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Book Political Regimes and Neopatrimonialism in Central Asia

Download or read book Political Regimes and Neopatrimonialism in Central Asia written by Ferran Izquierdo-Brichs and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is aimed both at researchers and advanced students of Central Asia, the space of the former USSR, and the foreign policy of Russia and China. The authors adopt a sociological approach in understanding how power structures emerged in the wake of the Soviet collapse. The independencies in Central Asia did not happen as a consequence of a nationalist struggle, but because the USSR imploded. Thus, instead of the elites being replaced, the same Soviet elites who had competed for power in the previous system continued to do so in the new one, which they had to build, adapting themselves and the system to their needs. Additionally, unlike in the immense majority of the independent states that emerged from decolonization, the social movements and capacity to mobilize the people were very weak in the new Central Asian states. For this reason, the configuration of the new systems was the product of a competition for power between a very small number of elites who did not have to answer to the people and their demands. Thus, the new power regimes acquired a strong neopatrimonial component. Analyzing the structure of societies, economies and polities of post-socialist states, this book will be of great interest to scholars of Central Asia, to sociologists, and to scholars of China's rise.

Book Political Regimes and Neopatrimonialism in Central Asia

Download or read book Political Regimes and Neopatrimonialism in Central Asia written by Ferran Izquierdo-Brichs and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book provides a thorough and well needed analysis of the dynamics of power in Central Asian republics. By focusing on the role played by neopatrimonialism, these contributions are able to shed light on the fundamental features of governance in the "Stans": clientelism, corruption, crony capitalism, concentration of power in the hands of a closed circle of ruling elites and the absence of democracy. A must read for any scholars studying this part of the world." - Jean-François Caron, Associate professor in Political Science and International Relations at Nazarbayev University This book adopts a sociological approach in understanding how power structures emerged in Central Asia since the Soviet collapse. The independencies in Central Asia did not happen as a consequence of a nationalist struggle, but because the USSR imploded. Thus, instead of the elites being replaced, the same Soviet elites who had competed for power in the previous system continued to do so in the new one, which they had to build, adapting themselves and the system to their needs. Additionally, the social movements and capacity to mobilize the people were very weak in the new Central Asian states. For this reason, the configuration of the new systems was the product of a competition for power between a very small number of elites who did not have to answer to the people and their demands. Thus, the new power regimes acquired a strong neopatrimonial component. Analyzing the structure of societies, economies and polities of post-socialist states, this book will be of great interest to scholars of Central Asia, to sociologists, and to scholars of China's rise. Ferran Izquierdo-Brichs is Professor on International Relations at Autonomous University of Barcelona. His research is focused on the Sociology of power and the Arab and Muslim world. Francesc Serra-Massansalvador is lecturer on International Relations at Autonomous University of Barcelona. His research focuses on Russia's foreign policy and its relations with the EU, national minorities, ethnic conflicts and human rights in the post-Soviet space.

Book Power and Change in Central Asia

Download or read book Power and Change in Central Asia written by Sally Cummings and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-01-14 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers the first systematic comparison of political change, leadership style and stability in Central Asia. The contributors, all leading international specialists on the region, offer focused case-studies of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, comparing how the regimes have further consolidated their power and resisted change.

Book Neopatrimonialism in Africa and Beyond

Download or read book Neopatrimonialism in Africa and Beyond written by Daniel C. Bach and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Neopatrimonialism, a system whereby rulers use state resources for personal benefit and to secure the loyalty of clients in the general population, is central to any teaching or conceptualisation of contemporary African politics. This book is a theoretical and comparative study of neopatrimonialism in Africa and across world regions. Although such practices are widespread in other parts of the world, the African neopatrimonial state has also become a global prototype of the anti-developmental state. This volume calls for a reappraisal of the genesis and interpretations of the concepts of patrimonialism and neopatrimonialism. Expert contributors consider recent debates in Africa through the study of democracy, clientelism, the ‘big man’ syndrome (Kenya), the rise of ‘godfatherism’ (Nigeria), ‘warlordism’ (Liberia) and the neopatrimonial state on a day to day basis (Niger). They discuss patrimonialism and neopatrimonialism from Latin America to Europe, Central Asia and Asia-Pacific, to weave a comparative analysis of the interplay between public policies and private interest. Neopatrimonialism in Africa and Beyond is an important and timely volume that will be of interest to students and scholars of international politics, African studies, sociology and international development.

