Karolina Kluczewska
Biographic Data
| ID | 308774 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Karolina Kluczewska |
| GIVEN NAMES | Karolina |
| FAMILY NAME | Kluczewska |
| SIGNATURE | KLUCZEWSKA K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of St Andrews |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0349-4443 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 50 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Framing feminism in Eurasia: Bottom-Up Strategies of Depoliticisation and Repoliticisation
Worldwide, feminist politics is increasingly marginalised and faces resistance from governments and societies. In post-socialist Eurasia, gender discourses are dominated by international donors promoting a neoliberal approach, as well as states mobilising patriarchal norms for nation building. Focusing on three grassroots feminist initiatives in Eurasia, this article explores alternative gender visions emerging from the ground up, which are orien…
Post-Soviet Dependence with Benefits? Critical Geopolitics of Belarus's and Tajikistan's Strategic Alignment with Russia
The 2022 invasion of Ukraine has stimulated a debate on Russia’s relations with states which were part of the Soviet Union. Our article contributes to this discussion by focusing on Russia’s two ‘strategic partners’, Belarus and Tajikistan, and exploring these countries’ perspectives. We develop a critical geopolitics framework which accounts for time, multi-level power dynamics and culture. The article provides a new understanding of the dynamic…
Early career pracademics in international development: Satisfactions and Challenges
This essay reflects on the satisfactions and challenges of early career researchers entering the field of development work from an autoethnographic perspective. During my doctoral and postdoctoral research, I engaged in small-scale cooperations with local non-governmental organisations in Tajikistan by assisting them with project development, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation. I saw pracademia as a more ethical and pragmatic way to en…
Silent De-Sovietization and Urban Renewal in Dushanbe
In the past decade, large-scale urban reconstruction has been ongoing in Dushanbe, Tajikistan’s capital city. In this process, the city’s Soviet architecture is being demolished and replaced by Dubai-inspired high-rises. This transformation of public space is a manifestation of the process of silent de-Sovietization that has taken place in Tajikistan. Unlike what has been seen in other post-Soviet countries, this form of de-Sovietization does not…
Post-Soviet power hierarchies in the making: Postcolonialism in Tajikistan’s relations with Russia
This article explores post-Soviet power hierarchies which constitute a unique system of vertical stratification in world politics. It does so by analysing relations between two former Soviet states, Tajikistan and Russia, in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. The article investigates the underlying reasons for power asymmetries between the two countries, the ways hierarchies are sustained and enforced, as well as perceived and …
Family-Centered World Ordering: Polish Conservative Civil Society Seeking Remedies to the World in Crisis
This article analyzes bottom-up, conservative, and reactionary world ordering from the margins. It explores actors, visions, and practices of alternative, family-centered world ordering, taking the case of Polish conservative civil society organizations. Members of these organizations came to resent the liberal world order through their own everyday experiences of living through the capitalist transition in Poland after the end of communism in 19…
Still Engaging, Not Avoiding, Contradictions: Conceptualizing Cooperative Research in Practical, Structural and Epistemic Terms
Critical methodologies in International Political Sociology (IPS) and its intersecting fields and research traditions have increasingly coalesced around the idea that research should be done in dialogue, and possibly cooperation, with people rather than only about them. Drawing together research under this theme and wider debates on participatory, activist, and action research, alongside our own research experience, this article proposes the noti…
Academic Mobility the ‘Other’ Way: Embodying Simultaneous Privilege and Precarity
The international academic mobility that we hear about most often concerns moving from the non-West to the West. It is far more rare for academics to go the ‘other’ way, i.e. from Western to non-Western academia. While I have been both ways, I owe the really transformative experience of my academic mobility to Tajik academia. This essay describes three of the many aspects of this formative experience, referring to the issues of mistrust, mutual f…
Decolonial Central Asia, or a Post-liberal One
Timur Dadabaev's Decolonizing Central Asian International Relations is an innovative piece of work in two ways. First, it represents an attempt to think in a decolonial manner about the practices of international relations in Central Asia, pointing to a distinct way of doing world politics in this region. It attributes an equal agency to Central Asian states, with a focus on Uzbekistan, and some of their major international partners, such as Russ…
Securitization and Coping Strategies of Women Sex Workers in Tajikistan
