Between “imagined” and “real” nation-building: identities and nationhood in post-Soviet Central Asia

Abstract

Much of the existing literature on nation-building in Central Asia offers a statist topdown approach which focuses on how the nation and nationhood is "imagined" by political elites. In this special issue the contributors provide an analysis which seeks to explore the process of nation-building in Central Asia by addressing the other side of the state-society relationship. The case studies in this collection examine the "grey zone" between "imagined" and "real" differences between state-led policies and discourses related to nationhood and identity and how they are received by different audiences at different levels (regional, national and international). The authors bring to the fore the contested nature of nation-building in Central Asia as well as focusing on new or less conventional analytical tools for the study of nation-building such as cinema, construction projects and elections. This article provides the introduction to the special issue and lays out the contribution the articles make to the existing literature on nation-building in Central Asia. It also sets out the rationale and aims of the collection.

Civil Society as a Phenomenon of Post-Soviet Political Life: A Threat or a Guarantor of National Security

“…); periodically arising foreign policy actions that distract the population from acute pressing social problems are an additional means of maintaining stability (Macedo et al 2005;Bartels 2016;Achen and Bartels 2016). So, for Azerbaijan and Armenia, the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh became the epicenter of public attention and the subject of political manipulations, and for Moldova, it is Transnistria, the topic of the "Chinese threat" for Kazakhstan, and the danger of the promotion of Islamic radicalism for Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan (Isaacs and Polese 2015;Senggirbay 2019). Despite the support of the US and NATO forces, the Afghan army is still not able to cope with the religious fundamentalist formations.…”

Socio-Cultural Adaptation of Repatriates of East Kazakhstan and Migration Attitudes of the Kazakhs of Mongolia

“…Domestic and foreign authors are unanimous in one thing that the migratory moods of ethnic Kazakhs living outside the Motherland are intensified as the social conditions for their reception on the territory of Kazakhstan improve (Abildina, 2017;Isaacs and Polese, 2015;Nurmakov, 2005).…”

“…The author focuses on the discourse of Kazakhstan's leaders on the repatriation of their compatriots, as well as the legal and political context created to achieve their smooth absorption in the national society (Bonnenfant, 2012). Isaacs and Polese (2015) similarly consider the alternative discursive Kazakh constructions of the 'Kazakh Motherland' in Mongolia and Kazakhstan, their idealisation as ancestral rootedness, and mobility as the basis of the sense of 'belonging' to the Land (Isaacs and Polese, 2015).…”

Dirty Water, Muddied Politics: Hybridisation of Local and National Opposition to Kumtor Mine, Kyrgyzstan

“…Following their delimitation by Soviet "nation-makers" in the 1920s [29,30], the Central Asian nations underwent a reluctant "catapult to independence" initiated by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 [31,32]. As Central Asian political elites focused on constructing a "common-sense of belonging" in these artificial and multi-ethnic nations, academic scholarship on the region began to concentrate on their strategies of state and nation building [30,[33][34][35][36].…”