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Includes all relevant information on national elections and referendums held in Uzbekistan since 1990. Part I gives a comprehensive overview of Uzbekistan's political history, outlines the evolution of electoral provisions, and presents the current electoral legislation in a standardized manner (suffrage, elected institutions, nomination of candidates, electoral system, organizational context of elections). Part II includes exhaustive electoral statistics in systematic tables (numbers of registered voters, votes cast, the votes for candidates and/or parties in parliamentary and presidential elections and referendums at both the national and regional level, the electoral participation of political parties, the distribution of parliamentary seats, etc.).

New and complex problems in inter-ethnic and international relations emerged following the independence of Central Asian republics. These include serious divergences among Central Asian states in their understanding of issues; contradictions between the process of nation-building and traditional Central Asian management of multi-ethnicity, ethnocultural diversity, and multiculturalism; and deepening of ethnocultural differences. This is especially true of urban civilization in Uzbekistan, to which both Tajiks and Uzbeks lay claim. This paper examines each of these problems in detail.

Whereas the previous chapter examined only classical sources, this chapter turns exclusively to the dialects. Forty-nine features, 25 morphological, and 24 phonological in two Arabic dialect areas are examined in detail, Mesopotamian Arabic and the western Sudanic (Chad, northern Cameroon, NE Nigeria). The data are compared using the statistical measure of standard deviation (SD). Two key points emerge. First, the Mesopotamian area is considerably more diverse (with a higher SD) than is the western Sudanic, a point explained in terms of longer settlement as well as other factors. Secondly, adding a further comparison with Uzbekistan Arabic — usually considered to be closely related to the Mesopotamian dialects — reveals that it is as close to western Sudanic in the feature comparison as it is to Mesopotamian. The significant similarities between Uzbekistan and western Sudanic are explained in terms of common retention, pointing to a pre-diasporic core dating to the 7th century.

Anthony Shay describes and analyzes the attempted erasure of many kinds of traditional male dance styles in Iran, Egypt, and Uzbekistan. Realizing that Western colonial powers reacted negatively to what they perceived as effeminate and indecent in male dancing, many postcolonial political and cultural leaders sought to rid their traditional dance forms of any overt sexuality or, particularly, any activity that hinted at homosexuality in the dance world. In order to achieve parity with the former colonial powers, who were both hated and valorized, choreographers from state‐supported dance companies in these three areas created new, hypermasculine movement vocabularies that replaced much of what had been traditional. Shay details shifts in perception of older dancers, as well as the movement mechanisms and choreographic strategies employed by the state‐supported choreographers to erase the past.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Central Asia, after its five countries—Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan—became independent with the dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991. During the 1990s, the Central Asian countries focused on nation-building and transition to market-based economies, the nature of which varied from country to country. Indeed, the five governments adopted diverse economic strategies, from the most reformist, Kyrgyzstan, to the least reformist, Turkmenistan's personalized autocracy. Given the shared geography, history, and cultural background of the five countries, observers envisioned a natural experiment to test the efficacy of differing approaches to the transition from central planning and of the variety of market-based economic systems. However, completion of the essentials of transition by the turn of the century coincided with the start of a super-cycle in world prices for resources—most importantly oil—that dominated economic performance in the early twenty-first century.

This chapter explores the national economy and transition strategies of Uzbekistan. At independence Uzbekistan inherited important assets, including the best civil aircraft fleet, the military command, and the best administrative capacity in Central Asia. Indeed, during the 1990s, Uzbekistan was the most successful of all Soviet successor states in terms of limiting the fall in output, and in the early 2000s it became the first former Soviet republic to regain its pre-independence level of GDP. Uzbekistan was fortunate that world cotton prices increased substantially after independence, providing the resources to maintain public services, and when cotton prices fell in 1996 the government overreacted by introducing foreign exchange controls. A new phase of Uzbekistan's economic development dates from the termination of forex controls at the end of 2003.

This chapter examines the impact of natural resources on transition reform in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan using the rapid reform model. Natural resource endowment was incorporated into the model to improve its explanatory power. It is shown that both countries delayed reform, and had higher levels of rent-seeking behaviour and corruption compared with resource-deficient countries in Eastern Europe and East Asia.

This chapter investigates the reform paths of four Central Asian Republics (CARs): Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. It analyses their reform strategies and identifies what kind of economic systems are emerging as a result of the differing reform paths in Central Asia.

Chapter 3 overviews the evolution of U.S. regional policy, exploring how its Central Asia strategy increasingly has become a function of supporting military operations in nearby Afghanistan. These roles have included establishing military bases and access agreements for OEF and concluding new commercial agreements in order to expand the delivery of supplies via the Northern Distribution Network (NDN), an alternative to shipping through Pakistan. At the same time, U.S. policymakers have had to balance their security cooperation with a public commitment to promote political and economic reforms in the region. These two imperatives clashed in the aftermath of the Uzbek government’s crackdown in the city of Andijan in May 2005, when the Uzbek government, in response to U.S. criticism of its actions, evicted the U.S. military from its airbase in Karshi-Khanabad (K2). Over the course of the decade, Central Asian leaders have grown increasingly cynical and even dismissive of such political criticism and demands for reform, while the United States and its Western allies have become less vocal about the so-called values agenda in order to placate their regional partners.

