Short Abstract:

This forum advances the debate on alternatives to framings on ‘authoritarian’ and ‘illiberal’ governance in discussing Philipp Lottholz’s monograph Post-Liberal Statebuilding in Central Asia: Imaginaries, Discourses and Practices of Social Ordering (Bristol UP) in the Eurasian and global context.

Long Abstract:

Recent political developments and scholarly advances have indicated the limitations of liberal-democratic politics, capitalist development and analytical approaches founded upon them. Thus, well established framings on ‘authoritarian’, ‘illiberal’ and otherwise non-democratic governance have faced critique and a call for alternative approaches that better capture the contradictions of liberalism and its capitalist foundation. 

This author-critic forum engages with this emerging debate in the Central Asian and wider Eurasian and global context. It is centred around Philipp Lottholz’s monograph Post-Liberal Statebuilding in Central Asia: Imaginaries, Discourses and Practices of Social Ordering (Bristol UP), which develops the concept of 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 practice-based and ethnographic inquiry into community security and peacebuilding in Southern Kyrgyzstan and a wide-ranging textual analysis, the study demonstrates the continuous co-existence of liberal-democratic discourse with exclusion, marginalisation and violence in the present order, and identifies alternative sources and potentials of substantive peace and security in practical and political, but also imaginary and cosmological domains. 

Participants will critically examine this analysis and, among other things, the author’s argument that Kyrgyzstan’s – and the wider Central Asian – socio-political order 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.