Seventy kilometres south of Tashkent, Pengsheng Industrial Park is the biggest non-energy cooperation project between China and Uzbekistan. Photo: Zhou liang / Xinhua News Agency / PA Images. All rights reserved.Understanding the configuration of political change in Central Asia is traditionally a challenging task. The temptation to examine the region’s authoritarian evolution through a lens of persistent stagnation has proven very hard to resist: such approaches ultimately contributed to the consolidation of a peculiar analytical standpoint, which identified a leader’s death as the exclusive harbinger of change in the region. Everything will get better, but only after the president dies.
This mantra brings with it two analytical pitfalls. To begin with, it reduces any alteration of Central Asia’s authoritarian governance to an inevitably positive process. This diminishes the analytical relevance of downward authoritarian trajectories similar to those recently experienced by Kazakhstan and, more extremely, Turkmenistan. In doing so, it obfuscates our understanding of the consequences of a leader’s death: these consequences must be positive, given that they are part of an essentially new landscape where the authority of a late president has all but disappeared. When the “zero hour” comes, governance standards are bound to be lifted. Some of the positive views of early post-Niyazov Turkmenistan were certainly inspired by this narrative, which, nevertheless, recently resurfaced to shape more decisively the international perception of what is going on in post-Karimov Uzbekistan.
After the death of Islam Karimov in August 2016, predictable references to an elusive “Uzbek spring” have shaped many of the reports published by prominent international media outlets. Indeed, this term is used to describe the political landscape that has emerged in Uzbekistan after Shavkat Mirziyoyev came to power. Some of the flagship initiatives put into place by the new regime strengthened this narrative: the re-establishment of contacts with international human rights organisations and international broadcasters, the accreditation of foreign journalists and the release of unjustly incarcerated local media operators, the introduction of full convertibility for the som and some embryonic attempts at reforming the local cotton industry suggest that something is actually changing in Uzbekistan.
