Review of Rentier Capitalism and Its Discontents Power Morality and Resistance in Central Asia (original) (raw)
How the free market created rentiers and plutocracy in post-Soviet Central Asian countries
2020
In a reversal of the classical ideal of a ‘free market’ (a market free from land rent, monopoly rent and interest), neoliberalism celebrates and promotes rent extraction, sometimes over wealth creation. Neoliberalism has created and expanded the role of rent and unearned income in post-Soviet economies. The article argues that the top 20 richest individuals in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan extract income based on their ownership and control of scarce assets, and thereby obtain unearned income. They also have considerable political power and influence. Neoliberalism has concentrated wealth and power into the hands of a few, and has emerged economic and political elites into the rentier class
The other road to serfdom: the rise of the rentier class in post-Soviet economies
Social Science Information, 2020
This article offers a moral economic critique of the transition to a market economy in the post-Soviet space. In a reversal of the classical ideal of a ‘free market’ (a market free from land rent, monopoly rent and interest), neoliberalism celebrates and promotes rent extraction, sometimes over wealth creation (Hudson 2017). In freeing markets from government regulation, neoliberalism enables powerful economic actors to extract income by mere virtue of property rights that entitle them to a stream of income from their ownership and control of scarce assets (Sayer 2015). Neoliberalism has created and expanded the role of rent and unearned income in post-Soviet economies (Mihalyi and Szelenyi 2017). The article will show the diversity and significance of rent in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan that go beyond natural resources and illicit public and private rent-seeking. Using three case studies on finance, real estate and the judiciary in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, this article will examine how property relations, rentier activities and unearned income have been morally justified and normalised. Despite its moral legitimation, rentiership has been harmful and damaging. It has produced social inequalities and suffering, and has resulted in plutocracy and corruption.
Society and Economy, 2016
The paper intends to give an insight into the relations of the economic and political systems of the Central Asian republics using the theoretical framework of the “rentier economy” and “rentier state” approach. The main findings of the paper are that two (Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan) of the five states examined are commodity export dependent “full-scale” rentier states. The two political systems are of a stable neo-patrimonial regime character, while the Kyrgyz Republic and Tajikistan, poor in natural resources but dependent on external rents, may be described as “semi-rentier” states or “rentier economies”. They are politically more instable, but have an altogether authoritarian, oligarchical “clan-based” character. Uzbekistan with its closed economy, showing tendencies of economic autarchy, is also a potentially politically unstable clan-based regime. Thus, in the Central Asian context, the rentier state or rentier economy character affects the political stability of the actual r...
Power Distribution and Rentierism – Complementary Explanations for Bad Governance in Central Asia
Remoteness from Western incentive schemes and rentierism cannot fully explain bad governance in Central Asia. In this paper, I argue that the decentralization of power in the non-democratic regimes and the interplay with resource curse phenomena may explain why Central Asia suffer from unexpected bad governance and why some countries face a voice/stability trade-off while other don't. Preliminary results suggest that the voice/stability trade-off is especially relevant for intermediate decentralization while availability of oil revenues and diversified clan structures seem to drive corruption.
Economic Sociology in the Context of Central Asia: Trend Analysis and Development Prospects
This article presents an overview of economic sociology on the example of the countries of Central Asia, where there are unique problems associated with the transformation of socio-economic relations in the period of post-Soviet adaptation of the republics that were part of the Soviet Union. Social inequality, discrimination and inequality based on tribal, ethical, religious or gender grounds, lack of inclusivity-these and many other social challenges and problems that our society faces require a search for solutions and an optimal way out of the situation, since society and the development of society directly affect the economy in the countries as a whole, the stability of society and the quality of life of citizens of the entire Central Asian region and each country. Social justice creates stability in market relations and contributes to economic growth, equal rights and opportunities create the necessary level of trust in society at which growth and development take place. The article analyzes the changes that have taken place since the independence of the republics, as well as the post-pandemic period, which has made significant adjustments to the lives of citizens of Central Asian countries.
Political Science Quarterly, 2013
Chinese economy. "China," asserts Hsueh, "only appears to be a more liberal state" (p. 3). Unlike the orthodox "developmental state," writes Hsueh, China has welcomed "foreign competition and know-how"; it has adopted "sectoral reregulation" of strategic industries; and has prioritized "bureaucracies and state-owned companies" (p. 267). This book is a must-read for students of political economy and for those seeking to make sense of contemporary China's complex economic landscape.
