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SoSe 22: The political economy of (un)sustainable development in Central Asia

Sebastian Schiek

Information for students

Students are strongly advised to also take the accompanying tutorial by Alireza Rahimi. Places in the exercise will be allocated after registration for the lecture.

Comments

The course is jointly conducted by political economist Kuat Akizhanov (Nur-Sultan) and political scientist Sebastian Schiek (Berlin) and takes place in English partly online, partly offline. The course aims to build an understanding of evolution and transformations that has taken place in the five post-Soviet Central Asian countries, namely, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. This course applies the interdisciplinary approach to analyse the socio-economic and political processes in the region. The course is designed to provide students with a solid introduction to key actors in the Central Asian states and approaches that will serve as the analytical basis and a tool for policymaking. It will explore some of the historical experience of regional development, as well as contemporary debates. This more nuanced approach will help students to see the broader picture of the global political economy of sustainable development from the vantage point of post-Soviet societies and critical political economy perspective. Following the concept of sustainable development, the basic hypothesis of the course is that the economy and politics have not developed sustainably in the years since independence: Wealth is based on (resource) extraction and unequally distributed between elite and the general population and between urban and rural areas. Labour is often precarious. Small and medium businesses struggle with elite networks that dominate large parts of the economy. During the course, we apply diverse concepts from political economy and related theories to explain Central Asia’s unsustainable development. While doing so, we attempt to minimize the risk of exoticising, essentialising and pathologising the region, which is dominant in parts of the literature on Central Asia (Sanghera and Satybaldieva, 2021). We will take into account both national and international approaches and factors that have shaped post-Soviet dynamics. Special attention is given to economic systems, the influence of ideologies and ideas, such as neoliberalism, and the role of political power and national elites. For instance, in post-Soviet capitalism, the concept of neoliberalism has shifted the balance of power towards the political elites in these countries. Topics covered include the transition from nomadic society to socialism, the transition to capitalism and neoliberalism in the 1990s; Central Asia’s embeddedness in the global (under)development project; natural resource dependency and rentier capitalism; political economy and gender; financialization, market reforms, and protest; agricultural reform, political power, and the environment; autocracy and participation; rural development and societal resilience; the politics of green transformations and decarbonization. close

14 Class schedule

Regular appointments

Wed, 12:00 - 14:00 14 Class schedule

Wed, 2022-04-20 12:00 - 14:00

Lecturers:
Dr. Sebastian Schiek