Periodic Reporting for period 3 - BuildingTomorrow (Building a Better Tomorrow: Development Knowledge and Practice in Central Asia and Beyond, 1970-2017)
Reporting period: 2023-05-01 to 2024-10-31
The landscape of post-Soviet Central Asia (Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrygzstan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan) is littered with the physical remnants of Soviet development, both positive –health clinics and schools – and negative - decaying factories, polluted soil, and dried out rivers. Less visible are Soviet development’s political, intellectual, and institutional legacies. Yet just as post-socialist states and international development organizations have been forced to deal with the physical legacies of socialism, their approaches to economic development, welfare provision, and governance has been shaped by the socialist past. After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the newly independent states of Central Asia invited international institutions and foreign donors to help them achieve prosperity and transition to a market economy. At the time, most development institutions and national governments subscribed to the so-called “Washington Consensus” which emphasized financial discipline, minimum state regulation, and open borders. This project proposes to study the influence of Central Asian economists, activists, specialists, and government officials who straddled the Soviet/post-Soviet divide by going to work in national and international development institutions after independence. By studying these individuals and the legacies of their work will allow us to investigate how ideas and practices of economic development and welfare provision were shaped and reshaped at the local and international level. The project will uncover how international development transformed post-Soviet Central Asia, and how the encounter with post-socialist states transformed paradigms and practices of international development. The research will thus make an innovative scholarly contribution to understanding the legacy of socialism, the history of economic development, and the global history of development.
The BuildingTomorrow team spent the first two years of the project deepening our inter-disciplinary engagement with the literature on development in history, anthropology, sociology, and economics, identifying relevant sources and starting research, and workshopping our initial findings. Simultaneously, we began working with platforms that allow us to share our empirical findings on an ongoing basis and to make connections between our different projects. The team that has taken shape includes three people with a background in anthropology, three in history (including the PI), and one in international relations and development studies. Despite the difficulties caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the team has made solid progress conducting fieldwork and is now starting to prepare its first findings for publication. The team is on track to meet its goals. We are organizing workshops to be held in Tashkent for May 2023 and in Amsterdam (fall 2023).
The team has already uncovered a trove of materials, many declassified at the teams request, relevant to understanding the engagement of post-Soviet Central Asia with international institutions. Articles that will appear over the next year will show some of the ways that an understanding of the role played by Central Asian actors in critiquing the Soviet system and offering solutions after 1991 shaped the political economy of these states. They will change our understanding of the region's post-Soviet history and show the complicated ways that economic development paradigms change over time.