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Moving beyond state-centric and elitist perspectives, this volume
examines everyday security in the Central Asian country of
Kyrgyzstan. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and written by scholars
from Central Asia and beyond, it shows how insecurity is
experienced, what people consider existential threats, and how they
go about securing themselves. It concentrates on individuals who
feel threatened because of their ethnic belonging, gender or sexual
orientation. It develops the concept of 'securityscapes', which
draws attention to the more subtle means that people take to secure
themselves - practices bent on invisibility and avoidance, on
disguise and trickery, and on continually adapting to shifting
circumstances. By broadening the concept of security practice, this
book is an important contribution to debates in Critical Security
Studies as well as to Central Asian and Area Studies.
The southernmost and poorest state of the Eurasian space,
Tajikistan collapsed immediately upon the fall of the Soviet Union
and plunged into a bloody five-year civil war (1992-1997) that left
more than 50,000 people dead and more than half a million
displaced. After the 1997 Peace Agreements, Tajikistan stood out
for being the only post-Soviet country to recognize an Islamic
party-the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (IRPT)-as a key
actor in the civil war as well as in postwar reconstruction and
democratization. Tajikistan's linguistic and cultural proximity to
Iran notwithstanding, the balance of external powers over the
country remains fairly typical of Central Asia, with Russia as the
major security provider and China as its principal investor.
Another specificity of Tajikistan is its massive labor migration
flows toward Russia. Out of a population of eight million, about
one million work abroad seasonally-one of the highest rates of
departure in the world. Migration trends have impacted Tajikistan's
economy and rent mechanisms: half of the country's GDP comes from
migrant remittances, a higher share than anywhere else in the
world. However, it is in the societal and cultural realms that
migration has had the most transformative effect. Migrants'
cultural and societal identities are on the move, with a growing
role given to Islam as a normative tool for regulating the cultural
shock of migration. Islam, and especially a globalized
fundamentalist pietist movement, regulates both physical and moral
security in workplace and other settings, and brings migrants
together to make their interactions meaningful and
socio-politically relevant. It offers a new social prestige to
those who work in an environment seen as threatening to their
Islamic identity. The first section of this volume investigates the
critical question of the nature of the Tajik political regime, its
stability, legitimacy mechanisms, and patterns of centralization.
In the volume's second part, we move away from studying the state
to delve into the societal fabric of Tajikistan, shaped by local
rural specificities and social vulnerabilities in the health sector
and gender relationships. The third section of the volume is
devoted to identity narratives and changes. While the Tajik regime
works hard to control the national narrative and the interpretation
of the civil war, society is literally and figuratively on the
move, as migration profoundly reshapes societal structures and
cultural values.
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