This article analyzes why and how women’s sex work is securitized in Tajikistan. It argues that state actors view sex work as a threat to the nation in the context of two simultaneous processes: nation-building, centered around the family unit, and the fight against HIV/AIDS. The article explores the narratives, laws, and practices that are deployed to limit sex work. It also analyzes how security frameworks are experienced and navigated by women…
EU–Central Asian interactions: Perceptions, interests and practices
By shifting the study of European Union (EU)–Central Asian relations from its fixed category of black-boxing both the EU and Central Asia, this article advances the case for the approach of examining multi-level and multi-actor interactions that identify the dynamic processes of reciprocal action and meaning-making that characterize the mutual cooperation. It distinguishes perceptions, interests and practices, pointing to the rationales and modes…
Learning in, about and from the field? Symbolic functions of EU knowledge production on Central Asia
Examining the European Union's (EU) engagement with Central Asia since the early 1990s, we see an increased commitment to context sensitivity. Arguably, in order to design 'better' interventions, the EU needs to know more about this region. This article explores three means of EU learning: in the fieldthrough EU officials' first-hand experience of working at EU Delegations in Central Asia; about the fieldthrough programmed channels of external ex…
Socialist in Form, “National” in Content? Art and Ideology in Soviet Tajikistan
This article examines the nexus between art and its ideological function, both discursively and in practice, in the Soviet socialist republics. Scrutinizing the case of visual monumental art in Soviet Tajikistan in the 1970s and 1980s, it can be seen that the geographical and cultural distance from Moscow, in addition to complex multi-actor and multi-level policy implementation channels, allowed for non-conventional artistic practices to develop …
Donor-Funded Women’s Empowerment in Tajikistan: Trajectories of Women’s NGOs and Changing Attitudes to the International Agenda
This article investigates internationally funded women’s empowerment initiatives in Tajikistan. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the subsequent Tajik civil war (1992–1997), this newly independent, Muslim-majority country has experienced an influx of foreign aid, including in the field of women’s rights. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, the article analyzes the growth and diversification of local, Western-funded women’s non-go…
Recognizing the never quite absent: De facto usage, ethical issues, and applications of covert research in difficult research contexts
This article scrutinizes and reconceptualizes covert research in social science. Surveying recent literature about this research method, we reflect on the ethical and safety implications stemming from the widespread, even if well-intended, lack of transparency characterizing many research projects, especially ones conducted in difficult research contexts. While the standard definition of covert research holds that researchers deliberately do not …
Engaging with Labour Migrants: Emigration Policy in Tajikistan
Tajikistan is one of the main migrant origin countries in the post-Soviet world, with about one million labour migrants living and working in Russia. It is also one of the world’s most remittance-dependent economies. By exploring how and why the Tajik government has engaged with labour migrants since 1991, this article analyses the development of emigration policy in Tajikistan. In doing so, the article de-reifies the state and illustrates the co…
Securitising HIV/Aids in Tajikistan: Framings, Policies and Practices
Building on previous work on the securitisation of HIV/AIDS, studies of framings, and the Copenhagen and Paris schools of security studies, this essay explores how policy framings of HIV/AIDS have shifted from the late Soviet period through to present-day Tajikistan. Pointing to both continuity and change, it shows how, under the influence of international actors and in accordance with nation-building priorities, Soviet-era medical and societal s…
When IOM encounters the field: Localising the migration and development paradigm in Tajikistan
This article analyses localisation of the migration and development paradigm, promoted worldwide by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), by unpacking transformations that this approach undergoes in aid-receiving countries assisted by this organisation. Drawing on insights from International Relations and the anthropology of development, and taking the case of a specific policy transfer initiated by IOM in post-Soviet Tajikistan, wh…
Tajikistan’s Atomised Peace: Approaching Conflict Management from the Ground Up
By analysing constitutive everyday peace practices, the article shows that poor socio-economic conditions, rather than political grievances and aspirations, are major sources of an actual and potential discontent in present day Tajikistan. It is argued that peace is atomised in a way that it is upheld through state withdrawal from welfare provision and an ongoing, ever more deepening fragmentation of the social fabric in the context of the precar…
Worlds apart? The World Bank’s business rankings and small entrepreneurship in Tajikistan