This chapter discusses the lack of true democracy in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan in order to set the stage for a presentation of the study's findings. In the mid-1980s the leadership in the republics of Central Asia was either quiescent in the face of looming changes within the Soviet Union or loyal to the central Soviet leadership and supportive of the Soviet federation's preservation. Ultimately, however, Central Asian governments backed democratization, and the leaders of these republics openly renounced their communist beliefs and affiliations. Western international organizations then launched development, democracy promotion, and security-related projects in these states. Although there were legitimate concerns about these republics' susceptibility to political instability and economic crises, there was also hope that these countries would undergo quick political reform, marketization, and transformation into liberal democratic states. But none of the Central Asian states has met these expectations. Today, Central Asian regimes sit along a continuum of autocracy rather than democracy, their power and authority firmly concentrated in the presidential office and maintained through a combination of repression, co-option, and political constraints on societal institutions.

This chapter begins with a discussion of international perspectives on democratization, premised on the assumption that the strategies of international actors determine the outcomes of democracy promotion abroad. It then offers a novel perspective on international democratization that relies on the concept of frames to discern the content of democracy promotion discourses. Specifically, this chapter looks at democracy promotion frames, which encompass a certain understanding of democracy, assumptions about why it is important, intended goals of democratization, and explanations of how to meet these democratic expectations. This chapter also outlines the various forms of research and analysis the author utilized for the study, including the process by which she examined texts produced by representatives of the US, EU, Russia, China, and the Central Asian governments, as well as her survey design.

This chapter examines alternative democracy promotion frames advocated by Russia and China through their foreign policies toward the Central Asian states, including through regional organizations such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). By the early 2000s, Central Asia had become the prize in a geopolitical race for influence and control of its vast energy resources, with Russia and China being key competitors. They have not, however, promoted their views on governance as actively as the US and EU have. Neither Russia nor China has openly stated an ambition to impose its practices on other states. In their foreign policy statements and internal security documents, both Russia and China have affirmed their adherence to the principle of noninterference in the domestic affairs of other nations. This chapter outlines the competing ideas and strategies for political development and economic modernization proposed by Russia and China for Central Asia, as well as the attractive models they have presented for maintaining stability and generating prosperity in the region without meaningful democratization. Both powers have disbursed growing amounts of bilateral aid to the Central Asian governments for a mix of humanitarian, economic, and political aims.

This chapter explains how the leaders of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan devised and actively disseminated their own rhetorical and ideological subsets of democracy, presented under the guises of “presidential democracy” in Kazakhstan, “consultative democracy” in Kyrgyzstan, and the “Uzbek model of democracy” in Uzbekistan. It discusses the essence of these local democratic varieties, as well as strategies used by these governments to defend their alternative models of democracy and different standards for assessing it. Although these models, which have delegitimized Western conceptions of democracy and efforts at international democratization, do have distinctive features, several characteristics are shared in all three nations. Similarities include a deep ethnic heritage, a strong state personified by a strong leader, the prioritization of security and economic development over political modernization, and the principle of gradual political reform. This chapter posits that, by defining what counts as democracy and democratization and linking these notions to history and culture, the Central Asian leaders not only reinforce their own understanding of their political rule but also foster knowledge of democracy and attitudes about democratization among the people targeted by national democracy frames.

This chapter explores beliefs, understandings, and attitudes toward various aspects of democracy and democratization among the Central Asian populations, discerned through a public opinion survey and focus group interviews carried out in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. It describes how the survey questions tapped into the respondents' understandings of democracy and their values, priorities in life, and attitudes toward various social and political institutions. The nature of the questions and the combinations of responses in the survey were informed by themes of alternative democracy promotion frames. The survey indirectly measured the respondents' political knowledge and consciousness by asking them to choose from among lists of values and priorities or to express their attitudes toward assumptions underlying various democracy promotion frames. Additionally, interpretive data collected from focus group discussions were used to elucidate quantitative results and add depth to the understanding of democracy embedded in the respondents' political knowledge.

In this chapter, alternative democracy promotion frames used by the US, EU, Russia, China, and the governments of the Central Asian states are assessed on several dimensions of effectiveness, including cultural compatibility, salience, consistency, and credibility. The effectiveness of the Central Asian governments' discursive frames is assessed against the beliefs, values, and dispositions of their own citizens, as determined by the survey instrument and focus groups. By looking at the limitations of the Western democracy promotion frames and the interest-based compatibility of ideas promoted by Russia and China, as well as by investigating the public resonance of national democracy frames, this chapter demonstrates that the alternative models for governance promoted by Russia and China enjoy greater support in Central Asia—just as the Central Asian governments' own models of democracy resonate strongly with their respective populations.