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xi Preface and Acknowledgments In response to my request for a dependable research contact in Surkhandarya Province, my friend’s relative—a mid-level employee in Uzbekistan’s security apparatus —made an extraordinary offer. Having just detained a driver from Surkhandarya for (unwittingly) transporting narcotics in his taxi, he would assign the driver’s older brother to take me to the region, host me there, and bring me back to Tashkent. The driver was innocent, he noted, but would be held “in custody” for a few weeks until I was safely returned. With quiet composure and a steady look, he assured me that “nothing will happen to you, and you will not find a better guide.” As I weighed the moral (and legal) implications of advancing my career through the imprisonment of another human being, I considered the effect of adding the brother’s road rage to my usual taxi ride to the region—a nine-hour, seatbeltless journey over decrepit roads, traveling in excess of eighty miles an hour to the beat of blaring Uzbek techno music. I politely declined. Not long after he departed, I realized that what made this offer so extraordinary (and unsettling) was that it was not at all extraordinary to the person making it. It was a fairly typical, passing occurrence in his otherwise busy day. How were the security services of such a highly coercive state so malleable that such an offer could be so easily made? If this private use of state security could be done for an acquaintance (a foreigner no less), then what kind of actions would be taken for a relative, a supervisor at work, or an important political figure? With a quarter of a million people in Uzbekistan wearing uniforms, carrying guns, and claiming the authority to enforce rules in society, the question of what motivates their behavior seemed particularly pertinent. But my understanding of how the country’s law enforcement and security apparatus fit into the workings of the postcommunist state remained incomplete—in part because Uzbekistan is often credited with possessing too much coercive capacity by human rights and democracy advocates. As I investigated further into this overlap of coercion and corruption in Uzbekistan, I found it difficult to reconcile the view in policy and academic communities of a repressive state with numerous examples of a weak apparatus: that a district prokurator named as a defendant in a trial had arranged to be a judge on the case, leading to a conviction of the plaintiff on trumped-up charges; that police and prokurators earning fifty dollars a month drive luxury cars and remodel their homes; and that the two law institutes and the militsiya institute in Tashkent have witnessed a spike in applications because lucrative xii VERSO RUNNING HEAD xii PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS careers await their graduates (while degrees are in less demand for professions such as medicine that eke out a subsistence living). It seemed that Uzbekistan manifested the bizarre contradiction of a highly corrupt law enforcement and security apparatus that nonetheless had far more coercive capacity than its Central Asian counterparts. To get a better grasp of the underlying processes at work, I began to look at Uzbekistan through the lens of Tajikistan, where security services had literally disintegrated during a brutal civil war. I realized that the coercive institutions of both countries were at the center of two very different paths of state development. The comparison seemed worth pursuing and, after many permutations, it evolved into the study of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan before you. From the outset, the project has benefited from the support of many institutions . During graduate school, the U.S. Fulbright-Hays Program, American Councils for International Education, International Research and Exchanges Board, and the Global Studies Program at University of Wisconsin–Madison all provided generous financial support, which enabled me to conduct field research in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and a Social Science Research Council fellowship afforded me time to write. Later as I developed the research into a book,grants from the National Council for East European and Eurasian Research, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Rowan University, and a postdoctoral fellowship from Georgetown University, each provided time for reflection as I developed various parts of the book. Some of the material used in the book has drawn on articles I have previously published: “Unlootable Resources and State Security Institutions in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan,” Comparative Political Studies 44, 2 (February 2011...

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