This article contrasts the World Bank’s policy-oriented, standardized assessment of the business climate and small business in Tajikistan with an alternative, bottom-up reading of local entrepreneurship focused on the life stories and business experiences of the young Tajik business community. It shows that the World Bank’s business evaluations and rankings, Doing Business and Enterprise Survey, offer a top-down understanding of business in this …
Policy translation in global health governance: Localising harm reduction in Tajikistan
This article analyses how global governance frameworks and knowledge claims are translated to fit local contexts. It specifically looks at harm reduction initiatives targeting injection drug users utilising the case of Tajikistan. In the 1990s, this post–Soviet Central Asian country became exposed to an inflow of cheap and easily available heroin from Afghanistan. While Tajikistan mainly became a transit country, some parts of the local populatio…
How to Translate ‘Good Governance’ into Tajik? An American Good Governance Fund and Norm Localisation in Tajikistan
This article analyses how international norms are transferred to aid-receiving countries and with what outcomes, when tensions exist between these norms and local realities. By taking a case study of an American-funded good governance project in Tajikistan, it investigates a multi-level and multi-actor process of norm localisation, looking at why and how different development agencies re-appropriate international norms. The article proposes to se…
Questioning local ownership: Insights from donor-funded NGOs in Tajikistan
Local ownership is one of the popular paradigms of Western development aid. It involves giving more effective control of the design and implementation of development aid to local actors in aid-receiving countries, including governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and local communities. This article contrasts the understanding of local ownership as a top-down process triggered by donors, with an alternative, bottom-up ownership, which e…
Politics in the Tajik Emigrant Community Complex
Cet article retrace les différentes origines, le développement, l’influence et les positions politiques de diverses communautés d’émigrés tadjiks qui ont émergé après l’éclatement de l’Union soviétique, principalement en Russie, mais également au-delà de l’espace post-soviétique. Il montre que des facteurs tels que la date et le mode d’arrivée, la région d’origine, le statut socio-économique dans la société d’accueil, ainsi que les politiques du …
Benefactor, industry or intruder? Perceptions of international organizations in Central Asia – the case of the OSCE in Tajikistan
Soon after the breakdown of the Soviet Union in 1991, a civil war started in Tajikistan (1992–97). This was also the period when a number of international organizations arrived in the country to distribute humanitarian assistance and assist in conflict resolution and stabilization. After the UN, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) was the second key organization which appeared in the conflict-stricken country. Like oth…
Tajikistan’s Atomised Peace: Approaching Conflict Management from the Ground Up
By analysing constitutive everyday peace practices, the article shows that poor socio-economic conditions, rather than political grievances and aspirations, are major sources of an actual and potential discontent in present day Tajikistan. It is argued that peace is atomised in a way that it is upheld through state withdrawal from welfare provision and an ongoing, ever more deepening fragmentation of the social fabric in the context of the precar…
How to Translate ‘Good Governance’ into Tajik? An American Good Governance Fund and Norm Localisation in Tajikistan
This article analyses how international norms are transferred to aid-receiving countries and with what outcomes, when tensions exist between these norms and local realities. By taking a case study of an American-funded good governance project in Tajikistan, it investigates a multi-level and multi-actor process of norm localisation, looking at why and how different development agencies re-appropriate international norms. The article proposes to se…
When IOM encounters the field: Localising the migration and development paradigm in Tajikistan
This article analyses localisation of the migration and development paradigm, promoted worldwide by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), by unpacking transformations that this approach undergoes in aid-receiving countries assisted by this organisation. Drawing on insights from International Relations and the anthropology of development, and taking the case of a specific policy transfer initiated by IOM in post-Soviet Tajikistan, wh…
Questioning local ownership: Insights from donor-funded NGOs in Tajikistan
Local ownership is one of the popular paradigms of Western development aid. It involves giving more effective control of the design and implementation of development aid to local actors in aid-receiving countries, including governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and local communities. This article contrasts the understanding of local ownership as a top-down process triggered by donors, with an alternative, bottom-up ownership, which e…
Politics in the Tajik Emigrant Community Complex
