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

Preface

I began to study clan politics because of what I found in the political world: clan divisions continue to animate power relations in a wide array of contexts. This is true not only across the southern tier of the ex-USSR, which is the empirical focus ofthis book, but also in broad parts of the Middle East, East and North Africa, and Southeast Asia. Moreover, such kinship-based divisions are not simply residual factors of limited political import but often lie at the center of politics. In this book, I explore the relationships between clans and the paramount power in the contemporary world, the modern state. What sparked my initial interest in these issues was the sense that dominant theories were out ofsync with empirical developments across the southern tier ofthe former Soviet Union. Although they were criticized , modernization and neomodernization paradigms continued to inspire background thinking on identity politics, permitting no conceptual space for clan politics. In these approaches, the political significance of clans was understood to be, restricted in two ways: spatially, to the remote margins ofthe state system where traditional and diffuse authority patterns prevailed, and temporally, to historical periods before the emergence of modern state structures. But kinship divisions have both broader and more lasting significance for politics than we normally recognize. Ofcourse, their significance changes across space and time; it is a variable, not a constant. What is surprising, from the perspective ofour usual theoretical concerns , is how important clans continue to be. The former Soviet southern tier offers an array of cases through which to study this relatively underexamined phenomenon. This book also tells a story about the persistence and transformation ofclan politics in Kazakhstan. The exercise is largely one in induction . That is, I move from an empirical phenomenon to theory IX x Preface construction, although in no sense did I approach the issue with a theoretical blank slate. Tipping the balance toward induction seemed warranted, given the lack of attention paid to the issue. As a practical matter, this meant that I gathered data using intensive, rather than extensive, strategies. I felt that it was important first to capture accurately the issue through close study of a single country (Kazakhstan, in this case) rather than rushing to broad comparison. We should not avoid generalization; we should, however, ground our comparative enterprise in the specifics of time and place. Intensive focus on a single country makes good sense for another reason. It can highlight actual causal mechanisms, where studies that cover a large number of country cases can only find correlations. Moreover, the coding strategies that undergird cross-case statistical evaluation capture certain factors better than others. Identity politics -which necessarily involves perceptual variables, discourses, and symbols that inform group behavior and self-understandingsbenefits from an intensive, rather than an extensive, perspective. This book is not a story about Kazakhstan for its own sake. Ex-Soviet Central Asia tells us much about the encounter between clan-based societies and modern state institutions. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan , Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan all experienced a heavy-handed state push for modernization that included coercive attempts to root out clan relationships. Yet, clan networks remain central to political life. Among these cases, Kazakhstan stands out further; it felt the state effort most dramatically. Whereas the populations of the other parts ofCentral Asia and the Caucasus were geographically more remote and could more easily resist the Soviet effort, the same cannot be argued for Kazakhstan. The latter felt the brunt ofSovietization. Why clan politics persists in a most unlikely case is the central puzzle that inspires this research. To undertake a study of clan politics is to rely on the widest array of methodological strategies available. Eclecticism is the best way to sort through biases and attempt to minimize their impact on the final product. In addition to using Western and Soviet secondary sources, I examined newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals from across the region, conducted elite interviews in several cities, led in-depth interviews , ran focus groups in three regions, engaged in ethnographic observation of events of cultural and political relevance, and exam- Preface Xl ined documents of particular importance from the Central State Archives ofthe Republic ofKazakhstan. The appendix provides detail on these strategies. To undertake a study of clan politics is also to tax one's sense of humor. Because this is a phenomenon that many individuals prefer to conceal rather than reveal, I cannot...