ABSTRACT
Shifting away from conventional approaches focusing on blessings and curses, rents and corruption, this chapter looks instead at oil in Central Asia as being part of a global production network, or complex. In particular, the chapter first outlines some of the strategies employed in order to accumulate capital and power by corporations and elites in the region. Secondly, it relates the accumulation of capital to practices of labour governance and control by looking at two different spaces of extraction, the ‘oil enclave’ and the ‘oil town.’ Tracing old and new approaches to the study of oil, especially in the context of Central Asia, the chapter engages critically with the existing literature and proposes some starting points for further research. The chapter claims that focusing on strategies, spaces and forms of capital accumulation, together with how global and local labour governance practices articulate, constitute an analytical framework which would ‘deprovincialise’ Central Asia by linking it to wider dynamics and processes observable in the oil complex in other locales and sites beyond the region.
