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The 2022 invasion of Ukraine has stimulated a debate on Russia’s relations with states which were part of the Soviet Union. Our article contributes to this discussion by focusing on Russia’s two ‘strategic partners’, Belarus and Tajikistan, and exploring these countries’ perspectives. We develop a critical geopolitics framework which accounts for time, multi-level power dynamics and culture. The article provides a new understanding of the dynamics of geopolitical knowledge beyond the West, analysing how Belarusian and Tajik political elites’ decision-making towards Russia has evolved from the late Soviet period until now. While both governments appear to be dependent on Russia and, consequently, generally supportive of its politics in the global arena, the article argues that this alignment has been highly strategic. Throughout the years, Belarusian and Tajik decision makers have skilfully navigated power and economic asymmetries with Russia by using their geographical location and Russia’s neo-imperial mindset to their benefit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The book "Mothers, Families, or Children? Family Policy in Poland, Hungary, and Romania, 1945–2020" offers a comprehensive analysis of the history of family policymaking in these three countries. The authors explore the constant negotiations and transformations that family-related programs underwent over the course of 70 years, influenced by demographic, political, ideational, and economic pressures. The book highlights the distinct foci of family policy in each country, with Poland prioritizing maternal protection, Hungary focusing on families as a whole, and Romania emphasizing children. The analysis incorporates a historical institutionalist approach, interviews with policymakers, archival research, and an intersectional perspective that considers class, gender, and race. While the book lacks broader conclusions about state-citizen relations and does not extensively address fathers, it provides valuable insights into the evolution of state approaches to family in Eastern Europe. [Extracted from the article]

This article analyzes why and how women's sex work is securitized in Tajikistan. It argues that state actors view sex work as a threat to the nation in the context of two simultaneous processes: nation-building, centered around the family unit, and the fight against HIV/AIDS. The article explores the narratives, laws, and practices that are deployed to limit sex work. It also analyzes how security frameworks are experienced and navigated by women sex workers on a very local level. Three coping strategies are identified: hiding techniques, developing networks and befriending influential clients, and seeking companionship with other sex workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By shifting the study of European Union (EU)–Central Asian relations from its fixed category of black-boxing both the EU and Central Asia, this article advances the case for the approach of examining multi-level and multi-actor interactions that identify the dynamic processes of reciprocal action and meaning-making that characterize the mutual cooperation. It distinguishes perceptions, interests and practices, pointing to the rationales and modes of behaviour of multiple EU and Central Asian actors. The article also advances five reasons why EU studies should take more interest in Central Asia, given that the EU's larger external relations and security agenda extends to this region. Similarly, it shows that Central Asian studies can benefit from the analysis of the region's interactions with external actors, including the EU, given that external actors contribute to reshaping national policy agendas and influence everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examining the European Union's (EU) engagement with Central Asia since the early 1990s, we see an increased commitment to context sensitivity. Arguably, in order to design 'better' interventions, the EU needs to know more about this region. This article explores three means of EU learning: in the field – through EU officials' first-hand experience of working at EU Delegations in Central Asia; about the field – through programmed channels of external expert knowledge, and in particular think tanks; and from the field – during institutionalized consultations with multiple local actors, such as academics, journalists and non-governmental organizations. It is argued that despite this complex learning infrastructure, EU knowledge production on Central Asia has a predominantly performative character. Rather than leading to changes in its relations with Central Asia, new knowledge produced by the EU aims at legitimizing this organization's pre-existing frameworks of engagement and practices of interactions with the region, and substantiating existing policy priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tajikistan is one of the main migrant origin countries in the post-Soviet world, with about one million labour migrants living and working in Russia. It is also one of the world's most remittance-dependent economies. By exploring how and why the Tajik government has engaged with labour migrants since 1991, this article analyses the development of emigration policy in Tajikistan. In doing so, the article de-reifies the state and illustrates the complexity of policy processes: many actors are directly and indirectly involved in policymaking and implementation. Four aspects are analysed: shifts in emigration policymaking over time and the influence of different domestic actors; the assistance offered to labour migrants; the impact of Russia as the main host country; and the influence of international organisations in the context of the nascent global governance of migration. This article argues that Tajikistan's emigration policy has gradually moved from a laissez-faire phase, through a proactive, then a "messy", to a reactive one. It shows that Tajik authorities have followed often contradictory pathways of (non)involvement with labour migrants and thereby illustrates how declared policies can be distinguished from informal practices performed by the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on previous work on the securitisation of HIV/AIDS, studies of framings, and the Copenhagen and Paris schools of security studies, this essay explores how policy framings of HIV/AIDS have shifted from the late Soviet period through to present-day Tajikistan. Pointing to both continuity and change, it shows how, under the influence of international actors and in accordance with nation-building priorities, Soviet-era medical and societal security framings gradually transformed into state security, demography and family-oriented framings. It also examines the resulting policy responses and