The Moral Matrix of Capitalism: Insights from Central and Eastern Europe
East European Politics and Societies, 2023
This special section aims to shed light on moral milieus and agencies in contemporary capitalist Central and Eastern Europe. Drawing on case studies from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Romania, and Russia, it offers insight into changing perceptions of proper economy and practice amongst a broad range of actors—from landfill workers to business managers and the super-rich. The contributors explore how actors at various scales morally construct, contest, and defend ideas of justice, (re-)distribution, and social worth, as well as socio-economic hierarchy, inequality, and harm. They analyse the capitalist moral transformation and order in the region and examine the local appropriation of and buy-in to (as well as critique of) aspects of neoliberal moral orders—a topic sidelined in much of the existing moral economy scholarship. Exploring a broad range of moral economic phenomena, the contributors move beyond the conventional definition of morals as prosocial norms and action, approaching morals as a broader empirical phenomenon of economy and politics. They examine the actions, practices, and reasoning of different actors in relation to shifting notions of acceptable and unacceptable, just and unjust, and praiseworthy and blameworthy behaviour. As such, this collection makes the case for widening the empirical object and analytical purchase of moral economy to include the study of not only moral critiques and resistance to capitalism but also the diverse moral agencies, milieus and orders of capitalism, and the ways in which the advancement and embedding of the capitalist moral order has shaped economic life in the region.
Global capitalism in Central Asia and competing economic imaginaries
openDemocracy, 2018
This article examines how the US, Russia and China have proposed different visions and strategies of economic development (including neoliberalism, economic union and trade corridors) for Central Asia. It will argue that these different economic imaginaries reflect the global powers' imperative to manage contradictions and crises inherent in advanced and emerging capitalist economies. The global powers' attempts to fix Central Asia are partly based on past failures to regulate their own economic problems and contradictions.
Political Economy of Central Asia:Initial Reflections on the Need for a New Approach (2011)
This article aims to give an overview of the analytical approaches to political economy of Central Asia. It argues that twenty years after transition paradigm we still find lingering separation between politics and economics that compartmentalizes studies of economic development, nation-and state-building into separate projects. 1 The analytical separation between economics and politics creates two crucial problems for scholars of development in Central Asia: the suspense of theorization of economy and lack of attention to the new practices of governing. Two theories tried to solve the issue of separation. First is the theory of the "resource curse", which argues for the inability of a raw material supplier to develop a healthy democratic system . The second view, "varieties of capitalism" traces institutional and historical peculiarities as preconditions for a stable marketoriented democratic system Luong, 2000). However, the first view is rather deterministic in relying on a single variable to prove the case; whereas, the second view is highly arbitrary by picking specific historical and cultural contexts that suit the case. I argue that post-structuralist approaches and specifically, the framework of "governmentality"a term coined by Michel Foucault, allows for more fruitful heuristic exercise. Governmentality as an analytical approach looks at the way the state positions itself in its society and determines the type of governing rationale it adopts. Particularly, it incorporates both discursive and structural-technological conditions of each state into analysis by augmenting the data before constructing the theory to argue what rationale drives government activities in the state. Governmentality speaks to both "resource curse" and the "varieties of capitalism" by enriching and complicating them while allowing identification of how rationales of governing evolve and change over time.
Capitalism in Mongolia - ideology, practice and ambiguity
Capitalism in Mongolia - ideology, practice and ambiguity, 2018
Definitions of and understandings of capitalism are currently the source of much debate in Mongolia’s recent context of severe economic decline. This has followed the differing and sometimes contradictory perceptions of capitalism that have emerged throughout both Mongolia’s recent capitalist history and experiences of socialism. Following an anthropological, generative approach to the making of capitalist economy and drawing from Çalişkan and Callon’s discussion of economization, we explore how the economization of everyday life in Mongolia since 1990 has given rise to a context in which the economy is intensely politicized. This special issue explores the kinds of new economic practices, social formations, ideologies and subjectivities that Mongolia’s capitalist economic forms have produced. We ask what Mongolian processes of economization can tell us about the formation of capitalist economies more generally.
Central Asian Survey Recollections of collectivization in Uzbekistan: Stalinism and local activism
Collectivization of agriculture in Uzbekistan demanded the efforts of many local agitators who called on Uzbek dehqons to join kolkhozes and who stimulated a local version of class warfare. In oral history interviews with those who experienced mass collectivization's first moments, we find both the brutality of change imposed from above and a social transformation led by local Uzbek activists.