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Abstract
This paper reviews the history of Japanese corporate penetration in the CA region. It identifies two waves of Japanese corporate entry into the CA region over the last 30 years. The first wave started with Japanese companies entering energy-related projects and infrastructure development based on ODA (Official Development Assistance). In the second wave, in the 2010s, Japanese corporate interests were more diverse, and the Japanese business community members in CA entered new areas, such as financing by megabanks, international transportation, and digital technologies.
This paper divides the problems faced by Japanese companies into those related to the logistics of the region and those related to a lack of economic infrastructure. Among the logistic problems are the size of the market and the difficulty of transportation due to the location of the region, with no access to major seaports.
Abstract
This article combines oral histories with documents from family and public archives to re-assemble fragments of a Tashkent family history, and it uses Bourdieu’s theses on social reproduction and cultural capital to analyze the ways that this family repurposed its status-seeking decisions in changed political circumstances. Beginning with the author’s effort to document an ancestor who served as a shine-keeper, the article explores what became of that religious role as successive generations turned to new sources of cultural capital. Evidence shows the author’s grandmother’s elision of her lineage, simultaneous reinforcement of her traditional social status, and embrace of the role of Soviet teacher and intellectual. Soviet period repression led some families to destroy lineage documents, and to recount the past in selective ways. The author’s research partially reconstructs the strategies of a Tashkent family who transferred, hid, and reconfigured its cultural capital.
Abstract
Most studies on transitions to democracy focus on macro-level factors, while Przeworski considers people as the most important factor and emphasizes looking at the ruling class and civil society. Softliners within the ruling class may aim to choose to open up the system to increase political stability and ensure the survival of the existing regime. The paper aims to test whether liberalization indeed increases political stability in the Central Asian context. By performing the empirical analyses, one can find out that liberalization results in political stability in Central Asia.
Abstract
Urban development in contemporary Kazakhstan diverges from official policy and procedure. Through the exploration of a case study in Astana (until recently Nur-Sultan), the capital, this research reveals how activists are organizing to preserve natural space and thwart development. An activist-expert coalition is currently engaged in a drawn-out effort to preserve Small Taldykol, a natural space for recreation and leisure which is part of a lake system within Astana. The proposed plan includes draining this lake, the development of housing complexes, a tourism complex, and an eco-park. Using Miraftab’s invented spaces of participation and Ong’s exceptions to neoliberalism, this research explores how urban activists use the space created by deviations from development policy processes, orchestrated by developers and officials within the city and national government, in Small Taldykol’s development. These exceptions provide an opportunity for activists to organize, engage with other stakeholders, and to impact Small Taldykol’s fate.
Abstract
This article explores systems of social control over women’s bodies demonstrated by discourses and practices which regulate women’s virginity in Kyrgyzstan. Emergence of these discourses are shaped by Kyrgyzstan’s continued post-independence nation-building processes and economic instability. In this context, women’s bodies are at the center of political contestation, ethnic nationalism, and collective power. Findings suggest that women have learned to use their bodies in economic struggles as sources of individual resistance. Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnography of social media, we identify how young Kyrgyz women relate to the issue and its associated practices. We investigate their strategizing mechanisms and analyze how, in the attempts to undermine patriarchal oppression and optimize their opportunities, their coping strategies may actually contribute to perpetuate them.
Abstract
The specificity and variety of the experiences of feminist organizing in the former “second world” is rarely explored in the studies of transnational feminist praxis. This paper explores the (queer) feminist discourses of the region, described as the most “distant Other” of the former USSR – Central Asia. I look at the ways artists, activists, and academics from two cities in the region, Bishkek and Almaty, articulate their understandings of feminism from an intersectional and decolonial perspectives. I argue that local (queer) feminist activists are producers of unique knowledge(s), bound neither to a “return to tradition” nor to accept ready-made solutions from the “West,” which positions itself as an “origin” of contemporary debates on gender. By engaging with the inner coloniality of the feminist movements in the former USSR, the article contributes to the transnational debates on the inclusivity of feminism(s).
Abstract
Varied visuals (paper-based, textiles, ceramics, etc.) targeted men and women to join the struggle for a new happy life in Soviet Central Asia. I designate these visuals as “Soviet material ideology” and I consider them as a powerful tool in spreading new ideas and practices. In this paper I explore posters and carpets created in the 1920s and 1930s that call for the emancipation of women of Central Asia. Studying of graphic and textile iconography helps to understand how the image of a woman of the “Soviet East” was reproduced and which ideas about women’s emancipation were promoted. The analysis of Soviet visuals, which were a part of everyday life, explores a multidimensional picture of Soviet history and reveals the links between tradition and modernity, national and supranational, top-down and bottom-up narratives. Finally, textiles and graphics reflect Soviet trends pertaining to gender roles in the 1920–1930s. The paper is based on posters from the collection of the department of the Russian State Library and the Mardjani Foundation. It also relies on the examination of carpets from the Museum of Fine Arts of Turkmenistan, the State Museum of Oriental Art, the Russian Museum of Ethnography, the All-Russian Museum of Decorative and Applied Art and private collections.
Abstract
Racializing locals has been one of the main characteristics of Russian and Soviet imperial modernity. Anbar Otin (1870–1915) was among the thinkers and writers in Turkistan’s Muslim society engaging with such issues. In Risolai Falsafai Siyohon (The Treatise on the Philosophy of the Blacks) she treats siyohon (blacks) as a color employed as a social metaphor and social position used in reference to the ordinary people of Turkestan, their frustrated hopes, and their pain. In the work, Anbar indicates that the word siyohon (qoralar -blackness) has been used to racialize, discriminate against, and denigrate Turkestan’s peoples. According to Anbar, it also carries a positive connotation as in “inner and physical beauty.” In this paper, I analyze the writing of Anbar in relation to her understanding of racialization, inequality, religion, gender, and disability, situating Anbar’s experience within broader discussions of such topics in the Central Asian context.
Abstract
In contemporary Tajikistan, the onus of national identity’s (re-)production has been disproportionately placed on women. Decisions about female bodies, dress, duties, and the limits of women’s roles in the public and private spaces serve as important differentiating markers and mobilization tools for the competing ideological forces. Using the insights from the scholarship on nation-building and gender, this paper explores the official (government’s) narrative on women in Tajikistan. Based on content analysis of various primary data sources, including official documents, government publications, official speeches, and media sources, I argue that contemporary nation-building has become about tangible lifestyles. Thus, nationhood in Tajikistan has acquired a recognizably gendered character. In this state-promoted imagination, women encapsulate the Tajik nation by performing three significant tasks that continuously reproduce and represent the nation: they bear, rear, and wear the Tajik nation-state.