practices that influence the everyday life of social groups who become identified as a public health concern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses localisation of the migration and development paradigm, promoted worldwide by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), by unpacking transformations that this approach undergoes in aid-receiving countries assisted by this organisation. Drawing on insights from International Relations and the anthropology of development, and taking the case of a specific policy transfer initiated by IOM in post-Soviet Tajikistan, which involved setting up a local state-operated labour recruitment system for industries abroad, the article advances three arguments. First, the crucial relevance of actors in the field, namely brokers who arrange and navigate IOM's collaborations with various actors on the ground, reveals that the authority of IOM in Tajikistan is personalised and relational, rather than institutional. Second, the existence of brokers points to an ideological heterogeneity within IOM, which on the surface seems united in its pursuit of the migration and development agenda. Third, this article problematises the role of IOM in Tajikistan, showing that the organisation interferes in state-citizens relations and that its rhetoric of migration and development justifies a market-tailored export of local labour, serving the global capitalist economy. The article contributes to research on IOM, as well as global-local interactions and international organisations in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contrasts the World Bank's policy-oriented, standardized assessment of the business climate and small business in Tajikistan with an alternative, bottom-up reading of local entrepreneurship focused on the life stories and business experiences of the young Tajik business community. It shows that the World Bank's business evaluations and rankings, Doing Business and Enterprise Survey, offer a top-down understanding of business in this post-Soviet Central Asian country, which is filtered through an underlying neoliberal policy paradigm. This paradigm promotes economic liberalization, rivalry and individual responsibility for wellbeing at the expense of a welfare state, solidarity and common interest. The article proposes a different account which is centered on the socio-economic, political and moral embeddedness of local business practices. Four aspects of doing business are analyzed: informality, the role of the state in regulating business, bribing, and the relevance of social networks. Such an alternative, ethnographically informed account is needed because this organization's publications are seen by policymakers as an authoritative source of knowledge and, as a result, serve as a powerful global governance tool influencing economic reforms worldwide. These reforms, however, often exercise a negative effect on local economic lifeworlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By analysing constitutive everyday peace practices, the article shows that poor socio-economic conditions, rather than political grievances and aspirations, are major sources of an actual and potential discontent in present day Tajikistan. It is argued that peace is atomised in a way that it is upheld through state withdrawal from welfare provision and an ongoing, ever more deepening fragmentation of the social fabric in the context of the precarity accompanying the country's integration into the global political economy after the Soviet collapse and the subsequent civil war (1992–97). Nevertheless, individuals themselves navigate, domesticate and mitigate conflicts from the ground up. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local ownership is one of the popular paradigms of Western development aid. It involves giving more effective control of the design and implementation of development aid to local actors in aid-receiving countries, including governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and local communities. This article contrasts the understanding of local ownership as a top-down process triggered by donors, with an alternative, bottom-up ownership, which emerges spontaneously on the ground. By looking at the case of a local NGO in post-Soviet Tajikistan, the article analyses practices which reveal how the NGO actively takes ownership of development aid through everyday work. This includes fundraising, structuring relations with other organizations competing for donor funding, selecting calls for proposals from NGOs and writing grant applications. Each of these activities involves negotiations of the goals and scope of development work, against parameters imposed by donors. By means of example, the article questions the application of the local ownership paradigm in development work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses how international norms are transferred to aid-receiving countries and with what outcomes, when tensions exist between these norms and local realities. By taking a case study of an American-funded good governance project in Tajikistan, it investigates a multi-level and multi-actor process of norm localisation, looking at why and how different development agencies re-appropriate international norms. The article proposes to see a failed localisation from the point of view of donors, in a way that outcomes differ from their initial intentions, as a successful localisation from the point of view of local actors. The distortion of international norms indicates that local actors re-appropriated them in accordance with their biographies, personal views, and political opportunities and constraints of organisations which they represent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Soon after the breakdown of the Soviet Union in 1991, a civil war started in Tajikistan (1992–97). This was also the period when a number of international organizations arrived in the country to distribute humanitarian assistance and assist in conflict resolution and stabilization. After the UN, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) was the second key organization which appeared in the conflict-stricken country. Like other key international organizations in Tajikistan, the OSCE, which has been in the country since 1994, has seen a shift in its original functions of monitoring and emergency assistance. Some see its avowed objectives in the new century as formalistic, virtual and ineffective. By capturing perceptions of foreign assistance to Tajikistan among employees of the OSCE and other international organizations, NGO workers, government officials and ordinary citizens, this article explores how Tajikistan ‘socialized’ the OSCE, making the organization simultaneously a benefactor, an industry and even an intruder. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]