Objectives
Using the example of Uzbekistan, this article examines the challenges and opportunities for conducting field research in a context of tightened scientific closure in those countries with highly autocratic regimes.
Methods
Drawing on the author's own field experience conducting elite interviews in Uzbekistan in 2002 and 2003 (as well as many subsequent visits), it examines three strategies of field research that emerged in this context of tightening scientific closure.
Results
The article outlines several essential features of authoritarianism in Uzbekistan and tracks the regime's shift toward scientific closure over three distinct phases, tracing out the implications of this shift for those carrying out systematic field research.
Conclusions
Uzbekistan illustrates the challenges and opportunities facing researchers under conditions of scientific closure in the 20–30 other countries ruled by hard authoritarian regimes.
Why, when faced with similar conditions of weakening central control, do some institutions of state security fragment into autonomous agents of organized violence whereas others cohere around coercive rent seeking without challenging the central government? Focusing on Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, this article explains these divergent state security outcomes as a consequence of resource concentrations and patronage pressures that influence the political elites who leverage local offices of state security. The article finds that privatizing violence within state apparatuses of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan took very different forms in the 1990s.
This article argues that increased anti-immigrant mobilization (the targeting of ethnic migrants to limit their rights and/or promote their resettlement) in Russia's regions is a consequence of local social movements adopting an anti-immigrant frame as part of their efforts to promote recruitment, acquire resources, and advance their movement's particular cause. Using the cases of Sverdlovsk's Gorod Bez Narkotikov (City Without Drugs) and Krasnodar's Cossack groups, it develops the argument and demonstrates specific ways in which an antiimmigrant frame is taken up by local movements. As a complement to existing studies of anti-immigrant sentiment or far right ideology, these cases highlight the practical politics of mobilizing support for anti-immigration causes in contemporary Russia.
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