In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

51 During my second visit to southern Tajikistan’s Amirshoev Farm, after failing to catch up with the farm chair (whose BMW outran my driver’s twenty-year-old Jiguli), I turned to others at the farm to interview.Amirshoev is the furthest farm from Kuliab’s district center, requiring a thirty-minute drive over deteriorated roads through well-maintained cultivated fields. Situated deep in Khatlon Province , in the foothills not far from the Afghanistan border, the farm has its own bazaar, apteka (pharmacy), and several shops clustered in the center, constituting a self-sufficient village. With a worried glance in the direction of his departed boss, the secretary (who was initially quite knowledgeable of the farm’s history) directed me to the “head of a local soviet.” My introduction to that individual evoked an angry outburst, questioning why I came to him. Surrounded by a growing crowd of suspicious faces, I asked to speak with the former farm chair. On learning that he (with his wife and three children) had been assassinated by gunfire in a 1998 ambush by“competitors”while driving on the desolate road between Kuliab and Kurgan-Teppe—and that the current chair was his brother— my driver promptly declared that he was leaving (with or without me). As I later learned, this farm operated independently of the district center and was reportedly involved in a range of illegal (and/or illicit) economic activity from which it generated revenue that remained untouched by provincial or national elites.1 As indicated by its distant location, its self-sufficient revenue base, the untimely end of its former chair,and the cool reception I received,Amirshoev Farm existed outside the top-down patronage from central (or even district) state authorities. Amirshoev Farm illustrates the weak top-down patronage and restricted rent 3 PATHWAYS TO FAILURE: TAJIKISTAN AND UZBEKISTAN 52 VERSO RUNNING HEAD 52 CHAPTER 3 seeking that left local elites susceptible to state security fragmentation in many localities in Tajikistan. By contrast,most farms in Uzbekistan remained embedded within a top-down patronage system that encourages the co-optation of local elites into coercive resource extraction. As a prominent Samarkand Province journalist explained, Provincial governors are pressured by the president to fulfill their cotton and grain plans. They then transfer that demand to their district governors making it clear that they don’t care how the plans are fulfilled as long as the targets are met. The district governors then do the same to shirkat hojaligi [former collective farm] heads. . . . The shirkat hojaligi heads at the bottom spend most of their profit on bribes or purchasing crops to make it look like they are meeting plan targets.2 After the first grain harvest in 2003, for example, Samarkand’s provincial governor reportedly demanded two hundred tons of wheat from each shirkat hojaligi in the province for a Korean investment project. But as one local lawyer noted, “This fund is not legal. There are no documents or forms to be filled out. Nobody knows what this fund is or where the money is going. That is because it is all going to the governor.”3 Local economic operations, therefore, found themselves doubly squeezed—first by the extractive demands of the central state, then by rent-seeking elites who have marshaled local and regional law enforcement offices to execute their demands on enterprises and farms in the province. While damaging to the region’s economy, rent-seeking opportunities were opened to local elites in Samarkand Province because it secures their political support and motivates them to leverage local state security services in extraction. Across Uzbekistan , similar patterns emerged, partly explaining the drop in net transfers in profits from cotton production from 4.7 percent to 1.8 percent of the country’s GDP between 2000 and 2004.4 These examples illustrate the very different rent-seeking activities of local elites by the end of the 1990s. In Tajikistan’s Khatlon Province, elites who lacked the opportunity to convert their resources into rents operated independent of the state, while in Uzbekistan’s Samarkand Province local elites were enmeshed in a system of rent appropriation that made them highly dependent on protection and patronage from regional and central politicians. How did these divergent patterns of rent seeking arise? Why did one pattern promote state security fragmentation whereas the other reinforced state security cohesion? In this chapter I examine the process by which resource structure, patronage, and rent-seeking opportunities produce dramatic transformations of...

Share