City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 6-2016 Social Ties and State Formation in Post-Soviet Central Asia David Siegel Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1337 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] SOCIAL TIES AND STATE FORMATION IN POST-SOVIET CENTRAL ASIA by DAVID SIEGEL A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Political Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2016 © 2016 DAVID SIEGEL ii All Rights Reserved Social Ties and State Formation in Post-Soviet Central Asia by David Siegel This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Political Science to satisfy the dissertation Requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Susan L. Woodward_____________________________________ ___________ Date Chair of Examining Committee Alyson Cole Date Executive Officer Susan L. Woodward Vincent Boudreau Julie A. George Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii Abstract SOCIAL TIES AND STATE FORMATION IN POST-SOVIET CENTRAL ASIA by DAVID SIEGEL Adviser: Professor Susan L. Woodward This dissertation examines state formation in newly or recently independent states. Why are state authorities able to exert control over provincial areas in some cases but not others? How do the national authorities of newly independent states build centralized bureaucracies, control state cadre, and ensure deference among their regional subordinates? Why do they sometimes fail? I answer these questions by focusing on the social ties of state officials in the periphery. Specifically, I argue that where the state’s regional officials are socially embedded in local communities, the process of administrative centralization will proceed unevenly and incompletely. It is only by dislocating state personnel from local social structures that they become, as Weber described them, “servants of the state.” While framed within theories from the literature on state formation, this study demonstrates how the contemporary historical context reshapes processes of state development. International policy prioritizes decentralization and regional representation over administrative centralization and can have the unintended effect of creating social bases of support for the state’s regional cadre, bolstering their independence, and undermining the state’s administrative hierarchy. This dissertation employs a comparative analysis of two post-Soviet Central Asian states—Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan—during their first two decades of independence, from 1991 iv to 2013. These two states share a common Soviet institutional legacy and adopted similar formal administrative structures after independence; they are both non-democratic unitary states where the highest-level provincial officials formally represent the central government in the regions, not the populations living there. Yet, the politics of bureaucratic centralization and cadre control have differed dramatically in each state. Central authorities in Kazakhstan have obtained firm control over their regional cadre and mete out swift punishment for insubordination. By contrast, central authorities in Kyrgyzstan have twice been overthrown by revolutions led by regional elite. Moreover, they regularly face challenges from local cadre and ordinary people when they seek to fire, relocate, or replace state officials in the periphery, in accordance with their formal legal authority. In short, regional officials in Kazakhstan who challenge national authorities end up in jail or in exile while their counterparts in Kyrgyzstan often end up in power. The data for this study were collected during 15 months of fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. During this time I conducted ethnographic research at the village level in each state. This included interviews with local officials and ordinary villagers as well as observational research about the processes of local government. I also interviewed former and current state officials in the capital city of each state, representatives of international organizations, local scholars, and journalists. Finally, using local media sources, I created an original database of provincial governors’ biographies and career trajectories. Using these data, I analyze levels of social embeddedness for regional officials and trace local, provincial, and national outcomes in state formation. I find that Kyrgyzstan, which was dependent on international donors for aid, adopted many of the reforms that donors favored, including a system of local self-government that kept village-level officials socially embedded in local communities, forging close bonds between v those officials and the population. The pattern of state-society relations that resulted from these close bonds undermined the central government’s ability to appoint and remove its own cadre at the provincial level, leaving them only loosely integrated into the state’s administrative bureaucracy. The insubordination of regional cadre becomes observable not only in Kyrgyzstan’s two national-level revolutions, but in regular center-periphery political struggle over the appointment of regional officials. With surprising regularity, local officials, backed by supporters in their native villages and districts, have sacked provincial state offices, or resisted central authorities’ orders for relocation to a different province. Kazakhstan, which was wealthier at independence, was virtually immune to international pressure to decentralize administration. There, central authorities maintained strict appointment powers down to the village-level and used them to rotate cadre across regions, further disembedding state officials from local social contexts and facilitating the centralization of bureaucratic administration. The upshot is that regional cadre have few social bases of support in the regions and are more dependent on their bosses in the capital city. This has facilitated bureaucratic centralization; that is, it has enabled central authorities to construct a robust hierarchy of state administration, given them more control over regional cadre and, therefore, better reach into the regions themselves. vi Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction: Social Ties and State Formation: p. 1 Chapter 2: Centralization, Cadre Rotation, and the Politics of Regional Appointment: p. 43 Chapter 3: Institutions of Local Government: p. 89 Chapter 4: Patterns of Local Social Ties: p. 130 Chapter 5: Trust Relationships and State-Society Relations: p. 194 Chapter 6: Contentious Episodes of Regional Appointment and Representation: p. 229 Chapter 7: Conclusion: p. 283 Annex: p. 312 Bibliographic References: p. 317 vii List of Tables and Figures Table 2.1: Appointment of Governors to All Provinces (oblasts), 1991-2013: p. 80 Figure 3.1: Territorial Administrative Levels in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan: p. 90 Table 3. 1. Institutions of Local Government in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan (village-level institutions): p. 95 Table 3.2. Models of Center-Local Governmental Relationships: p. 114 Table 4.1. Percentage of Residents Who Recognize the Name of Village/City Local Officials by Province: p. 136 Annex: Diagrams and captions: Local officials’ visual representations of center-local relations: p. 312 viii Chapter 1: Introduction: Social Ties and State Formation I. The Puzzle In 2002, the governor of Kazakhstan’s Pavlodar province, Galymzhan Zhakiyanov, was arrested on charges of abusing power. His real crime, however, was to publicly criticize President Nazarbayev’s constitutional authority to appoint and remove provincial governors. Zhakiyanov demanded that governors be chosen by direct election instead. In this and other instances the president faced few problems overcoming and eliminating insubordinate opponents. Zhakiyanov served four years in jail and was released on the condition of permanent exile. Even more than Zhakiyanov in Kazakhstan, the tenure of Melis Myrzakmatov in Kyrgyzstan—the mayor of Osh city from 2009 to late 2013—was marked by highly public forms of insubordination. Myrzakmatov not only flouted official government policies, he openly questioned the legitimacy of the central government itself. Authorities in Bishkek, however, did not have an easy time getting rid of him, even though they had the legal authority to do so. When the president attempted to fire Myrzakmatov in 2010, thousands of his supporters protested in the streets of Osh until the government relented, leaving him in office to serve another three years. The contrasting fates of Zhakiyanov and Myrzakmatov reflect a broader divergence of state formation outcomes in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. These are center-periphery conflicts that reflect levels of centralized administration in each state, or the degree to which regional officials are actually integrated into the state’s administrative hierarchy and subordinate to 1 national authorities in the capital city.1 And, since the centralization of bureaucratic administration is one of the key processes of state formation, these outcomes pose a number of broader questions about state development in post-Soviet Central Asia, and in newly independent states