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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]

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]

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]