Cet article retrace les différentes origines, le développement, l’influence et les positions politiques de diverses communautés d’émigrés tadjiks qui ont émergé après l’éclatement de l’Union soviétique, principalement en Russie, mais également au-delà de l’espace post-soviétique. Il montre que des facteurs tels que la date et le mode d’arrivée, la région d’origine, le statut socio-économique dans la société d’accueil, ainsi que les politiques du …
EU–Central Asian interactions: Perceptions, interests and practices
By shifting the study of European Union (EU)–Central Asian relations from its fixed category of black-boxing both the EU and Central Asia, this article advances the case for the approach of examining multi-level and multi-actor interactions that identify the dynamic processes of reciprocal action and meaning-making that characterize the mutual cooperation. It distinguishes perceptions, interests and practices, pointing to the rationales and modes…
Recognizing the never quite absent: De facto usage, ethical issues, and applications of covert research in difficult research contexts
This article scrutinizes and reconceptualizes covert research in social science. Surveying recent literature about this research method, we reflect on the ethical and safety implications stemming from the widespread, even if well-intended, lack of transparency characterizing many research projects, especially ones conducted in difficult research contexts. While the standard definition of covert research holds that researchers deliberately do not …
Early career pracademics in international development: Satisfactions and Challenges
This essay reflects on the satisfactions and challenges of early career researchers entering the field of development work from an autoethnographic perspective. During my doctoral and postdoctoral research, I engaged in small-scale cooperations with local non-governmental organisations in Tajikistan by assisting them with project development, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation. I saw pracademia as a more ethical and pragmatic way to en…
Still Engaging, Not Avoiding, Contradictions: Conceptualizing Cooperative Research in Practical, Structural and Epistemic Terms
Critical methodologies in International Political Sociology (IPS) and its intersecting fields and research traditions have increasingly coalesced around the idea that research should be done in dialogue, and possibly cooperation, with people rather than only about them. Drawing together research under this theme and wider debates on participatory, activist, and action research, alongside our own research experience, this article proposes the noti…
Benefactor, industry or intruder? Perceptions of international organizations in Central Asia – the case of the OSCE in Tajikistan
Soon after the breakdown of the Soviet Union in 1991, a civil war started in Tajikistan (1992–97). This was also the period when a number of international organizations arrived in the country to distribute humanitarian assistance and assist in conflict resolution and stabilization. After the UN, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) was the second key organization which appeared in the conflict-stricken country. Like oth…
Framing feminism in Eurasia: Bottom-Up Strategies of Depoliticisation and Repoliticisation
Worldwide, feminist politics is increasingly marginalised and faces resistance from governments and societies. In post-socialist Eurasia, gender discourses are dominated by international donors promoting a neoliberal approach, as well as states mobilising patriarchal norms for nation building. Focusing on three grassroots feminist initiatives in Eurasia, this article explores alternative gender visions emerging from the ground up, which are orien…
Post-Soviet Dependence with Benefits? Critical Geopolitics of Belarus's and Tajikistan's Strategic Alignment with Russia
The 2022 invasion of Ukraine has stimulated a debate on Russia’s relations with states which were part of the Soviet Union. Our article contributes to this discussion by focusing on Russia’s two ‘strategic partners’, Belarus and Tajikistan, and exploring these countries’ perspectives. We develop a critical geopolitics framework which accounts for time, multi-level power dynamics and culture. The article provides a new understanding of the dynamic…
Post-Soviet power hierarchies in the making: Postcolonialism in Tajikistan’s relations with Russia
This article explores post-Soviet power hierarchies which constitute a unique system of vertical stratification in world politics. It does so by analysing relations between two former Soviet states, Tajikistan and Russia, in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. The article investigates the underlying reasons for power asymmetries between the two countries, the ways hierarchies are sustained and enforced, as well as perceived and …
Family-Centered World Ordering: Polish Conservative Civil Society Seeking Remedies to the World in Crisis
This article analyzes bottom-up, conservative, and reactionary world ordering from the margins. It explores actors, visions, and practices of alternative, family-centered world ordering, taking the case of Polish conservative civil society organizations. Members of these organizations came to resent the liberal world order through their own everyday experiences of living through the capitalist transition in Poland after the end of communism in 19…
Learning in, about and from the field? Symbolic functions of EU knowledge production on Central Asia