Book Regime Transition in Central Asia

Download or read book Regime Transition in Central Asia written by Dagikhudo Dagiev and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-30 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presenting a study of regime transition, political transformation, and the challenges that faced the post-Communist republics of Central Asia on independence, this book focuses on the process of transition in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and the obstacles that these newly-independent states are facing in the post-Communist period. The book analyses how in the early stages of their independence, the governments of Central Asia declared that they would build democratic states, but that in practice, they demonstrated that they are more inclined towards authoritarianism. With the declaration of independence, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, like many other former Soviet national republics, were faced with the issues of nationalism, ethnicity, identity and territorial delimitation. This book looks at how the discourse of patrimonial nationalism in post-Communist Tajikistan and Uzbekistan has been the elites’ strategy to address all these issues: to maintain the stateness of their respective countries; to preserve the unity of their nation; to fill the ideological void of post-Communism; to prevent the rise of Islam; and to legitimize their authoritarian practice. Arguing against the claim that the Central Asian states have undergone divergent paths of transition, the book discusses how they are in fact all authoritarian, although exhibiting different degrees of authoritarianism. This book provides a useful contribution to studies on Central Asian Politics and International Relations.

Book Party System Formation in Kazakhstan

Download or read book Party System Formation in Kazakhstan written by Rico Isaacs and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-03-21 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Central Asian states have developed liberal-constitutional formal institutions. However, at the same time, political phenomena in Central Asia are shaped by informal political behaviour and relations. This relationship is now a critical issue affecting democratization and regime consolidation processes in former Soviet Central Asia, and this book provides an account of the interactive and dynamic relationship between informal and formal politics through the case of party-system formation in Kazakhstan. Based on extensive interviews with political actors and a wide range of historical and contemporary documentary sources, the book utilises and develops neopatrimonialism as an analytical concept for studying post-Soviet authoritarian consolidation and failed democratisation. It illustrates how personalism of political office, patronage and patron-client networks and factional elite conflict have influenced and shaped the institutional constraints affecting party development, the type of emerging parties and parties’ relationship with society. The case of Kazakhstan, however, also demonstrates how in the former Soviet space political parties emerge as central to the legitimization of informal political behavior, the structuring of factional competition and the consolidation of authoritarianism. The book represents an important contribution to the study of Central Asian Politics.

Book Politics of Regionalism in Central Asia

Download or read book Politics of Regionalism in Central Asia written by JeongWon BOURDAIS PARK and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-08-11 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses how to mitigate regional tensions and enhance cooperative opportunities through well-designed regional institutions and organizations among countries in geographical proximity. We use the case of Central Asia (i.e., Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) to employ our conceptual framework of ‘externally guided regionalism.’ The following questions guide the study: How and by what forces has Central Asian regionalism evolved, and what are the main characteristics and political implications of the continuously evolving regional institutions? We discuss not only the extra-regional influential actors (i.e., Russia, the United States, the European Union, and China), but also intra-regional initiatives, strategies, and struggles in securing stability and sovereignty. Extra-regional actors’ growing competition over molding their own kind of multilateralism involving this region has contributed to the current direction of Central Asia’s regionalization. Concurrently, Central Asia’s political conditions and constraints interactively contribute to ever-increasing institutional sprawl.

Book Personalism and Personalist Regimes

Download or read book Personalism and Personalist Regimes written by and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-04-04 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Personalist leaders, such as Russia's Vladimir Putin, Belarus's Alexander Lukashenko or Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro, are increasingly prominent players in the international landscape; their motivations and policies, however, are poorly understood. The regimes they lead are difficult to examine, mostly because of their most defining feature-an inordinate concentration of power in the hands of one single individual. Yet, personalist leaders do not rule alone, even if they do not always govern through institutional channels. How do personalist regimes really work? How do their rulers acquire and maintain personal control? How does contemporary personal rule differ from how it was practised during the Cold War? These are the key questions addressed in Personalism and Personalist Regimes, which offers a systematic examination of the logic of personalism, or personalist rule, tackling comprehensively the study of personalist leaders and personalist regimes. The book is underpinned by a theoretical framework that combines historical and comparative analyses, brought forward through a series of detailed country studies authored by a distinguished group of comparativists and area studies experts. The book also revisits, and builds upon, Sultanistic Regimes, the seminal study by H.E. Chehabi and Juan Linz. In contrast to Sultanistic Regimes that studied sultanism-an extreme form of personalism-Personalism and Personalist Regimes examines personal rule on its full continuum, from Turkey under Erdo?an or Venezuela under Maduro, to Turkmenistan under Berdimuhamedov or Libya under Gaddafi. Because personalism, or personal rule, can be present across all regimes, the book also includes several studies of personalism and institutions in party dictatorships, China or Cuba amongst others.

