ABSTRACT
Building on some of the key elements in neo-Gramscian and historical sociology approaches in IPE, this chapter will explore the dynamics of Uzbekistan’s post-Soviet political and economic transformation. The two key questions for this chapter are: How does domestic politics contribute to shaping Uzbekistan’s international engagement? What is the role of domestic socio-economic and socio-political structures, shaped historically, in Uzbekistan’s relations with major powers? In order to answer these questions, the chapter will analyse material, institutional and ideological dimensions of state-society complexes by examining the configurations of Uzbekistan’s state, economic structure and civil society, as well as external conditions that shaped them. The chapter will argue that the state, represented by the ruling regime, has been ‘everything’ in Uzbekistan during the Karimov era. The government, in order to preserve its almost unlimited power over the rest of the society, carried out policies which kept the predominance of the state, by strengthening the state’s control mechanism over the country’s economic resources, while restricting the development of the civil society. These actions, as the book will argue, made Uzbekistan more prone to ‘the war of manoeuvre’ strategy of external powers and more susceptive to external pressure, especially from Russia and China. The chapter will conclude that the new stages of opening-up in the country since Mirziyoyev became president in 2016 offer a positive hope for change in Uzbekistan. The proper implementation of his major reforms will likely make the government play in multiple directions.