Examining the European Union's (EU) engagement with Central Asia since the early 1990s, we see an increased commitment to context sensitivity. Arguably, in order to design 'better' interventions, the EU needs to know more about this region. This article explores three means of EU learning: in the fieldthrough EU officials' first-hand experience of working at EU Delegations in Central Asia; about the fieldthrough programmed channels of external ex…
Socialist in Form, “National” in Content? Art and Ideology in Soviet Tajikistan
This article examines the nexus between art and its ideological function, both discursively and in practice, in the Soviet socialist republics. Scrutinizing the case of visual monumental art in Soviet Tajikistan in the 1970s and 1980s, it can be seen that the geographical and cultural distance from Moscow, in addition to complex multi-actor and multi-level policy implementation channels, allowed for non-conventional artistic practices to develop …
Engaging with Labour Migrants: Emigration Policy in Tajikistan
Tajikistan is one of the main migrant origin countries in the post-Soviet world, with about one million labour migrants living and working in Russia. It is also one of the world’s most remittance-dependent economies. By exploring how and why the Tajik government has engaged with labour migrants since 1991, this article analyses the development of emigration policy in Tajikistan. In doing so, the article de-reifies the state and illustrates the co…
Securitising HIV/Aids in Tajikistan: Framings, Policies and Practices
Building on previous work on the securitisation of HIV/AIDS, studies of framings, and the Copenhagen and Paris schools of security studies, this essay explores how policy framings of HIV/AIDS have shifted from the late Soviet period through to present-day Tajikistan. Pointing to both continuity and change, it shows how, under the influence of international actors and in accordance with nation-building priorities, Soviet-era medical and societal s…
Worlds apart? The World Bank’s business rankings and small entrepreneurship in Tajikistan
This article contrasts the World Bank’s policy-oriented, standardized assessment of the business climate and small business in Tajikistan with an alternative, bottom-up reading of local entrepreneurship focused on the life stories and business experiences of the young Tajik business community. It shows that the World Bank’s business evaluations and rankings, Doing Business and Enterprise Survey, offer a top-down understanding of business in this …
Benefactor, industry or intruder? Perceptions of international organizations in Central Asia – the case of the OSCE in Tajikistan
Soon after the breakdown of the Soviet Union in 1991, a civil war started in Tajikistan (1992–97). This was also the period when a number of international organizations arrived in the country to distribute humanitarian assistance and assist in conflict resolution and stabilization. After the UN, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) was the second key organization which appeared in the conflict-stricken country. Like oth…
How to Translate ‘Good Governance’ into Tajik? An American Good Governance Fund and Norm Localisation in Tajikistan
This article analyses how international norms are transferred to aid-receiving countries and with what outcomes, when tensions exist between these norms and local realities. By taking a case study of an American-funded good governance project in Tajikistan, it investigates a multi-level and multi-actor process of norm localisation, looking at why and how different development agencies re-appropriate international norms. The article proposes to se…
Questioning local ownership: Insights from donor-funded NGOs in Tajikistan
Local ownership is one of the popular paradigms of Western development aid. It involves giving more effective control of the design and implementation of development aid to local actors in aid-receiving countries, including governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and local communities. This article contrasts the understanding of local ownership as a top-down process triggered by donors, with an alternative, bottom-up ownership, which e…
Politics in the Tajik Emigrant Community Complex
Cet article retrace les différentes origines, le développement, l’influence et les positions politiques de diverses communautés d’émigrés tadjiks qui ont émergé après l’éclatement de l’Union soviétique, principalement en Russie, mais également au-delà de l’espace post-soviétique. Il montre que des facteurs tels que la date et le mode d’arrivée, la région d’origine, le statut socio-économique dans la société d’accueil, ainsi que les politiques du …
Tajikistan’s Atomised Peace: Approaching Conflict Management from the Ground Up
By analysing constitutive everyday peace practices, the article shows that poor socio-economic conditions, rather than political grievances and aspirations, are major sources of an actual and potential discontent in present day Tajikistan. It is argued that peace is atomised in a way that it is upheld through state withdrawal from welfare provision and an ongoing, ever more deepening fragmentation of the social fabric in the context of the precar…
Worlds apart? The World Bank’s business rankings and small entrepreneurship in Tajikistan
