New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2017. xvi, 290 pp., [8] pp. of plates. (Illustrations.) US$40.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-300-20844-3.
Patronage networks, clientelism, and clan politics have long been popular themes in scholarship on contemporary, or for that matter “post-Soviet,” Central Asia. Much of what has been written in this regard suggests that the stable authoritarian governance systems of five republics have been determined by increasingly solidified domestic power structures based on ethnic affiliation, kinship relations, and other networks often preceding the period of national sovereignty. This analysis is based on an inward-looking perspective. Few, if any, researchers, however, have engaged with the outward-looking focus of secretive geographies of global connectedness actively exploited by the Central Asian elites for regime consolidation (and their personal enrichment), including both licit and illicit schemes in the West such as offshore tax havens, Interpol Red Notices, and international PR companies.
Alexander Cooley, director of the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, and John Heathershaw, associate professor at the London School of Economics, offer this perspective, based on an in-depth review of a wide range of data sources. Their compelling analysis of how Central Asian regimes engage with and maintain transnational networks of money-laundering, intimidation, and the prosecution of political opponents brings a controversial but previously neglected theme into the debate around authoritarian rule in Central Asia. This politically highly sensitive study challenges several underlying assumptions of knowledge production on Central Asia in global politics, the media, and academia. These widely accepted “myths,” according to the authors, refer to the region’s isolation from the mainstream of “global political and economic transformations” (5), the acknowledged failure of introducing Western-oriented political and economic liberalization, and the abovementioned emphasis, particularly in research, on the localized character of power relations. The first accusation is not entirely justified from an academic point of view, given the increasing body of work examining translocal social interaction and mobilities as forces in re-thinking Central Asia as a container space (Crossroads Asia). Nonetheless, doing focused research on the interface of regime consolidation and global political connections, as suggested by Cooley and Heathershaw, surely matters for a better understanding of evolving political power dynamics in the region.
Boldly stating that “Central Asia is best understood by focusing on the sprawling, informal transnational links between elites,” the authors seek to overcome the inside-outside (domestic-international) divide in studying authoritarian politics and, by doing so, call for new regulatory regimes in limiting the illicit activities of what they provocatively call a transnational and globalized “uncivil society” (45).
Examples from four Central Asian republics—except for the most secretive regime, Turkmenistan—illustrate empirically how thin the lines are in reality between the personal enrichment of members of the state elite, their falling into disgrace as public enemies, and their subsequent self-repositioning as dissidents. Mukhtar Ablyazov (chapter 2), former head of Kazakhstan’s largest bank, BTA, who defrauded billions of US dollars from BTA by channelling them into offshore companies before fleeing to Europe, is a good case in point. The authors outline meticulously the instruments applied by Kazakhstan’s government to hunt down Ablyazov, now a self-proclaimed opponent, his family, and former business partners, at times with the direct support of legal authorities from all over Europe. Cooley and Heathershaw then trace the trajectory of Tajikistan’s increasingly authoritarian rule, basically eliminating the balance of power in Central Asia’s poorest country, carefully negotiated in the post-civil war peace contract of 1997 (chapter 3). Through a case study of the state-controlled aluminum smelter Talco, the country’s single most-important company, they also illustrate how the ruling elite plunders Tajikistan’s already limited assets using offshore transfer operations, in many instances acting with the silent consent of Western partners and controlling agencies. Uzbekistan, until recently arguably one of Central Asia’s most—if not the most—repressive and closed regimes, is dealt with in the next chapter, which addresses the illicit schemes run by the country’s elite. It takes on the scandal around the personal involvement of Gulnara Karimova, daughter of the country’s first president Islom Karimow, in negotiations to access the domestic mobile telecommunications market, as an example of the corruptness of elite circles. More importantly, though, the authors draw attention to the active participation of Western—in this case Scandinavian—multinational companies in these schemes. Cooley and Heathershaw then discuss how Kyrgyzstan, being widely considered Central Asia’s by far most liberal and open state, is not beyond the involvement of its highest-ranking officials in illicit international processes (chapter 5). The book’s informative empirical section, at times resembling a piece of investigative journalism, ends by exploring the dynamically changing offshore connectivities of Central Asia’s elites under the auspices of the varying involvement of the US and China (chapter 6) and by scrutinizing mechanisms of extraterritorial repression against political exiles abroad (chapter 7).
The authors, in lieu of a conclusion, provide a number of policy recommendations in order to confront, and provide institutional checks on, the illicit global activities of “dictators without borders,” including more effective reporting mechanisms and more transparent accounting in, for example, Western real-estate markets. Cooley and Heathershaw’s suggestions in the face of broadly facilitated and large-scale offshore economics in the West, the sheer extent of which can only be guessed based on regular leaks in the system, might appear a bit naïve. Dictators without Borders, nonetheless, is an intriguing introduction to globally operating authoritarian elites. It is also extremely timely, as demonstrated by the recently fully acknowledged flooding of the UK economy (and others) with, Russian and other funds of dubious origin worth billions of US dollars.
Henryk Alff
Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research, Bremen, Germany