Civic Union Newspaper (Russian Version)

Abstract

This book develops and applies the concept of post-liberal statebuilding as an alternative way to capture political and social change in Central Asia and the wider post-Soviet space. Drawing on decolonial perspectives on peace, conflict and intervention and their iterations in the post-Socialist world, this work argues for a practice-based and dialogical approach to research, and for inquiring the imaginaries, discourses and practices foregrounding social order. Using ethnographic fieldwork in southern Kyrgyzstan, the volume offers a detailed examination of community security and peacebuilding discourses and practices. It demonstrates how, despite its emancipatory appearance, post-liberal statebuilding is best understood as a set of social ordering mechanisms that (re-)produce exclusion, marginalization and violence. This serves to problematize widespread assumptions about liberal democracy, modern statehood and capitalist development as standard templates underlying research and interventions in post-conflict countries. Alternative sources and potentials of peace and security are identified in imaginaries and lifeworlds embedded in spirituality and human–nature relations and in community and civil society initiatives for tolerance, solidarity and accountable law enforcement. The author argues that such resistance to modern-colonial ordering is of decisive importance for understanding the post-liberal nature of socio-political order, and for articulating a decolonial perspective on it.