Modern Clan Politics: The Power of "Blood" in Kazakhstan and Beyond

5/ Clan Conflict

5 What we can understand ofsomething depends on how we think our way into it in the first place. - Katherine Verdery 1N THE 1990S THE STRUCTURE OF ACCESS TO POLITICAL AND economic goods was strikingly similar to that ofthe Soviet period, and this legacy continued to fuel clan politics. Unlike the Soviet period, however, when clan politics remained subordinated to other highstakes struggles, in post-Soviet Central Asia clan conflict flourished. The state-building and nation-building efforts of newly independent Kazakhstan now included intense competition for control ofthe state, and, consequently, for resources that were increasingly valuable on international markets. Jockeying among kinship-based groups was apparent, although its specifics were often shrouded in secrecy. As one observer noted, subethnic politics was like watching bulldogs fight under a carpet; the outlines of this struggle became clear in the event that one combatant emerged temporarily, only to return to the fight.l Given shifting relationships and highly imperfect information, the contours of this clan competition are not always easy to establish.2 It is nonetheless worth taking a look at the empirical record to discern patterns. This chapter pays particular attention to the background of the political and economic elite to evaluate the widespread assertion (by journalists both in Central Asia and abroad) that President Nursultan Nazarbaev's clan-based network dominated political and economic life in the 1990S. I will show that Nazarbaev privileged his umbrella clan and extended family, but he also sought to avoid a fundamental imbalance in the relative power of the three umbrella clans. Thus, the politics of clan networks was deeply etched into post-Soviet real95 ity, but not in the ways that many analysts described them. Clan conflict was vibrant, but it stopped short of the "social closure" that Weber describes as typical ofgroup relations. That is, one clan group did not seek total exclusion of other clan groupings} CLAN NETWORKS IN CONFLICT Students of informal politics often find it useful to make a series of assumptions about their subject of study. Central among them is the notion that every informal relationship is dyadic in nature; that is, it involves relations between two (and only two) actors, and this relationship may be described for its durability, issue coverage, and exclusivity. A second central assumption is that such informal relationships involve an exchange ofgoods; that is, things of value move (often in both directions) between the two actors. A third premise is that this exchange between actors occurs according to some notion of what is considered "rational" for each actor; that is, each party is assumed to benefit from a relationship that otherwise has no reason to exist. The picture that these assumptions paint is that individuals ensnared in informal relationships are scarcely part oflarger societal wholes. They are not the members ofgroups understood in some corporate sense; rather, they are individuals whose political interactions may be usefully reduced to the rational exchange of goods with one another.4 Though this tripartite premise is useful to tease out theoretical propositions based on the rationality assumption, do these assumptions make empirical sense with regard to the concrete contexts in which real-life political competition occurs? After all, there is no logical reason to assume a priori that individuals are parts ofdyadic relationships (rather than N-sized groups ofpeople with whom they have little face-to-face contact), exchange goods (rather than play social roles, for example), and exhibit goal-seeking, rational behavior (rather than behave in ways to which they are habituated).5 To be most useful , our assumptions should line up neatly with the empirical contexts that we study. This chapter suggests that, for contextual reasons rather than logically deduced ones, these three premises do make sense in the study ofclan politics in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. Because ofthe Soviet experience , they are empirically defensible. First, Soviet rule deprived clan Clan Conflict 97 groupings of their cultural content. Clans were no longer the corporately defined kin groups that dealt with a wide array ofcultural, social, and political matters. In the post-Soviet period, individuals used kin networks often without imagining clan as a coherent group. I move from a Durkheimian, group-centered perspective on clans to a Weberian , individual-based one for this reason. Second, the Soviet period limited kinship to particular social niches associated with gaining access to scarce goods. Thus, clan emerged as distinctly political, by becoming ensnared with questions ofdistribution...