, Kazakhstani case provides diversity of empirical case.
3. With some notable exceptions (e.g. Bail, 2021), studies of political polarization indeed conducted almost exclusively by scholars of economics and political science, who striving toward purely factual studies. This leads to significant progress in methodology of empirical research (e.g., identification of causal inference), but relatively poor development of theory. My goal is not so much to give the most accurate quantitative assessment of the impact of new media on political polarization, but to advance the conceptualization of new media effect on political polarization in the context of broader sociological concepts such as ethnic and class identity. The idea that media use is shaped by habits and preferences anchored in social context (that should be conceptualized in terms of social class and/or ethnic groups) seems obvious, but, surprisingly, does not receive much attention in the current research agenda. Thus, the proposed project would contribute to theory.
Paper abstract:
The paper investigates whether the online provision of government services makes it easier to start up new businesses in developing Central Asian economies, in terms of the number of regulatory procedures, time, and costs of starting business. To address the research objectives, firstly, the paper starts with a comprehensive review of the role of government in entrepreneurship and arguments about how e-government might support entrepreneurship. Second, after set of hypotheses are developed based on relevant literature and theoretical arguments, to test the relationship between e-government and ease of starting a new business, empirical analysis (fixed-effect regression) is employed. While the primary focus of the paper is the e-government services to facilitate new venture creation, the impacts of other factors that related to entrepreneurship regulating environment and exist independently of e-government, particularly the quality of regulation, contract enforcement, rule of law, and the control of corruption, are controlled. In addition, effects of overall technological infrastructure (telecommunication, internet connectivity) and soft skills development (human development index) on entrepreneurship are tested.
A panel data used to measure e-government development, human capital, and telecommunication index of the selected economies, including, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, obtained from UN E-Government Knowledgebase. In addition, the country-specific data of individual countries are acquired from the World Development Indicators data set, and World Governance Indicators is going to serve as a source of data for measuring the regulatory and institutional effectiveness of the countries in the sample.
The key objective pursued by this study is to contribute to the discussions around the aspects of digitalization of government services and entrepreneurship in emerging economies of Central Asia. Although in academic literature, debates around the small and medium-sized enterprises are based on the premise that they are base for private sector-led growth and emerging private sector of developing economies, there is lack of scholarly study on entrepreneurship in Central Asian economies. In practice, in Central Asian countries, government is considered as a body that impede entrepreneurship, administrative complexity is perceived as an environmental barrier, hinders private sector development, and regulation is viewed as a factor, which imposes a burden on firms, particularly new entrants, potentially deterring entrepreneurial entry. Therefore, empirical investigation of this issue comes up with significant contribution to relevant literature and important implications for policymakers.