Clans, Pacts, and Politics in Central Asia

Central Asia is suddenly on the world map. Indeed, September 11 and the U.S. war against the Taliban and the al-Qaeda terror network in Afghanistan have drawn Central Asia from the periphery to near the center of that map. Policy makers forging strategies for Afghanistan have begun to realize that the entire vast region is plagued by increasingly weak states and regimes that are losing popular legitimacy. Thus a successful policy will have to take into account not only Afghanistan itself but also nearby countries that face the same challenge of building coherent and democratic states despite declining economies and fragmented, clanbased societies. Viewed in this larger strategic context, the problem of Central Asia is sobering indeed. The lapse of a decade since the breakup of the USSR finds the former Soviet Central Asian republics not more but actually less stable, politically consolidated, prosperous, and free than they were in 1991. Some or all could follow the disastrous path taken by Afghanistan in the 1990s. Any effort to avert this frightening prospect must begin by asking why it is such a plausible scenario in the first place. While much research has been done on the causes that drive transitions to democracy, we have a far shakier grasp of how transitions to authoritarianism or civil war can come about, as in fact they have in all too many places over the last ten years or so. Nor do we understand the types of authoritarianism that we now see emerging in what was once the Soviet world. Yet as Afghanistan reminds us, we need to understand the nature and dynamics of these nondemocratic regimes. Kathleen Collins is assistant professor of government and international studies at the University of Notre Dame and a faculty fellow of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. She is currently working on a book, based on her 1999 Stanford University doctoral dissertation “Clans, Pacts, and Politics: Understanding Regime Transition in Central Asia.”