Target audience: Civil society groups and reform-minded policymakers across Central Asian  countries 

Policy challenge: How can Central Asia escape the resource curse, leading to more equitable  societies and thus more stable social contracts? 

Context 

When the Soviet Union disintegrated abruptly, leaders of many Central Asian former republics found  themselves in charge of new sovereign states with few checks and balances to their power. The  combination of vast natural resource deposits, autocratic political cultures and  civil repression apparatuses inherited from Soviet times provided a hotbed for oligarchic elite capture.  Further fanning the flames is Central Asia’s geographic position between multiple authoritarian great  powers - China, Russia, Turkey, India and Iran, who in the past generally favoured preserving the  incumbent regimes in exchange for stable energy trade. This imposed stability, however, is vulnerable  to external shocks such as commodity price fluctuations and great power proxy struggles. 

As recently as 2022, factional rivals within Kazakhstan’s regime took advantage of pent up popular  discontent and mobilised civil unrest against political enemies. While the spark was a sharp increase  in petroleum gas prices in the runup to the Invasion of Ukraine, the deadly protests saw the removal of  former president Nazarbayev and his allies from top decision-making circles, but no effective change  in government and its elite capture practices. Before his downfall, Nazarbayev was responsible for  Kazakhstan’s growing economic ties with China under the Belt and Road Initiative, while his successor  pursued more pro-Russian policies notably after he called on Russian-led security forces to crack  down on local protesters. Similar such events have also rocked the sociopolitical fabric of Kyrgyzstan,  Uzbekistan and Tajikistan periodically, incurring mass civilian casualties but leading to no improvement  in social equality and governance transparency. 

Problem statement 

The Central Asian countries have in recent years made some attempts at expanding their trade  relations more internationally but achieved mixed results. At the same time, decreased global  economic integration and intensified great power competition once again threaten to destabilise the  domestic politics of this region. To mitigate the potential for more coups, unrest, state failure or even  civil wars, extensive research is needed to understand how more sustainable economic development  could take place in these countries, and how a more equitable distribution of commodity revenues  could support the legitimacy of stable societies.  

Literature Review 

The literature review of this study focuses on explaining the political culture of the nomadic steppes  and the region’s incomplete processes of state-making. With that, we hope to identify the structural  constraints the region faces, such as dominant cultural values, available natural resources and  geographical positions. We then examine successful precedents of economic diversification and  political transformation across Arab Gulf states and the East Asian Tigers. Through this, we hope to  arrive at applicable political economic policy prescriptions that could help Central Asian countries  escape the "resource-curse" to become more equitable and therefore stable societies. 

Analytical Framework  

Our analysis will involve the comparison between multiple variables and datasets. We plan to  incorporate datasets that display information about the rates of corruption, political fragility, natural  resource dependency, and elite capture (the extent of personalistic controls of energy companies).  These datasets would inform our root cause analysis (RCA) to identify the specific challenges that are  hindering the formation of stable social contracts in the Central Asian region. These datasets include  UN trade statistics, the World Bank’s World Development Indicator and the German Institute of  Development and Sustainability (IDOS)’s Constellations of State Fragility.

To have a better understanding of the Central Asian case study, please check the following interactive dashboards developed by SFDI’s data analysts, Jeanne Brownewell and Wu Yang