Book Research Handbook on Law and Political Systems

Download or read book Research Handbook on Law and Political Systems written by Robert M. Howard and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2023-11-03 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Research Handbook is a multi-faceted, comparative analysis of how law and political systems interact around the world. Chapters include analyses of judicial deference, congressional support, democratic representation, politicization of courts, public support, and judicialization across multiple jurisdictions in the United States and abroad. Chapters also investigate transnational courts and the linkages between international and domestic law and politics.

Book Stubborn Structures

    Book Details:
  • Author : Bálint Magyar
  • Publisher : Central European University Press
  • Release : 2019-04-10
  • ISBN : 9633862159
  • Pages : 713 pages

Download or read book Stubborn Structures written by Bálint Magyar and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-10 with total page 713 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The editor of this book has brought together contributions designed to capture the essence of post-communist politics in East-Central Europe and Eurasia. Rather than on the surface structures of nominal democracies, the nineteen essays focus on the informal, often intentionally hidden, disguised and illicit understandings and arrangements that penetrate formal institutions. These phenomena often escape even the best-trained outside observers, familiar with the concepts of established democracies. Contributors to this book share the view that understanding post-communist politics is best served by a framework that builds from the ground up, proceeding from a fundamental social context. The book aims at facilitating a lexical convergence; in the absence of a robust vocabulary for describing and discussing these often highly complex informal phenomena, the authors wish to advance a new terminology of post-communist regimes. Instead of a finite dictionary, a kind of conceptual cornucopia is offered. The resulting variety reflects a larger harmony of purpose that can significantly expand the understanding the “real politics” of post-communist regimes. Countries analyzed from a variety of aspects, comparatively or as single case studies, include Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Hungary, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russia, and Ukraine.

Book The European Handbook of Central Asian Studies

Download or read book The European Handbook of Central Asian Studies written by Jeroen Fauve, Adrien De Cordier, B. J. Van Den Bosch and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 1064 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook is the first collection of comprehensive teaching materials for teachers and students of Central Asian Studies (CAS) with a strong pedagogic dimension. It presents 22 chapters, clustered around five themes, with contributions from more than 19 scholars, all leading experts in the field of CAS and Eurasian Studies. This collection is not only a reference work for scholars branching out to different disciplines of CAS but also for scholars from other disciplines broadening their scope to CAS. It addresses post-colonial frameworks and also untangles topics from their ‘Soviet’ reference frame. It aims to de-exoticize the region and draws parallels to European or to historically European-occupied territories. In each chapter, the handbook provides a concise but nuanced overview of the topics covered, in which way these have been approached by the mainstream literature, and points out pitfalls, myths, and new insights, providing background knowledge about Central Asia to readers and intertwine this with an advanced level of insight to leave the readers equipped with a strong foundation to approach more specialized sources either in classroom settings or by self-study. In addition, the book offers a comprehensive glossary, list of used abbreviations, overview of intended learning outcomes, and a smart index (distinguishing between names, locations, concepts, and events). A list of recorded lectures to be found on YouTube will accompany the handbook either as instruction materials for teachers or visual aids for students. Since the authors themselves recorded the lectures related to their own chapters, this provides the opportunity to engage in a more personalized way with the authors. This project is being developed in the framework of the EISCAS project (www.eiscas.eu), co-funded by the Erasmus + Program of the European Union.

Book Kazakhstan  Snow Leopard at the Crossroads

Download or read book Kazakhstan Snow Leopard at the Crossroads written by Christopher A. Hartwell and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-05-10 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the experience of Kazakhstan’s transition over the past 30 years, explaining the political and economic performance of the country since the collapse of the USSR, through the country’s institutions, policy choices, and external environment. In an exploration of more than 1,000 years of institutional development, the chapters analyse and assess the development of political arrangements and governance, and economic institutions, from pre-Russian colonization through to the Soviet experiment, and then take a magnifying glass to developments in a post-Soviet, independent Kazakhstan. Using a broad range of sources and data across disciplines, this book is the first to explicitly survey Kazakhstan’s transition as a function of its history, its people, and its institutions. Breaking new ground in institutional economics, it provides readers with a comprehensive examination of the history and development of Kazakhstan, and points to where it may be heading in the 21st century. The subject matter is accessible to a broad academic audience: to scholars in political science, economics, and the history of Central Asia and Russia, as well as to those with an interest in general transition economics.