This article contrasts the World Bank’s policy-oriented, standardized assessment of the business climate and small business in Tajikistan with an alternative, bottom-up reading of local entrepreneurship focused on the life stories and business experiences of the young Tajik business community. It shows that the World Bank’s business evaluations and rankings, Doing Business and Enterprise Survey, offer a top-down understanding of business in this …
Policy translation in global health governance: Localising harm reduction in Tajikistan
This article analyses how global governance frameworks and knowledge claims are translated to fit local contexts. It specifically looks at harm reduction initiatives targeting injection drug users utilising the case of Tajikistan. In the 1990s, this post–Soviet Central Asian country became exposed to an inflow of cheap and easily available heroin from Afghanistan. While Tajikistan mainly became a transit country, some parts of the local populatio…
Recognizing the never quite absent: De facto usage, ethical issues, and applications of covert research in difficult research contexts
This article scrutinizes and reconceptualizes covert research in social science. Surveying recent literature about this research method, we reflect on the ethical and safety implications stemming from the widespread, even if well-intended, lack of transparency characterizing many research projects, especially ones conducted in difficult research contexts. While the standard definition of covert research holds that researchers deliberately do not …
Engaging with Labour Migrants: Emigration Policy in Tajikistan
Tajikistan is one of the main migrant origin countries in the post-Soviet world, with about one million labour migrants living and working in Russia. It is also one of the world’s most remittance-dependent economies. By exploring how and why the Tajik government has engaged with labour migrants since 1991, this article analyses the development of emigration policy in Tajikistan. In doing so, the article de-reifies the state and illustrates the co…
Securitising HIV/Aids in Tajikistan: Framings, Policies and Practices
Building on previous work on the securitisation of HIV/AIDS, studies of framings, and the Copenhagen and Paris schools of security studies, this essay explores how policy framings of HIV/AIDS have shifted from the late Soviet period through to present-day Tajikistan. Pointing to both continuity and change, it shows how, under the influence of international actors and in accordance with nation-building priorities, Soviet-era medical and societal s…
When IOM encounters the field: Localising the migration and development paradigm in Tajikistan
This article analyses localisation of the migration and development paradigm, promoted worldwide by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), by unpacking transformations that this approach undergoes in aid-receiving countries assisted by this organisation. Drawing on insights from International Relations and the anthropology of development, and taking the case of a specific policy transfer initiated by IOM in post-Soviet Tajikistan, wh…
Securitization and Coping Strategies of Women Sex Workers in Tajikistan
This article analyzes why and how women’s sex work is securitized in Tajikistan. It argues that state actors view sex work as a threat to the nation in the context of two simultaneous processes: nation-building, centered around the family unit, and the fight against HIV/AIDS. The article explores the narratives, laws, and practices that are deployed to limit sex work. It also analyzes how security frameworks are experienced and navigated by women…
EU–Central Asian interactions: Perceptions, interests and practices
By shifting the study of European Union (EU)–Central Asian relations from its fixed category of black-boxing both the EU and Central Asia, this article advances the case for the approach of examining multi-level and multi-actor interactions that identify the dynamic processes of reciprocal action and meaning-making that characterize the mutual cooperation. It distinguishes perceptions, interests and practices, pointing to the rationales and modes…
Learning in, about and from the field? Symbolic functions of EU knowledge production on Central Asia
Examining the European Union's (EU) engagement with Central Asia since the early 1990s, we see an increased commitment to context sensitivity. Arguably, in order to design 'better' interventions, the EU needs to know more about this region. This article explores three means of EU learning: in the fieldthrough EU officials' first-hand experience of working at EU Delegations in Central Asia; about the fieldthrough programmed channels of external ex…
Socialist in Form, “National” in Content? Art and Ideology in Soviet Tajikistan
This article examines the nexus between art and its ideological function, both discursively and in practice, in the Soviet socialist republics. Scrutinizing the case of visual monumental art in Soviet Tajikistan in the 1970s and 1980s, it can be seen that the geographical and cultural distance from Moscow, in addition to complex multi-actor and multi-level policy implementation channels, allowed for non-conventional artistic practices to develop …
Donor-Funded Women’s Empowerment in Tajikistan: Trajectories of Women’s NGOs and Changing Attitudes to the International Agenda
