front cover of The Causes of Post-Mobilization Leadership Change and Continuity
The Causes of Post-Mobilization Leadership Change and Continuity
A Comparative Analysis of Post-Color Revolution in Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, and Georgia
Vasili Rukhadze
University of Michigan Press, 2021

Vasili Rukhadze examines the factors that contributed to post-uprising leadership durability in the Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, and Georgia in 2004–12, after these countries underwent their so-called “Color Revolutions.” Using structured, focused comparison and process tracing, he argues that the key independent variable influencing post-mobilization leadership durability is ruling coalition size and cohesion. He demonstrates that if the ruling coalitions are large and fragmented, as in the Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, the coalitions disintegrate, thus facilitating the downfall of the governments. Alternatively, if the ruling coalition is small and cohesive, as in Georgia, the coalition maintains unity, hence helping the government to stay in power.

This study advances the debate on regime changes. By drawing a clear distinction between political leaderships that come to power as a result of popular uprisings and governments that take power through normal democratic processes, military coup, or any other means, the research offers one of the first studies on post-mobilization leadership. Rukhadze helps scholars differentiate between the factors that affect durability of post-uprising leadership from those factors that impact durability of all other political leadership, in turn equipping researchers with new tools to study power politics.

[more]

front cover of The Force of Custom
The Force of Custom
Law and the Ordering of Everyday Life in Kyrgyzstan
Judith Beyer
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016
The Force of Custom presents a finely textured ethnographic study that sheds new light on the legal and moral ordering of everyday life in northwestern Kyrgyzstan. Through her extensive fieldwork and firsthand experience, Judith Beyer reveals how Kyrgyz in Talas province negotiate proper behavior and regulate disputes by invoking custom, known to the locals as salt. While salt is presented as age-old tradition, its invocation is shown to be a highly developed and flexible rhetorical strategy that people adapt in order to meet the challenges of contemporary political, legal, economic, and religious environments. Officially, codified state law should take precedence when it comes to dispute resolution, yet the unwritten laws of salt and the increasing importance of Islamic law provide the standards for ordering everyday life. As Beyer further demonstrates, interpretations of both Islamic and state law are also intrinsically linked to salt.
            By interweaving case studies on kinship, legal negotiations, festive events, mourning rituals, and political and business dealings, Beyer shows how salt is the binding element in rural Kyrgyz social life and how it is used to explain and negotiate moral behavior and to postulate communal identity. In this way, salt provides a time-tested, sustainable source of authentication that defies changes in government and the shifting tides of religious movements.
[more]

front cover of From Belonging to Belief
From Belonging to Belief
Modern Secularisms and the Construction of Religion in Kyrgyzstan
Julie McBrien
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017
From Belonging to Belief presents a nuanced ethnographic study of Islam and secularism in post-Soviet Central Asia, as seen from the small town of Bazaar-Korgon in southern Kyrgyzstan. Opening with the juxtaposition of a statue of Lenin and a mosque in the town square, Julie McBrien proceeds to peel away the multiple layers that have shaped the return of public Islam in the region. She explores belief and nonbelief, varying practices of Islam, discourses of extremism, and the role of the state, to elucidate the everyday experiences of Bazaar-Korgonians. McBrien shows how Islam is explored, lived, and debated in both conventional and novel sites: a Soviet-era cleric who continues to hold great influence; popular television programs; religious instruction at wedding parties; clothing; celebrations; and others. Through ethnographic research, McBrien reveals how moving toward Islam is not a simple step but rather a deliberate and personal journey of experimentation, testing, and knowledge acquisition.  Moreover she argues that religion is not always a matter of belief—sometimes it is essentially about belonging.
            From Belonging to Belief offers an important corrective to studies that focus only on the pious turns among Muslims in Central Asia, and instead shows the complex process of evolving religion in a region that has experienced both Soviet atheism and post-Soviet secularism, each of which has profoundly formed the way Muslims interpret and live Islam.
[more]