Book Civil Society and Politics in Central Asia

Download or read book Civil Society and Politics in Central Asia written by Charles E. Ziegler and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2015-02-27 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The five Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan constitute an area of increasing importance in global politics. The region currently serves as the main route for transporting American and NATO supplies and personnel into Afghanistan. Its Turkic Muslim peoples share ethnic and religious roots with China's Uighurs in neighboring Xinjiang, where some Uighurs have connections to the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, fueling Beijing's already acute fears of terrorism and separatism. Perhaps most importantly, the Caspian basin holds immense reserves of oil and natural gas. Countries rich in hydrocarbons—like Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan—can benefit greatly from this wealth, but often they must rely on foreign companies (usually backed by foreign governments) to develop these resources. Revolts in Kyrgyzstan (in 2005 and 2010) and Uzbekistan (in 2005); Tajikistan's civil war (in the 1990s); and continued terrorist incidents (2010–2011), strikes, and suicide bombings in Kazakhstan (in 2011) have contributed to concerns about stability in the region. In Civil Society and Politics in Central Asia, a prominent group of scholars assesses both the area's manifold problems and its emerging potential, examining the often uneasy relationship between its states and the societies they govern. A meticulously in-depth study, the volume demonstrates the fascinating cultural complexity and diversity of Central Asia. Small, landlocked, and surrounded by larger powers, Central Asian nations have become adept at playing their neighbors against each other in order to maximize their own abilities to maneuver. The essays in this book look beyond the surface of Central Asian politics to discover the forces that are working for political change and continuity in this critical region of the world.

Book Power and Change in Central Asia

Download or read book Power and Change in Central Asia written by Sally Cummings and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-01-14 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers the first systematic comparison of political change, leadership style and stability in Central Asia. The contributors, all leading international specialists on the region, offer focused case-studies of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, comparing how the regimes have further consolidated their power and resisted change.

Book Central Asia Today

    Book Details:
  • Author : Sunatullo Jonboboev
  • Publisher : Cuvillier Verlag
  • Release : 2014-06-16
  • ISBN : 3736947321
  • Pages : 448 pages

Download or read book Central Asia Today written by Sunatullo Jonboboev and published by Cuvillier Verlag. This book was released on 2014-06-16 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of descriptions and analyses from scholars from Central Asia, Xinjiang, Kashmir, and Siberia gives first a general overview about the geopolitics, economics, and politics of the Central Asian countries (Kazakhstan, Kyrgizstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan) plus a details description of their foreign policy towards their neighborhood, the region, and the further abroad (Russia, India, China). This is complemented by studies on the relations between Central Asia on the one side and China, India, and Russia on the other hand. Secondly, the history, problems, and pers-pectives of the Central Asian regionalization and trans-regional (SCO, OSCE) process is discussed and evaluated. Third, problems such as Islamism in Central Asia are studied. The book is not only a coherent handbook on Central Asia but presents the views of the academic generation of the newly independent Central Asian countries. It gives a comprehensive overview about foreign policies and Central Asian relations with the big neighbors China, Russia, and India as well as a differentiated discussion on the regionalization process.

Book Theorizing Central Asian Politics

Download or read book Theorizing Central Asian Politics written by Rico Isaacs and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-10-26 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together a series of innovative contributions which provide an eclectic view of how theorizing politics plays out in Central Asia. How are the concepts of governance, legitimacy, ideology, power, order, and the state framed in the region? How can we use the experiences of the Central Asian states to renovate political theorizing? In addressing these questions, the volume relies on the contributions of many young and local researchers, whose chapters are primed to address three key themes: exploring models of governance, revealing ideological justifications, and reframing state and order. Utilizing a range of single and comparative case studies from across the Central Asian space, this illuminating and original volume opens up a new space for political theorists, regional specialists and students of politics to begin reconsidering how we approach the theorization of regions of the world assumed to be on the periphery.