This article investigates internationally funded women’s empowerment initiatives in Tajikistan. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the subsequent Tajik civil war (1992–1997), this newly independent, Muslim-majority country has experienced an influx of foreign aid, including in the field of women’s rights. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, the article analyzes the growth and diversification of local, Western-funded women’s non-go…
Academic Mobility the ‘Other’ Way: Embodying Simultaneous Privilege and Precarity
The international academic mobility that we hear about most often concerns moving from the non-West to the West. It is far more rare for academics to go the ‘other’ way, i.e. from Western to non-Western academia. While I have been both ways, I owe the really transformative experience of my academic mobility to Tajik academia. This essay describes three of the many aspects of this formative experience, referring to the issues of mistrust, mutual f…
Decolonial Central Asia, or a Post-liberal One
Timur Dadabaev's Decolonizing Central Asian International Relations is an innovative piece of work in two ways. First, it represents an attempt to think in a decolonial manner about the practices of international relations in Central Asia, pointing to a distinct way of doing world politics in this region. It attributes an equal agency to Central Asian states, with a focus on Uzbekistan, and some of their major international partners, such as Russ…
Silent De-Sovietization and Urban Renewal in Dushanbe
In the past decade, large-scale urban reconstruction has been ongoing in Dushanbe, Tajikistan’s capital city. In this process, the city’s Soviet architecture is being demolished and replaced by Dubai-inspired high-rises. This transformation of public space is a manifestation of the process of silent de-Sovietization that has taken place in Tajikistan. Unlike what has been seen in other post-Soviet countries, this form of de-Sovietization does not…
Post-Soviet power hierarchies in the making: Postcolonialism in Tajikistan’s relations with Russia
This article explores post-Soviet power hierarchies which constitute a unique system of vertical stratification in world politics. It does so by analysing relations between two former Soviet states, Tajikistan and Russia, in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. The article investigates the underlying reasons for power asymmetries between the two countries, the ways hierarchies are sustained and enforced, as well as perceived and …
Family-Centered World Ordering: Polish Conservative Civil Society Seeking Remedies to the World in Crisis
This article analyzes bottom-up, conservative, and reactionary world ordering from the margins. It explores actors, visions, and practices of alternative, family-centered world ordering, taking the case of Polish conservative civil society organizations. Members of these organizations came to resent the liberal world order through their own everyday experiences of living through the capitalist transition in Poland after the end of communism in 19…
Still Engaging, Not Avoiding, Contradictions: Conceptualizing Cooperative Research in Practical, Structural and Epistemic Terms
Critical methodologies in International Political Sociology (IPS) and its intersecting fields and research traditions have increasingly coalesced around the idea that research should be done in dialogue, and possibly cooperation, with people rather than only about them. Drawing together research under this theme and wider debates on participatory, activist, and action research, alongside our own research experience, this article proposes the noti…
Framing feminism in Eurasia: Bottom-Up Strategies of Depoliticisation and Repoliticisation
Worldwide, feminist politics is increasingly marginalised and faces resistance from governments and societies. In post-socialist Eurasia, gender discourses are dominated by international donors promoting a neoliberal approach, as well as states mobilising patriarchal norms for nation building. Focusing on three grassroots feminist initiatives in Eurasia, this article explores alternative gender visions emerging from the ground up, which are orien…
Post-Soviet Dependence with Benefits? Critical Geopolitics of Belarus's and Tajikistan's Strategic Alignment with Russia
The 2022 invasion of Ukraine has stimulated a debate on Russia’s relations with states which were part of the Soviet Union. Our article contributes to this discussion by focusing on Russia’s two ‘strategic partners’, Belarus and Tajikistan, and exploring these countries’ perspectives. We develop a critical geopolitics framework which accounts for time, multi-level power dynamics and culture. The article provides a new understanding of the dynamic…
Early career pracademics in international development: Satisfactions and Challenges
This essay reflects on the satisfactions and challenges of early career researchers entering the field of development work from an autoethnographic perspective. During my doctoral and postdoctoral research, I engaged in small-scale cooperations with local non-governmental organisations in Tajikistan by assisting them with project development, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation. I saw pracademia as a more ethical and pragmatic way to en…
Political science (23 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Law (12 works) · Politics (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Political economy (10 works) · Economics (9 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (7 works) · Business (6 works) · Peacebuilding and International Security (6 works)