Introducing the symposium on Philipp Lottholz’s Post-Liberal Statebuilding in Central Asia: Imaginaries, Discourses and Practices of Social Ordering

This article is part of a series including:

Scrutinizing ethnographic depth and civil society impacts in Post-Liberal Statebuilding in Central Asia

Taking account of authoritarian peacebuilding in Post-Liberal Statebuilding in Central Asia

Author reply: Engaging with non-political lifeworlds, dialogical research and decolonial horizons through Post-Liberal Statebuilding in Central Asia

A practitioner's perspective from Kyrgyzstan: Post-Liberal Statebuilding in Central Asia

A reading from Kazakhstan with a focus on decolonization: Post-Liberal Statebuilding in Central Asia

Post-liberal Statebuilding in Central Asia is an ambitious attempt to realize that most difficult academic endeavour: to bring together theory and practice, operationalizing complex theoretical ideas in a practical way and in a particular locale. As a result, the book speaks to many different approaches and academic disciplines, from peace studies and peacebuilding to international relations. It also addresses very important questions concerning Kyrgyzstan and the manifold attempts to establish and maintain peaceful order in the country.

The book was written as an attempt to explain order-making practices in the country in the face of turmoil following the 2010 violence in the country’s south, the failures and changes which resulted from intense marketization, and the rise of Sadyr Japarov, Kyrgyzstan’s populist and comparatively authoritarian president. Over eight chapters, the book addresses the competing understandings and practices which are manifest in the process of order-making, including centralized state-building efforts, ideas and actions concerning peace and peace-building, and various aspects of social ordering.

Philipp Lottholz’s unpacking of the contradictions, unintended consequences, and sheer diversity of concepts and practices of ordering provides an analysis of the distinctiveness and heterogeneity of understandings and practices of peace in Central Asia through the lens of state-building. His development and application of a novel post-liberal approach, concern with epistemological and methodological decolonization, and detailed knowledge of Central Asia drawn from fieldwork together form an expansive contribution to understanding and contextualizing ideas concerning peaceful order in the region. The framing of such considerations through the lens of state-building provides contributions of interest to international relations approaches to the region, especially regarding the development of nation-states in post-Soviet Central Asia. Not only does the book bring together such considerations of state-building and peaceful order – a novel contribution in its own right – but also it does so with a distinct, important emphasis upon the diversity of this relationship in its practical manifestations. Lottholz thus highlights not only the importance of state-building to peaceful order in Central Asia, but provides a broad characterization of its multiplicity of manifestations through his discussion of social imaginaries. The book also brings a novel and insightful understanding of the ‘post-liberal’ to fruition through these discussions, expanding the concept beyond its common usage in peace studies to encompass a wider fusion of liberal concepts and practices of ordering with hierarchical, exclusionary and coercive mechanisms.

However, a vital part of academia, and by far the most fruitful aspect, is discussion, critique and the subsequent development of ideas. This author-critic forum is just such an attempt, critically engaging with Lottholz’s work in a productive manner, with diverse contributors exploring its strengths and weaknesses and a final response from the author. Although the book itself is a notably expansive contribution in the ways already outlined, it nonetheless creates room for critique and development through the novelness of the ideas, discussions and approaches which it employs. This forum addresses Lottholz’s work with this in mind and begins with the individual contributions of Arzuu Sheranova, Galym Zhussipbek, Nick Megoran and Noor O’Neill Borbieva.

Each brings a distinctive interpretation and critique, identifying both the biggest contributions of the book along with the areas worthy of discussion and further exploration. Borbieva highlights the book’s excellent, insightful critique of liberalism, while suggesting it lacks beneficial intimate ethnographies of the particular (Borbieva 2023). Megoran praises the use and delimitation of social imaginaries as the text’s main strength but is not persuaded by the decolonial approach employed (Megoran 2023). Although Zhussipbek suggests that more engagement with the resonances between indigenous lifeworlds and the universalist notions of human rights would benefit the book, he nevertheless commends Lottholz’s novel and expansive use of the notion of ‘post-liberal’, endorsing it overall (Zhussipbek 2023). In her contribution, Sheranova applauds the book’s rich empirical illustrations of the making and unmaking of post-liberal order but argues that it has overlooked another social imaginary; the ‘other/non-Western peace’ (Sheranova 2023). This forum ends with a chance for Lottholz to address these critiques directly in the form of a response, bringing the diverse and particular perspective of the contributors and that of the author together (Lottholz 2023).