Paper short abstract:

Drawing on Gibson-Graham’s conceptualisation of postcapitalism, I argue that our gaze on postsocialism has been largely capitalocentric until present. I hence propose the notion of “postcapitalist postsocialism” as a way to radically rethink postsocialism away from developmentalist models.

Paper long abstract:

In the book “The end of capitalism (as we knew it)”, Gibson-Graham called for a rethinking of the economy away from a capitalocentric perspective that, while attributing to capitalism a central and defining role, neglects other economic practices and identities by subsuming their definition to capitalism. She advanced a postcapitalist approach to study economic processes and to engage in the imagination of alternatives. Gibson-Graham's is a politics of possibilities that seeks to transform the frustrating and depressing affects generated by capitalocentric framings into openness and hope.

In this paper, I argue that our gaze on postsocialism has been largely capitalocentric until the present day. This argument emerges from the analysis of the attempts by international development agencies to promote a particular type of agricultural cooperatives in post-independence Kyrgyzstan. The definition of service and marketing cooperatives as the only "true" cooperatives is inserted in a broader normative vision of development, or transition, towards a particular kind of modernity. Despite the harsh critique to "transitology", scholarly literature on agrarian transformation in Central Asia still often reproduces such teleological perspective. As a way to overcome this, I propose a "postcapitalist postsocialism": a rethinking of postsocialism that implies in particular two moves. First, to radically refuse the linear teleology of developmentalist models. Second, to abandon capitalocentric representations of the economy and thereby reveal the existence and value of more-than-capitalist practices that remain invisible in most accounts of both postsocialism and capitalism.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation critically discusses the concept of path dependency and how it is operationalized in research on continuity and change in Central Asia. Recent framings of the term risk over-emphasizing the role of Soviet legacies in ongoing developments, but the concept has more to offer.

Paper long abstract:

Path dependence – or path dependency – is a popular term in the literature on social, political, and environmental change in Central Asia. Typically, the term has been used to explain why a certain problematic condition in the present, such as hierarchical governance structures or unsustainable resource use, is a result of institutions, structures, and processes from the Soviet past. In other words, the term often seems to function as a synonym for Soviet legacies, which are usually framed as something negative. Notably, this understanding of path dependence contradicts earlier conceptualizations of the term in postsocialist transformation research: in particular, David Stark (1992) operationalized the concept to investigate how new development pathways are constrained by the different ‘starting conditions’ after the collapse of socialist regimes, rather than by legacies of the socialist past. In this presentation, I sketch out different path dependency meanings from the literature and show that the concept has more to offer for research in Central Asia than its predominant framing in the field suggests. I illustrate my points with a case study on the adoption of agroforestry practices by farmers in rural Kyrgyzstan to make two basic arguments. First, while Soviet legacies do matter in certain ways for understanding current practices and constraints, new path dependencies have emerged since the early 1990s that seem equally or even more important. Second, not everything from the Soviet past is necessarily negative, which may be missed when framing path dependencies only as barriers for progressive change.

Paper long abstract:

Failed nation-building and colonial narratives in Kazakhstan

In this paper, I would like to pay attention to the problem of dispersion of Kazakhstani society, which was, once again, highlighted because of the events of January 2022, when the state decided to blame 20,000 mythical marauders for the unrest, and then to justify them starts persecution and torture of those who came out for a peaceful demonstration on January 5. Often they were members of the sensitive segments of the population, who came from the outskirts of the city of Almaty. The stigmatization of certain groups as backward and uneducated seen as an act of secondary colonization, where the command of the Russian language and belonging to an urban culture defined as modernization, progressiveness and success. In addition to the sensitive layer of the population defined as "living below Tashkentskaya street” of the city of Almaty, which is also defined as backward, there is another population group of those who do not speak Russian -Kazakh ethnic repatriates from non-Russian-speaking countries such as China and Mongolia. I draw attention to the following issues: the failure of state nation-building policies, the stratification of the population, the various groups of ethnic Kazakhs whose voices muted, including the social groups of vulnerable strata in the suburbs of Almaty and Almaty region.