front cover of Nationalism in Central Asia
Nationalism in Central Asia
A Biography of the Uzbekistan-Kyrgyzstan Boundary
Nick Megoran
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017
Nick Megoran explores the process of building independent nation-states in post-Soviet Central Asia through the lens of the disputed border territory between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. In his rich "biography" of the boundary, he employs a combination of political, cultural, historical, ethnographic, and geographic frames to shed new light on nation-building process in this volatile and geopolitically significant region.
            Megoran draws on twenty years of extensive research in the borderlands via interviews, observations, participation, and newspaper analysis. He considers the problems of nationalist discourse versus local vernacular, elite struggles versus borderland solidarities, boundary delimitation versus everyday experience, border control versus resistance, and mass violence in 2010, all of which have exacerbated territorial anxieties. Megoran also revisits theories of causation, such as the loss of Soviet control, poorly defined boundaries, natural resource disputes, and historic ethnic clashes, to show that while these all contribute to heightened tensions, political actors and their agendas have clearly driven territorial aspirations and are the overriding source of conflict. As this compelling case study shows, the boundaries of the The Ferghana Valley put in succinct focus larger global and moral questions of what defines a good border.
[more]

front cover of Polygynous Marriages among the Kyrgyz
Polygynous Marriages among the Kyrgyz
Institutional Change and Endurance
Michele E. Commercio
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022

During Soviet rule, the state all but imposed atheism on the primarily Islamic people of Kyrgyzstan and limited the tradition of polygyny—a form of polygamy in which one man has multiple wives. Polygyny did continue under communism, though chiefly under concealment. In the decades since the fall of the Soviet Union, the practice has reemerged. Based on extensive fieldwork, Polygynous Marriages among the Kyrgyz argues that this marriage practice has become socially acceptable and widely dispersed not only because it is rooted in customary law and Islamic practice, but because it can also enable men and women to meet societal expectations and solve practical economic problems that resulted from the fall of the Soviet Union. Michele E. Commercio’s analysis suggests the normalization of polygyny among the Kyrgyz in contemporary Kyrgyzstan is due both to institutional change in the form of altered governmental rules and expectations and to institutional endurance in the form of persistent hegemonic constructions of gender.

[more]

front cover of Postcards from Stanland
Postcards from Stanland
Journeys in Central Asia
David H. Mould
Ohio University Press, 2015

Central Asia has long stood at the crossroads of history. It was the staging ground for the armies of the Mongol Empire, for the nineteenth-century struggle between the Russian and British empires, and for the NATO campaign in Afghanistan. Today, multinationals and nations compete for the oil and gas reserves of the Caspian Sea and for control of the pipelines. Yet “Stanland” is still, to many, a terra incognita, a geographical blank.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, academic and journalist David Mould’s career took him to the region on Fulbright Fellowships and contracts as a media trainer and consultant for UNESCO and USAID, among others. In Postcards from Stanland, he takes readers along with him on his encounters with the people, landscapes, and customs of the diverse countries—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan—he came to love. He talks with teachers, students, politicians, environmental activists, bloggers, cab drivers, merchants, Peace Corps volunteers, and more.

Until now, few books for a nonspecialist readership have been written on the region, and while Mould brings his own considerable expertise to bear on his account—for example, he is one of the few scholars to have conducted research on post-Soviet media in the region—the book is above all a tapestry of place and a valuable contribution to our understanding of the post-Soviet world.

[more]

front cover of Practicing Islam
Practicing Islam
Knowledge, Experience, and Social Navigation in Kyrgyzstan
David W. Montgomery
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016
David W. Montgomery presents a rich ethnographic study on the practice and meaning of Islamic life in Kyrgyzstan. As he shows, becoming and being a Muslim are based on knowledge acquired from the surrounding environment, enabled through the practice of doing. Through these acts, Islam is imbued in both the individual and the community. To Montgomery, religious practice and lived experience combine to create an ideological space that is shaped by events, opportunities, and potentialities that form the context from which knowing emerges. This acquired knowledge further frames social navigation and political negotiation.
            Through his years of on-the-ground research, Montgomery assembles both an anthropology of knowledge and an anthropology of Islam, demonstrating how individuals make sense of and draw meanings from their environments. He reveals subtle individual interpretations of the religion and how people seek to define themselves and their lives as “good” within their communities and under Islam. 
            Based on numerous in-depth interviews, bolstered by extensive survey and data collection, Montgomery offers the most thorough English-language study to date of Islam in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan. His work provides a broad view into the cognitive processes of Central Asian populations that will serve students, researchers, and policymakers alike.
[more]

