ABSTRACT
Although generally relegated to the residual category ‘authoritarian’, the highly personalistic regime constructed by independent Turkmenistan’s first president, Saparmurat Niyazov, more closely conforms to ‘sultanism’, a term first coined by Max Weber and revived by Juan J. Linz in the 1950s. Containing strong elements of personal rulership, despotism, constitutional subversion and reliance on a foreign power, Niyazov’s government is generally consistent with Linz’s conceptualisation of a sultanistic regime, which, inter alia, is distinguished by the leader’s freedom ‘to exercise his power without restraint, at his own discretion and above all unencumbered by rules or by any commitment to an ideology or value system’.1 Loyalty to the ‘sultan’ is motivated by a mixture of fear and rewards, according to Linz’s model, and binding norms and procedures are continually overturned by his arbitrary personal decisions. Easily exploitable natural resources, such as oil or gas, whose production can be monopolised by a few enterprises, can provide the resources to sustain such a regime.2