Paper long abstract:

For some time, I have followed discussions in the heritage context about the original functions of certain threatened buildings, objects, places, and spaces that may require improved physical integrity, such as protection and preservation. A part of this discussion, as DeSilvey (2017) showed, stems from the protection and preservation paradigm, which remains on a silenced material transience bound with an official memory linked to perceptual encounters with a world of entities (Bennett, 2004). I folded the discussions into my motivation to share my observations about issues related to the concept of heritage, and consider a wider range of ideas about the entities that would have a positive effect on the tendency to rethink standards of classification. This would allow us to conceive what heritage constitutes in the Central Asia context more broadly, and whether we need to value the heritage practice of buildings woven into Soviet social life.

Thus, the paper reconsiders such anthropological notions as the decay, demolition, memorial presence and historical values of buildings in Bishkek, including the Planetarium, the hotel Issyk-Kul, and the Ak-Kula hippodrome by tracing the high economic value of their commercial use in everyday life during the early Soviet period to consider lost value and unnecessary representation. In this vein, it identifies the emergence of distinct post-materialist ways of understanding the buildings in relation to the highly specific sociopolitical and cultural trajectories of the Soviet past. The paper also contextualises programs of historical monuments to understand that it is difficult to fathom what human heritage remains in a preserved building.

References

DeSilvey C. (2017): Curated decay. Heritage beyond saving. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bennett J. (2004): The force of things: Steps towards an ecology of matter. In: Political Theory 32(3), 347-362.

Paper short abstract:

Within this presentation I aim to provide economic, institutional and epistemic analysis of failure of the neoliberalism in Central Asia, discuss the prospects of the region and search for the most appropriate dimensions for further research on the Central Asian region.

Paper long abstract:

Economic science has long been represented by scholastic free market oriented theories of Classical and Neoclassical Economics with their offsprings (mainstream), and so called “the Other Canon” (E.Reinert, 2011), represented by numerous practice-based schools (like German Historical School, Institutional Economics, etc.) The Other Canon principles helped developing most of industrialized nations, while the mainstream served the ideological functions to them. Real-life implementation of the principles of the mainstream economics brought to economic downturn and negative social outcomes.

Within this panel I aim to provide economic, institutional and epistemic analysis of failure of the neoliberalism in Central Asia, discuss the prospects of the region and search for the most appropriate dimensions for further research on the Central Asian region.

After the collapse of the USSR the post-Soviet “transition economies” embraced ideas of globalization and de-regulated markets, because they believed that the prosperity of the Western world was based on this mode. Some of the states, like Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia, implemented neoliberal reforms in full scale, the others, like Kazakhstan, took some elements of the so called “Washington Consensus”. There were very few states in the post-Socialist world (like Uzbekistan) that fully ignored fast transition to market economy. They have been criticized for a lack of economic reforms, but have shown the best results in economic development.

A key question in this context is why the much propagated economic and social theories did not give the expected results, and more autocratic regimes have shown better economic outcomes. We should understand if the “bad luck of neoliberalism” results from such phenomena as (neo)patrimonialism, state capture, patronage and clientelism, nepotism, and corruption, or, probably, vice versa, those phenomena appeared as a result of radical market reforms, as it was shown by A.Tutumlu (2019) on the case of Kazakhstan, and probably consequently caused higher conflict potential in the region. To answer this question I propose to study the nexus between economic development, institutional dynamics, and political conflicts in the region. In particular, I seek to shed light on how political instability and conflict can be causally linked to different economic models and the welfare distributions they produce on the one hand, and the dynamics of institutional frameworks in both formal and informal perspectives, with their varying levels of authoritarianism and state capture, on the other.

Paper short abstract:

Central Asian studies were reshaped in the 1990s. Access to the region enabled new empirical information and methods. At the same time, the analytical concepts that became established were colored by the post-cold war Western ideology. This paper explores some of these and their ideological bias.

Paper long abstract:

Central Asian studies were reshaped in the 1990s. Access to the region enabled a wealth of new information, material and methods. At the same time, the analytical concepts with which these new fields were approached and the established terms that stuck, were very much children of their time. Terms popularized during this time, like informality, shadow economy, second economy, corruption and transformation became "gate keeping concepts" (Marilyn Strathern) in Central Asian studies. Still in use today, they betray a state-gaze and an adaptation into the academic analytical approach of the perspectives and concerns or Western led international development organizations, many of whom co-financed such research while they entered with explicitly neo-liberal capitalist agendas. This paper traces the development and ideological background of some of these terms and questions their value as analytical tools to understand rather than as normative measures of certain ideologically predetermined development.