front cover of Speaking Soviet with an Accent
Speaking Soviet with an Accent
Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan
Ali Igmen
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012
Speaking Soviet with an Accent presents the first English-language study of Soviet culture clubs in Kyrgyzstan. These clubs profoundly influenced the future of Kyrgyz cultural identity and fostered the work of many artists, such as famed novelist Chingiz Aitmatov.

Based on extensive oral history and archival research, Ali Igmen follows the rise of culture clubs beginning in the 1920s, when they were established to inculcate Soviet ideology and create a sedentary lifestyle among the historically nomadic Kyrgyz people. These “Red clubs” are fondly remembered by locals as one of the few places where lively activities and socialization with other members of their ail (village or tribal unit) could be found.

Through lectures, readings, books, plays, concerts, operas, visual arts, and cultural Olympiads, locals were exposed to Soviet notions of modernization. But these programs also encouraged the creation of a newfound “Kyrgyzness” that preserved aspects of local traditions and celebrated the achievements of Kyrgyz citizens in the building of a new state. These ideals proved appealing to many Kyrgyz, who, for centuries, had seen riches and power in the hands of a few tribal chieftains and Russian imperialists.

This book offers new insights into the formation of modern cultural identity in Central Asia. Here, like their imperial predecessors, the Soviets sought to extend their physical borders and political influence. But Igmen also reveals the remarkable agency of the Kyrgyz people, who employed available resources to meld their own heritage with Soviet and Russian ideologies and form artistic expressions that continue to influence Kyrgyzstan today.

[more]

front cover of The State as Investment Market
The State as Investment Market
Kyrgyzstan in Comparative Perspective
Johan Engvall
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016
Based on the case of Kyrgyzstan, while going well beyond it to elaborate a theory of the developing state that comprehends corruption as not merely criminal, but a type of market based on highly rational decisions made by the powerful individuals within, or connected to, the state.
[more]

front cover of Under Solomon's Throne
Under Solomon's Throne
Uzbek Visions of Renewal in Osh
Morgan Y. Liu
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012

Winner of the 2014 Central Eurasian Studies Society Book Award in the Social Sciences.

Under Solomon’s Throne provides a rare ground-level analysis of post-Soviet Central Asia’s social and political paradoxes by focusing on an urban ethnic community: the Uzbeks in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, who have maintained visions of societal renewal throughout economic upheaval, political discrimination, and massive violence.

Morgan Liu illuminates many of the challenges facing Central Asia today by unpacking the predicament of Osh, a city whose experience captures key political and cultural issues of the region as a whole. Situated on the border of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan—newly independent republics that have followed increasingly divergent paths to reform their states and economies—the city is subject to a Kyrgyz government, but the majority of its population are ethnic Uzbeks. Conflict between the two groups led to riots in 1990, and again in 2010, when thousands, mostly ethnic Uzbeks, were killed and nearly half a million more fled across the border into Uzbekistan. While these tragic outbreaks of violence highlight communal tensions amid long-term uncertainty, a close examination of community life in the two decades between reveals the way Osh Uzbeks have created a sense of stability and belonging for themselves while occupying a postcolonial no-man’s-land, tied to two nation-states but not fully accepted by either one.

The first ethnographic monograph based on extensive local-language fieldwork in a Central Asian city, this study examines the culturally specific ways that Osh Uzbeks are making sense of their post-Soviet dilemmas. These practices reveal deep connections with Soviet and Islamic sensibilities and with everyday acts of dwelling in urban neighborhoods. Osh Uzbeks engage the spaces of their city to shape their orientations relative to the wider world, postsocialist transformations, Islamic piety, moral personhood, and effective leadership. Living in the shadow of Solomon’s Throne, the city’s central mountain, they envision and attempt to build a just social order.

[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter