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FRAMES OF MACKINDER AND “THE MUSLIM QUESTION”:
A CRITICAL GEOPOLITICS OF US. GEOGRAPHICAL
IMAGINARIES REGARDING ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY IN
UZBEKISTAN

presented by

David Lee Baylis

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FRAMES OF MACKINDER AND “THE MUSLIM QUESTION”:
A CRITICAL GEOPOLITICS OF US. GEOGRAPHICAL IMAGINARIES
REGARDING ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY IN UZBEKISTAN
By

David Lee Baylis

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF SCIENCE
Geography

2009

ABSTRACT
FRAMES OF MACKINDER AND “THE MUSLIM QUESTION”:
A CRITICAL GEOPOLITICS OF US GEOGRAPHICAL IMAGINARIES
REGARDING ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY IN UZBEKISTAN
By
David Lee Baylis

The hydropolitical debate taking place within the former Soviet Republics of
Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) has
garnered signiﬁcant attention from the international media over the last two decades. This
has been instigated by an increasing interest in international sites of environmental
degradation as contested spaces prone to conﬂict, particularly with the rise of
environmental security as a dominant geopolitical discourse following the end of the
Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Critical attention has not been paid to the
speciﬁc ways in which the hydropolitical debate has been constructed within Central
Asia, and how it has been packaged, disseminated, and received within the US. through
the media and government policy documents. Environmental security juxtaposes US.
security concerns regarding the potential threat of Islamic extremism alongside rapidly
declining environmental and social conditions in Central Asia. However, this rendering
of security as environmental security has had a detrimental impact on both the social and
environmental landscape of the region, particularly in Uzbekistan. This research aims to
Show how environmental security renders an overly simplistic and dangerous geographic
imaginary of religion and society in Uzbekistan, ultimately beneﬁting the security
interests of those establishing the geopolitical discourse while failing to directly address

the root causes of social and environmental degradation in the region.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to take a brief moment to thank several individuals who have
supported me in my academic and personal endeavors and have helped to make this
document possible. To my advising committee, Dr. Kyle Evered, Dr. Antoinette
WinklerPrins, and Dr. Eric Freedman, thank you for your guidance throughout this
process. I appreciate all of your words of encouragement and criticism, as well as the
countless hours you spent with me, not alone in reviewing this thesis but in providing me
guidance and direction as I continue on in my academic and professional pursuits. In
addition, I wish to thank the faculty and staff of the Department of Geography,
Department of Anthropology, and Asian Studies Center for their assistance in this
process.

I would also like to extend recognition to my good friends and fellow grad
students within the Department of Geography and throughout campus, especially Joel
Gruley, Audrey Joslin, Steve Aldrich, Nate Zukas, Tim Ledoux, Trilby MacDonald,
Jordan Howell, and Gary Schnakenberg. Your advice and humor have all been greatly
appreciated. I would also like to thank two of my good friends from off campus. Thank
you, Thompson and Kirby, for helping to make the transition to Lansing smooth and for
putting up with me and all of my eccentricities. Evan, karaoke has helped me get by.

And ﬁnally to my family, without whom none of this would have been possible,
thank you for all of your love and encouragement throughout my life. Mom and Dad,
Laura, Christina, Lucas, and Monica, if there is anything in this world that I truly believe
in it is this: you are my rock, the foundation of my very being. Everything I am and all

that I am able to do I owe to you.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures ...................................................................................................................... v
Key to Abbreviations ......................................................................................................... vi
1. Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 1
1.1 Conceptual Background .................................................................................... 1

1.2 Research Questions ........................................................................................... 4

1.3 Hypotheses ........................................................................................................ 5

1.4 Contribution to the Geographic Body of Literature .......................................... 9

2. Literature Review ........................................................................................................... 10
2.1 Ecological Politics and Political Ecologies ..................................................... 10

2.2 Postcolonial Studies, “Problematization,” and the Production of “Objects”..12

2.3 Environmental Discourses and the Production/Destruction of Nature ........... 20

2.4 Natural Resources and Conflict: Environmental Security Discourses .......... 28

2.5 Resource Governance: Scale Frames, Conservation, and Hydropolitics ........ 36

2.6 Critical Legal Geographies ............................................................................. 41

2.7 Legal Geographies of Water ........................................................................... 44

2.7 Critical Geopolitics and Critical Environmental Geopolitics ......................... 47

3. Historical Context and Geographical Setting ................................................................ 53
3.1 Geopolitics and Hydropolitics and Central Asia ............................................ 53

3.2 Shelving Perestroika: An “Environmentally Benign Democratic Peace?” ..... 59

4. Methods .......................................................................................................................... 69
4.1 Frames and Narrative Analysis ....................................................................... 69

5. Narrative Analysis and Discussion ................................................................................ 76
5.1 Critical Geopolitical Analysis of Major US. Policy Documents ................... 76

5.1a National Security Strategy of 1991 ............................................... 76

5.1b National Security Strategy of 1998 ............................................... 79

5.1c OSCE Istanbul Summit, November 1999 ...................................... 80

5.1d Heritage Foundation 2002 .............................................................. 81

5.1e Brookings Institute 2004 ................................................................ 83

5.1f Strategic Studies Institute 2004 ...................................................... 84

5.1g RAND Project Air Force 2005 ...................................................... 88

5.1h International Security Affairs 2006 ............................................... 9O

5.1i UNDP-UNEP-OSCE—NATO Environmental Security ................... 92

5.2 Critical Geopolitical Analysis of Major US. Newspapers ............................. 97

5.3 Critical Geopolitical Analysis of Uzbek Application of EnvSec .................. 105

5.33 Karimov’s Uzbekistan on the Threshold of the 21" Century ....... 105

5.3b Loss of Organizational Capital: Uzbek NGOs and Mahallas ..... 107

6. Implications and Conclusion ........................................................................................ 111
7. Bibliography ................................................................................................................ 1 14

iv

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Environmental Security: Causal Pathway of Conﬂict ...................................... 95

KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS
ADB — Asian Development Bank
BG - Boston Globe
BI — Brookings Institute
BWO — Basin Water Organization
CSM - Christian Science Monitor
DSP — US. and Uzbekistan Declaration of Strategic Partnership, 2002
ECACP - Environmental Change and Acute Conﬂict Project
ENCOP — Environmental Conﬂict Project
ESI — Environmental Security Initiative, 1998
GEF — Global Environmental Facility
HF -— Heritage Foundation
ICWC - Interstate Commission for Water Cooperation
ICWC-SIC — ICWC Scientiﬁc Information Center
IMU — Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan
IRP — Islamic Revival Party of Tajikistan
ISA - International Security Affairs
IWRM - Integrated Water Resource Management
NATO — North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NGOR — Uzbekistan Nongovernmental Registration Law
NSS91 - United States National Security Strategy of 1991
NSS98 — United States National Security Strategy of 1998

NYT - New York Times

vi

OEF — Operation Enduring Freedom
OFJ — Uzbekstan Mahalla Consolidation Law “Ochiq Fuqarolik Jamiyati”
OSCE — Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe

OSCE-ISD -— Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Istanbul Summit
Declaration

RAND - Rand Project Air Force

RFERL — Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty

881 — Strategic Studies Institute

UNDP — United Nations Development Programme

UNDP-UNEP-OSCE-NATO — Environmental Security Program for Central Asia and the
Caucasus

UNEP — United Nations Environmental Programme

UZT — Uzbekistan National Environmental Agency (Tabiat)
UZY - Uzbekistan National News (Yangliklar)

WB — World Bank

WP — Washington Post

vii

l . INTRODUCTION

1.1 Conceptual Background

The hydropolitical debate taking place within the former Soviet republics of
Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) has
garnered signiﬁcant attention from the international media over the last two decades. This
has undoubtedly been instigated by an increasing interest in international sites of
environmental degradation as contested spaces prone to conﬂict. The neo-Malthusian
resource scarcity debate in relation to water as a contested resource has been addressed
signiﬁcantly by a broad range of academics (Gleick 1998). Much of this work has
focused on the generation of intricate databases accounting for the sites and situations of
conﬂicts as they pertain to resource scarcity.

However, critical attention has not been paid to the speciﬁc ways in which the
hydropolitical debate has been constructed (and the construction here, I would argue, has
been three-fold) within Central Asia: how it has been packaged, disseminated, and
implemented. Media accounts of the process behind the annual attempts at creating a
transboundary water use agreement have proliferated within the last decade.
Unfortunately, media accounts typically lament the perpetual failure of these talks to
reach common ground (often before the agreement has ofﬁcially failed) without critically
assessing why such discussions are predestined to fail despite unanimous recognition
among member states of dire environmental circumstances. Few accounts go beyond a
limited and deterministic assessment of resource scarcity and the assumption of
incompatible demands among states gleaned from a surface-level assessment of the

hydropolitical process. Predictions of conﬂict are often exclusively focused on

population, religion, and ethnic-based determinants fracturing within the remnants of the
Soviet political and technical structure.

Central Asia’s history is one dominated by the dynamics and power
transformations of transitional empires. Central Asia’s diverse imperial/colonial history,
(be it Persian, Mongol, Timurid, Durrani, Russian, or Soviet) has woven a complex
tapestry of social and cultural ﬁbers into the fabric of everyday life in Central Asia.
Western inﬂuence has only recently reentered the picture with the fall of the Soviet
Union, on hiatus since the days of the Great Game. Much of this attention has been
directed toward development projects, aimed at economic growth and democratization,
primarily in the form of base construction for the “War on Terror” and energy resource
exploration and extraction. There is widespread agreement that these initiatives have
failed, allowing for accelerated social, economic, and environmental degradation.

Eric Sievers, formerly a consultant for several projects in the region during the
19903, levied an interesting critique of the Western development regime as it has
emerged in Central Asia. Most notably, in The Post-Soviet Decline of Central Asia
(Sievers 2003) be condemned these agencies for erasing the place-speciﬁc democracy
construction that emerged during Gorbachev’s Perestroika—era reforms. In a fashion
similar to Tim Mitchell’s critique of Western development regimes in Egypt as purely
technopolitical endeavors (Mitchell 2002), through an analysis of Central Asia’s
changing stocks of capital, Sievers’ critique addressed how totalizing and universal
expert development schemes ignored a critical junction in Central Asia’s historical

experience; one that has had both social as well as material consequences (Sievers 2003).

An interesting connection can be drawn between Eric Sievers’ socio-economic
analysis of the Central Asian landscape and Adeeb Khalid’s historical-cultural
assessment of the political and religious landscape. In Islam After Communism (Khalid
2007), Khalid traced the inﬂuences upon and evolution of, a highly contextualized,
historicized, and socially/culturally contingent formulation of uniquely Central Asian
Islam. In doing so, Khalid emphasized how the political power structures in each of the
post-Socialist Central Asian states adapted strategies for co-opting localized and loosely
Islamic traditions through various legal and political mechanisms. For example, Uzbek
President Islam Karimov’s simultaneous endorsement of state sponsored local or
traditional Islam through the incorporation of local mahallas and his tough stance on
“Wahhabi” Islamic extremism as a means of consolidating power (Khalid 2007) are
evidence of the enduring political relevance of Islam in Central Asia (McGlinchey 2005).

The mahallas, roughly translated as neighborhoods, are communal, typically
urban, social units that have been the primary non-centrally planned building blocks of
civil society in Uzbekistan and throughout Central Asia. According to Sahadeo and
Zanca, alongside “joint families, clans, tribes, and villages, the mahallas are central to
individual and group identities and relations” (Sahadeo and Zanca 2007; p. 33). In
addition, described as “densely social places” (Sahadeo and Zanca 2007; p. 77) or vast,
tightly-knit repositories of social capital, mahallas were pivotal in the promotion and
success of certain Perestroika and Glasnost-era policies as they materialized in Central
Asia. In fact, the mahalla survived and even prospered throughout the entire Soviet-era.
That prosperity, however, is threatened by the Karimov regimes’ crackdown upon

Islamic extremism and on groups engaging in non-state authorized Islamic practice,

including the regular zifoyat gatherings (group meetings) taking place within mahallas
(Sahadeo and Zanca 2007; p. 78).

Despite signiﬁcant differences in the content of Siever’s and Khalid’s work, due
in part to the divergent nature of their individual research questions, both of these authors
uncovered interesting connections among development, democracy construction, and
environmental degradation as they have occurred in Central Asia. Sievers and Khalid
each described how the failure of development initiatives in the region, the collapse of
local economies, the loss of human, monetary, and physical capital, and the steady decay
of the landscape, have been discursively linked to the vestiges of Soviet-era Communism.
Technical and political elites, developers, and the international popular media have joined
together in their geopolitical depiction of Central Asia as a ticking time bomb of
complete ecological collapse, impending conﬂict, and Islamic extremism. Nevertheless,
while the Central Asian environmental landscape is in dire condition, the predictions of

widespread local conﬂict and an inﬂux of Islamic extremism have failed to materialize.

1.2 Research Questions
In this thesis, I focus my analytical lens on Uzbekistan in order to answer the following
questions:
0 How has the current social and environmental condition in Uzbekistan been
framed in the post-Cold War era?
0 What political, social, and environmental characteristics are emphasized by this
post-Cold War discourse? In other words, which particular geographical

imaginaries are sustained or obscured?

0 What effect has this post-Cold War discourse had on the region’s local NGOS,
and mahallas of Uzbekistan (i.e. the dominant ﬁgures in the emerging Soviet
environmental movement during Perestroika and Glasnost)?

1.3 Hypotheses

o The failure of transboundary water agreements and continuing environmental
degradation are not purely endogenous to the region, nor solely a vestige of
“Soviet” era policies.

0 There is a common U.S. geographical imaginary of Central Asia as a whole, and
of Uzbekistan in particular, that characterizes the region as prone to conﬂict.

0 Following the post-Cold War geopolitical transition, Uzbekistan is framed as an
“environmental security” risk by major U.S.-afﬁliated international policy and
security organizations (e.g., RAND and NATO).

0 Under this discourse of environmental security, the potential for conﬂict is linked
to environmental degradation, Malthusian population characteristics, the failure of
democracy in the region, and the strong potential for Islamic extremist groups to
take root. As a whole, environmental security is a new post-Cold War discourse.

In this thesis, I argue that this geographic imaginary makes several historical and cultural
assumptions while neglecting a discussion of democracy—building efforts that took place
during the Perestroika era, between 1987 and 1991. This overly simplistic geographical
imaginary actually serves to hide its origin and realize itself, via the U.S.’s own
reluctance to continue early Perestroika-era democratic and environmental reforms. As a
result, the entrenched nomenklatura, or former Soviet-era political leadership, (i.e.

Karimov in Uzbekistan) is able to engage in further penetration of local institutions and

society. This is evidenced by the Karimov regime’s reorganization of NGOs and local
mahallas under state control.

Ultimately, I argue that the discourse of environmental security is a short-term and
poorly contextualized solution to Uzbekistan’ environmental and social problems.
Through its overtly Malthusian and Orientalist assumptions, an environmental security
narrative places realist concerns of security above that of the Uzbek people (e.g., as with
US. operations in Afghanistan, Karimov’s authoritarian policies), while simultaneously
obscuring environmental security’s own complicity in ongoing environmental
degradation. Environmental security that emphasizes security over environment is not a
long lasting and sustainable option for the region.

Despite the fact that certain environmental concerns, (i.e. the rapid desiccation of the
Aral Sea in particular) in Central Asia are near unanimously agreed upon by political
leadership in the ﬁve former Soviet states, annual attempts to initiate transboundary water
use agreements among the independent Central Asian states continually fail as
environmental and social conditions deteriorate - save for a few widely lauded
“successes,” (e.g., the partial ecosystem revival associated with the North Aral Sea
project). I argue that the general failure of these environmental agreements is not solely a
factor of endogenous characteristics within the region (e.g., the Soviet legacy of an
incompatibility of demands for water sharing among states) despite the widespread usage
of these narratives in Western (and speciﬁcally U.S.) development literature,
international relations think tanks, and the US. popular media. Rather, the current reality
in Central Asia was helped along by a hybrid of endogenous conditions along with US.

policies and representations of the region in the post-Cold War era.

In this research, 1 demonstrate how a US. security discourse that emphasizes fear and
uncertainty, a revival of the Russian Imperial “Muslim question,” and an inversion of the
late Soviet-era US. policy regarding “extremist” elements within the region has
developed and is being applied to Central Asia under the guise of “environmental
security.” This security discourse, rendered as environmental security, juxtaposes alleged
threats of Islamic extremism alongside continuing social and environmental degradation.
While this continuing degradation is often framed as solely a byproduct of the Soviet era,
I argue that the Western Soviet-Orientalist gaze (Mitchell 1988 with my addition of
Soviet to Mitchell's " gaze") often excludes discussions of US. development initiatives
and their failure to allow for place-speciﬁc democracy constructions of the
Perestroika/Glasnost-era to continue.

I also argue that there are two watershed moments in U.S.-Uzbek relations that
highlight the true security goals and realities of the environmental security geopolitical
discourse as realized in Uzbekistan: the events immediately following the onset of the
US. lead Operation Enduring Freedom into Afghanistan as well as U.S.-Uzbek relations
following the events in Andijon, Uzekistan on 13-14 May 2005. After initial attempts to
promote market-based democracies failed in the region during the 19908, the US. slowly
disengaged from many development projects in the region, focusing its attention
elsewhere. However, following the attack on the World Trade Center in New York City
on 11 September 2001 , Central Asia and Uzbekistan in particular became a central focus
of US. international security policy, now rendered as environmental security. However,
the stated goals of environmental security, to promote social and environmental stability

and peace, were put to the test when the Karimov regime brutally put down an uprising in

the northern Uzbek city of Andijon on 14 May 2005. The regime claimed that the
uprising was fundamentalist (allegedly initiated by the group Hizb ut-Tahrir) in nature,
however, journalistic accounts indicate that the mass of individuals that congregated in
Andijon were protesting the unfair arrest and incarceration of 23 local businessmen.
While the Uzbek government reported that 187 were killed, unofﬁcial estimates put that
number at 1,000 or more (Khalid 2007). While the US. initially reprimanded the Uzbek
government, Karimov himself removed the Americans from their Karshi-Khanabad base,
only to have the US. ask for Uzbek assistance again in 2008. Security indeed, but for
whom and at what cost? And what of the environment?

Finally, I argue that an instrument effect of this exclusion and Soviet-Orientalized
rendering is the repressive legislative measures of the entrenched nomenklatura in
Central Asia. For example, despite international condemnation of authoritarian policies
in the region, the Karimov regime in Uzbekistan is able to utilize the US. environmental
security discourse to engage in further acts of supression; namely, the continued
penetration of local and grassroots institutions that thrived during Perestroika and were
signiﬁcant players in the emerging environmental movement (i.e., the mahalla, NGOS
and other local level organizations/institutions). Thus, an overly simpliﬁed and
historically inaccurate US narrative of Central Asia, suffering from the old stereotypes of
the so-called Muslim question and Mackinder’s geopolitics, has actually helped realize
the formerly reiﬁed imaginary — with negative consequences for human and environment

alike.

1.4 Contribution to the Body of Geographical Literature

This research contributes to the limited critical geopolitical literature that
considers environmental policies and institutions. My research ﬁlls gaps in the body of
literature pertaining to environmental security discourses, post-Soviet geographical
imaginaries, and the theoretical frameworks of Tim Mitchell and James Ferguson. I
conclude by echoing Klaus Dodds’ (Dodds 2001) and Nick Megoran’s (Megoran 2007)
call for more research focusing on ethnographic approaches to critical geopolitical frames
and how the failure to do so ultimately succeeds in “producing” these same “dangers and
vulnerabilities” (Dodds 2001: 469). Through my critical geopolitical analysis of
environmental security as it pertains to Uzbekistan, I am attempting to answer Paul
Robbins’ call for more linkages between political geography and political ecology

(Robbins 2003).

2. LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 Ecological Politics and Political Ecologies

Environmental concerns commonly cross both disciplinary and sub-disciplinary
boundaries. Two subﬁelds of geography have contributed substantially to the body of
research regarding human—environment interactions: political geography and political
ecology. However, while both have traditionally engaged in similar lines of inquiry, they
have often done so myopically, making only passing reference to the analysis,
interpretation, and interactions of political institutions with the environment as assessed
within their counterpart ﬁeld (Robbins 2003).

In this section, I address the foundations and frameworks between political
geography and political ecology with respect to human-environment research, paying
particular attention to those that focus on the construction and implementation of
environmental and development discourses. I have aggregated the reviewed body of
literature into two categories beneath an overarching analysis of post-colonial studies
with respect to environmental and development discourses: resources and
conﬂict/environmental security and resources and governance (especially in terms of
scale frames, conservation, and institutional frameworks). While further subdivisions are
possible, for organizational purposes these two subcategories provide clear and logical
breaks within the larger body of literature. In addition, I highlight the distinctions
between the literatures in each category, published either as political geography or
political ecology.

Before beginning the review process, I summarize brieﬂy each of these

categories. A strong link exists between political geography and political ecology in the

10

postmodern tradition with respect to postcolonial studies of environmental and
development discourses (i.e., critiques of Western dominated development regimes and
neo-imperial/neo-colonial power relations as in Blaikie 2004, Escobar 1995, Escobar
1996, Adams 2001, Dalby 2004, Peet and Watts 2004, Radcliffe 2005, and Sharp 2006).
The environmental security literature crosses boundaries outside of geography and
pertains to assessments and critiques of ecological degradation within states as catalysts
for conﬂict and destabilization and thus, threats to the modern international state system
itself (Soroos 1995). Much of the work in political geography and political ecology
critiques the fundamentally realist and Malthusian assumptions of environmental security
(note Dalby 2002, Haas 2002, Flint 2003, and Dalby 2004).

The research regarding resources and governance, which emphasizes scalar
assessments, conceptualizations, and interactions of governance and identity that cross
permeate political ecology and political geography, is perhaps one of the most cohesive
elements shared by the two subﬁelds. Studies of scale and the “local trap” within
political ecology (e.g., Purcell and Brown 2005, Batterbury and Fernando 2006, and
Blaikie 2006) can be directly linked to David Delaney’s political construction of scale
(Delaney and Leitner 1997) and political geographer John Agnew’s “territorial trap”
(Agnew 2003). The bulk of the resources and governance literature focuses on the form
and function of institutional arrangements. In this review, I pay particular attention to the
literature as it pertains to water resource management, concluding by narrowing my focus
to Central Asia.

Throughout the literature review, I trace the methodological and theoretical

connections between political geography and political ecology. I then engage in a short

11

discussion and review of critical geopolitics scholarship, emphasizing recent efforts to
assess environmental issues, which have predominantly been the realm of political
ecology. Finally, I place the linkages between these two sub-disciplines in the context of
my own research interests regarding discourses of democracy, security, and
environmental degradation in Uzbekistan. Ultimately, as noted previously, I seek to
answer Paul Robbins’ call for further integration between the subﬁelds by demonstrating
a narrative method for engaging the “analytical and practical beneﬁts of such a
convergence” (Robbins 2003), linking critical geopolitics and critical legal analysis of

environmental frameworks.

2.2 Postcolonial Studies, Problematization, and the Production of ‘Objects’

Can representation be purely objective? If not, does the particular way in which
an object or subject is represented have practical social and material consequences? Are
representations manifestations, constitutive of power, both, or neither? What is the real
relationship between representation and power? Political ecologists and political
geographers alike have actively engaged in this line of questioning through the analytical
lens of postcolonial studies and critiques of development theory. The Islamic world has
been quite negatively impacted by Western representational constructs. Central Asia is
perhaps even more susceptible to this, as recent efforts to promote security and
democratic reform highlight, due to its unique Islamic and Soviet history.

Foucauldian knowledge/power dynamics, which manifest through discourses of
place, environment, and development, and the formulation of and opportunities for

contesting ‘colonial power and knowledge’ beneath these hegemonic discourses, are the

12

foundational elements of postcolonial studies (Radcliffe 2005). This work is part of the
larger body of postmodern literature that critiques the fundamentally Cartesian view of a
singular, universally discoverable, knowledge or truth about the a priori world out there
(Agnew 2003 and Dodds 2007). What followed from this line of reasoning, emphasizing
the assumption of complete separation between observer and observed, was the
subsequent structuring of the world, as envisioned through a supposedly unbiased and
detached scientiﬁc gaze, which commenced with the European Age of Enlightenment
(Mitchell 1988, Escobar 1996, and Agnew 2003). Modifying Marxian historical
materialism, where Marx implied that, in fact, social existence determined consciousness
(Marx, Engels et a1. 1978), postrnodemists in the tradition of Foucault perform
archaeologies of power-laden expert discourses that arrange social existence; they seek
to disassemble and deconstruct the power relations that help to promote certain dominant
interpretations of reality (i.e. “regimes of truth” for Foucault) (Foucault 1972).

The power behind the production of knowledge about objects can be extended to
a discussion of Western representations of the non-Westem world and the globalization
of govemmentality from a Western center (Sidaway 2000; Watts 2003; Sharp 2006;
Sharp 2008) as a means of compartmentalizing and organizing an otherwise chaotic and
unmanageable world (Mitchell 1988; Watts 2003). The act of producing knowledge
about objects from a postcolonial standpoint has been critiqued, most notably in Edward
Said’s Orientalism, as a process that reinforces hegemonic cultural, social, and political
discourses of the West via the othering of the so-called third world (Said 1979).

This formulation of the other, facilitated primarily through language via

F oucauldian discourses (i.e. “statements with practical effects”) (Abu-Lughod 2005) or

13

“shared, structured ways of speaking, thinking, interpreting, and representing,” (Dryzek
1997) socially constructs a world by helping to realize a formerly reiﬁed geographic
imaginary. In effect, representations do have material consequences (Braun and Castree
1998). Often, the ocular-centric modes of Western science and understanding
simplistically observe and classify characteristics of the non-Westem world as problems
which require the Western Development experts’ diagnosis and prescription, to use the
medical terminology of Foucault (Ferguson 1990, Escobar 1995, Escobar 1996, Mitchell
2000, and Mitchell 2002) for is often accomplished without consideration of the complex
globalizing linkages or colonial histories that perpetuate these conditions (Escobar 1995
and Mitchell 2002). Critiques of the ocular-centric address the dual fallacy of the ocular
or gaze: an over reliance on visual metaphors and methods in science studies (can
invisible phenomenon be explained visually? Is the visual always indicative of
underlying phenomenon), and the assumption that scientiﬁc observation in the Cartesian
tradition is detached and unbiased.

Said was speciﬁcally concerned with the reproduction and dissemination of
erroneous conceptions of the Middle East and the subsequent internalization of these
images by Middle Eastern political elites through “culture talk,” which reinforces certain
Islamic generalizations and promoting the notion of a “good Muslim/bad Muslim”
dichotomy (Mamdani 2004). This process of othering relies on the power of topoi, or
“myths drawn from the colonial imagination and stereotypes” (Hartmann 2005; p. 13),
which function as the “referential basis of interpretation [for] making a textual account

seem coherent within a particular culture’s norms” (Hartmann 2005; p. 13).

14

However, the fashioning of the other is also required to maintain a concrete
conception of the self. In other words, the European fashioning of a distinct Orient and
Occident was an act of self-preservation of European identity that continues today
(Mitchell 1988, Escobar 1996, and Agnew 2003). This fundamental geographic
imaginary of the world as “exhibition” and “museum,” or European modernity and non-
European antiquity, is perpetuated by the Western development agenda of
problematization and technopolitics (Mitchell 1988; Mitchell 2002).

In James Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine, Ferguson assessed the
Foucauldian question of how a “learned discourse” (i.e. Western development theory)
becomes indispensable or govemmentalized (Ferguson 1990). Ferguson applied
Foucault’s analytical framework to the discourse of development with respect to Lesotho,
arguing that the consistent failures of these development discourses to alleviate poverty
and reverse the process of uneven development should have led to their demise as viable
solutions to the so-called problem of under development (Ferguson 1990). Ferguson’s
argument tied into the broader discussion of the problematization of poverty as elaborated
upon by Arturo Escobar in Encountering Development in which the Cold War era
engendered the discursive impoverishment of nearly two thirds of the world (Escobar
1995). Poverty is juxtaposed in the developing world alongside criteria established in the
developed world, allowing for the creation of new “discourses and practices that shape
reality” (Escobar 1995). In essence, underdevelopment and poverty in the Third World
are objectiﬁed or problematized in such a way that the development practitioner’s
solution is rendered as a technical problem within the widely accepted body of

knowledge established by development experts.

15

The unintended instrument effects that accompany the objectiﬁcation and
representation of underdevelopment by the development discourse result from the
exercise of power by the state targeted for development. The state allows itself to be
subjected to the experts of development, albeit opportunities for resistance to
development theory and the structural adjustment policies that accompany it may be
limited, because the state’s power is expanded and strengthened by the establishment of
“local governing machinery” facilitated by the development discourse, i.e. increase in
roads, funding for surveillance of rural/isolated territories (Ferguson 1990; p. 253). The
development projects did not only restrain the state, impinging on its power, they also
enabled it. As Ferguson wrote, “The development apparatus is not a machine for
eliminating poverty; it is a machine for reinforcing and expanding the exercise of
bureaucratic state power — with poverty as the entry point” (Ferguson 1990; p. 255).

However, we can also see that the development discourse fashions the state as a
kind of object that conforms with the development expert’s framing of said problem
within a particular body of knowledge. Escobar refers to this fashioning of knowledge
about the developing state as the three components of the development apparatus:
aboriginal economy, peasant population, national government. Each is tasked with
developing the economy and is deemed unﬁt to do so (Escobar 1995). As Timothy
Mitchell pointed out in Rule of Experts, the state is just one such object that is often
poorly conceived of due to so-called experts ignorance of the fractured and unpredictable
nature of fashioning technical solutions through problematization (Mitchell 2002).

In Rule of Experts, Mitchell looked at the production of several objects within

Egypt from WWII until the 19803. These objects include: the economy, the market,

16

property, universals, capitalism, and, perhaps the most all encompassing, the territorial
state of Egypt. In doing so, Mitchell addresses the idea of agency from a perspective that
is typically not utilized when referring to conventional objects. Objects, such as the
economy, are fashioned in such a way that experts can position themselves outside of it
and look down upon it analytically (Escobar 1995; Mitchell 2002). In a similar fashion to
Ferguson’s discussion of development experts in Lesotho, economy as an object can be
problematized and solved through the development and implementation of technical
solutions.

In Mitchell’s case study of Egypt, he demonstrated how international
organizations objectiﬁed the state by framing Egypt’s “fundamental problems” as limited
natural resources and rapid population growth (Mitchell 2002). Mitchell describes how
this neo-Malthusian argument was legitimated in a classic Foucauldian sense, through the
construction of a particular body of knowledge regarding Egypt as a state and an
economy (Mitchell 2002). The solution to Egypt’s categorical problems was to be found
in large-scale engineering projects that would irrigate and fertilize the deserts and create a
second Nile River Valley that would support Egypt’s growing population (Mitchell
2002).

However, the projects of economic reform were beneﬁcial to only a select few
within the multiplicity of “logics and essences” that allow global capitalism to function
(Mitchell 2002; p. 303). The new irrigation techniques brought with them malarial
mosquitoes that ravaged rural populations, leading to the manufacture and ubiquitous
usage of DDT (Mitchell 2002). Green Revolution agricultural “improvements” were

encouraged, such as the usage of fertilizers and the production of hi gh-end cash crops,

17

that allowed foreign penetration of markets and the concentration of wealth in the hands
of a few at the expense of self-sustained staple food supplies. Finally, while the second
Nile River has yet to be built, the “problems” of population density have been “solved”
through the diversion of vast quantities of water, supplies, and electricity to Egypt’s
suburban desert oases (Mitchell 2002).

By fashioning the state of Egypt as a national economy, Egypt is made into an
object, a set of objects in fact that can be analyzed by experts. Egypt’s people and
landscape become a laboratory for testing these various expert logics, logics that
ultimately mirror the fractured logic of capitalism (Mitchell 2002). Enframing the
economy and the state is an attempt at containerizing all other forms of power and
agency. However, as Mitchell demonstrates, “the forces and overﬂows it must contain
are not limited to those of human agency, whose rationality itself contains forms of the
irrational and non-human” (Mitchell 2002; p. 299). By attempting to create objects that
can be problematized and analyzed, the potential agency of these newly formed objects
and the outcomes of trying to control or manipulate agency that is not fully realized,
results in a tendency to “overlook [or ignore] the forms of leakage, network, energy,
control, violence, and irrationality that can occur” (Mitchell 2002; p. 300). Do objects
have the type of agency that we normally attribute to people? While such a direct
comparison is unclear, it is obvious that the process by which objects such as “economy,”
or “state,” are fashioned are simplistic and focus to heavily on what Mitchell describes as
the binaries of the real and the represented (Mitchell 2002; Robbins 2007).

Binaries play a crucial role in postcolonial and development critiques. Jacques

Derrida describes the role of the binary, the existence of supposedly diametrically

18

opposed and thus mutually exclusive categories, i.e. man and woman, is to create one
category in the absence of another (Derrida 1997). In this sense, you are a women
because you are not a man. Thus the binary creates through exclusion; this is a
fundamental component of psychological understandings of identity crisis and is often at
the root of most xenophobia. We can historically trace the role of binary construction in
most nationalistic endeavors. Like Tim Mitchell’s argument in Colonising Egypt,
Europeanness is reinforced because it is juxtaposed by a strong caricature of the
“Oriental” Egypt (Mitchell 1988).

However, as Mitchell demonstrates, binaries are often false dichotomies.
According to Bruno Latour, through binaries we attempt to “purify” the world, yet
despite these efforts “hybrids” remain and our ignorance of, or unwillingness to except,
the existence of hybrids simply reinforces them (Hartmann 2005); thus is the “paradox of
modernity,” or for Mitchell “the fractured logic of capital” (Mitchell 2002; p. 303).
Several scholars have assessed how binaries are resisted (i.e., “traditional ecological
knowledge” in Berkes 2004, “multiple modemities” in McMichael 1997, “actor-network
theory” in Latour 1993, and “situated knowledges” in Hartmann 2005). However, the
process by which these narratives are created, imbedded in the human conscious, and
reinforced in society must ﬁrst be addressed. That process, the production of geographic
imaginaries, is often accomplished through framing. Frames are simplistic, easy to
remember, and thus dominant representation of place, are implicated in our
understanding of how the world works, and thus, how it comes to exist (Hartmann 2005).

Reality and representation are blurred beyond distinction.

19

Attempts at classifying objects through expert knowledge focus too heavily on

9, 66

notions of “real” and “representation, expert” and “indigenous” knowledge, object and
subject. There is much more going on than these simplistic bifurcations propose. As

Mitchell wrote, “Power and agency must be made a question, rather than an answer

known in advance” (Mitchell 2002; p. 42).

2.3 Environmental Discourses and the Production/Destruction of Nature

How have discourses of power been implemented in the construction of the
human/nature divide, perhaps one of the oldest and most pivotal of binaries?
Speciﬁcally, what power lies in the ability to set the boundaries between humans and
nature? Who is involved and who is excluded in this process? Political ecology in
particular has played a dominant role in the renegotiation of the subject/object
positionality of the environment, often questioning the origins and continued usage of
questionable discursive formulations of place, environment, and development (Zimmerer
1993, Batterbury, et al. 1997, Adams 2001, Adger, et a1. 2001, Peet and Watts 2004,
Blaikie 2004, and Hecht and Saatchi 2007). This literature often rejects long-standing
discourses of environmental degradation, such as the Malthusian population thesis, the
incompatibility of humans/natural environments, and uneducated “traditional” farming
practices, as overly simplistic and problematic assumptions when linked causally to
deforestation and regeneration, soil degradation, and indigenous knowledge.

Tim Forsyth advocates a “realist political ecology agenda” that seeks to
“understand the ramiﬁcations of environmental degradation, but in a way that

acknowledges the social and political construction of deﬁnitions of degradation” (Forsyth

20

2001; p. 147). In this sense, scientiﬁc assessments must be understood in light of the
complex biophysical as well as political agendas that comprise them. The theory of
Himalayan environmental degradation (THED), in which indigenous land use practices
were solely blamed for soil degradation in upstream Nepal, and Western China is one of
the most widely recognized examples. Despite THED’S debunking, the Chinese
government in particular has continued to endorse THED as a nationalistic scientiﬁc
endeavor, undoubtedly as a means for controlling rural localities (Forsyth 1996, and
Blaikie 2004).

With a legacy that traces back to the dynamic notions of landscape and human
environment interconnectedness of Sauer, Kropotkin, and even George Perkins Marsh
(Marsh 1864, Sauer 1983, and Robbins 2004), elements of political ecology have recently
engaged in postmodern archaeologies or deconstructions of formerly concretized
conceptions of environment, nature, and their construction and destruction (Robbins
2004). A notable example is William Cronon’s controversial narrative of the historical
transformation of wilderness from place of fear and exile in European and Christian
mythology, to place of spiritual and political idealism through the incorporation of the
“Doctrine of the Sublime” (Cronon 1995; p. 73). Wilderness became a religious
experience in the United States, but was also inextricably linked to myths of power,
masculinity, democracy, and hegemony (i.e. Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier
Thesis”) (Cronon 1995).

Wilderness conceived of in the majestic and primeval sense of pristine, (read
previously uninhabited by humans) mountains, rivers, and forests, became a relay point

between God and democracy, and thus, the goal of preservation became the isolation and

21

protection of these sacred spaces. However, as Cronon pointed out, a fundamental ﬂaw
of this idea] was its erroneous assumption of a pristine wilderness, which was often
accomplished through a re-writing of the history of wilderness as one that excluded
human interaction and a rejection of human-occupied space as natural (Cronon 1995).
These assumptions are the fundamental basis of the human-environment bifurcation that
exists today.

David Harvey described an additional process by which nature is socially
constructed, linked to its human-derived materialist qualities and discursive
transformation into “resource” via capitalist modes of production. This social
construction varies both spatially and temporally, based on the type and availability of
nature-turned-resource commodity, as well as historical relevance, “value,” and use
(Harvey 1996). One of the classic examples of a relatively abundant and “worthless”
natural material being discursively transformed into a valuable resource commodity is the
diamond. Aside from its relative utility as a hard-cutting material, diamonds acquire
most of their value due to the artiﬁcial control over their supply by the De Beers family
(Le Billon 2001). Unfortunately, the violent conﬂict that arises over access to this highly
constructed commodity is very real.

Just as a Euro-centric or now Westem—centric ordering of Space had
compartmentalized the social and political attributes of the world, it had also succeeded
in a second formulation of the other: human space and natural space. As Escobar
describes, this pair of bifurcations, Western/non-Western and human/natural, are
inextricably linked within the development agenda. Western imaginaries of democracy

and development have been packaged and sent to all corners of the developing world in

22

order to save them from themselves. Capital’s new “ecological phase” (i.e. sustainable
development) emerged with the United Nations World Commission on Environment and
Development’s Bruntland Report (Escobar 1996; p. 332).

The new global vision sought to invert the “limits to growth” argument by
merging the “old enemies of environment and development” (Escobar 1996; p. 330). A
modiﬁed imaginary of the non-Westem world as incapable of defending its environment
and often, in fact, culpable in its degradation was merged with the old imaginaries of
difference. For Escobar, “what is problematized is not the sustainability of local
cultures and realities, but rather that of the global ecosystem, the ‘global’ being deﬁned
according to a perception of the world shared by those who rule it” (Escobar 1996; p.
330)

Escobar’s critique of development as a complete failure that promotes the
“schizophrenic coexistence” of sustainable and unsustainable forms of capitalist
exploitation is one extreme of the development argument (Escobar 1996; p. 334, and
Harvey 1996). However, other researchers within political ecology and political
geography have focused on how other constructions of nature have contributed to
particular outcomes. Much of the literature in political ecology, as previously discussed
in section 2.2, seeks to deconstruct both sets of bifurcations. With respect to water, the
literature often addresses perceptions of water scarcity and the policy agendas that either
constitute or are constituted by this narrative (Johnston 2003). Environment is
conceptualized as both actor and stage, subject and object. Often, these studies highlight

that scarcity is actually an effect of access, not material existence (Peet and Watts 2004).

23

Other studies highlight how resources are valued through different scalar
discourses, from local to international, and how conceptions of scarcity differ between
scales in which scarcity “is as much a social construct as an ecological construct”
(Derrnan and Ferguson 2003; p. 281). Other times, these narratives can be linked to
historical and political struggles or expressions of power. For example, Alatout
demonstrates how environmental narratives are fashioned that differentiate between
concepts of territory and quality of life in Palestine and Israel and how discussions of
sovereignty, security, territory, and populations can permeate environmental meanings
(Alatout 2006).

A signiﬁcant body of literature focuses on the dissemination and internalization of
environmental narratives through governmental processes in parallel fashion to
Foucault’s govemmentality. Tim Luke traced the emergence of environmentality
through an archaeology of the widely used, though ambiguous, term environment. The
word’s early French/English origin was actually used in verb form, “to environ,” in the
sense of “encircling, encompassing, or enveloping” (Luke 1995; p. 64). With the advent
of the global world view, the rapid deployment of environment in place of nature, or
wilderness is described by Luke in relation to Foucault’s description of govemmentality
and the harnessing of bio-power through the transformation of populations into datums.
Human life and activity was quantiﬁed into a set of statistical functions focused through a
prism of expert knowledge on humans and populations (medicine, psychology, etc), as a

means for modeling, predicting, and controlling human activity (Foucault, Senellart et al.

2007)

24

For Luke then, an effective geo-power could also be harnessed by environing the
world; the carving up of the Earth into global spaces, monitored, and assessed through
new forms of eco-knowledge (Luke 1995). Paralleling Escobar’s argument, Luke
described this new regime of environmental truth as an “eco-panopticon” through which,
using the exact language of the aptly named Worldwatch Institue, speciﬁc expert
narratives calling for “an ecologically deﬁned vision of how an environmentally
sustainable society would look in a new vision of a global economy” are made and
reinforced, through which all human agency could then be redirected (Luke 1995; p. 76
my emphasis). Again, the sources of these narratives are largely Western in perspective,
begging the question that sustainability via particular understandings of capitalism,
democracy, and environment is the ultimate goal.

Arun Agrawal refered to environmentality as “a framework of understanding in
which technologies of self and power are involved in the creation of new subjects
concerned about the environment” (Agrawal 2005; p. 166), while leaving room for
subjects (not necessarily individuals) to renegotiate their positionality over time based on
experiences. Allowing for this renegotiation opens the door to such questions as to
“when, why, and how some subjects rather than others come to have an environmental
consciousness” through an understanding of both “practice and imagination” (Agrawal
2005; p. 165). Clearly the door is opened for geographical imaginaries, as referenced by
Agrawal’s acknowledgement of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, although
Agrawal’s denouncement of Anderson’s totalizing of hegemonic discourses, and his
subsequent agreement with Appadurai’s more ﬂuid and less deterministic understanding

of “imagination” is instructive (Agrawal 2005). While the dominant imaginary is a

25

construct of powerful elite representations, there are spaces and opportunities for
renegotiation of, and resistance to, such hegemonic discourses (Agrawal 2005, and
Megoran 2006).

Environmentality research focuses on how technologies of power are wielded by
different scales of governance to educate populations as good environmental stewards. In
addition, it questions what internal characteristics of individual subjects best facilitates
this transformation, and whether acceptance of an environmental discourse actually
equates to transformed environmental consciousness. Often this research addresses
development projects focused on conservation and preservation areas (Campbell 1999,
MacDonald 2005, and Zimmerer 2007) and critiques development projects as
reconﬁgurations of power for controlling the globalizing world order, i.e. “disciplinary
articulations of eco-knowledge might be interpreted as efforts to generate systems of geo-
power over, but also within and through, nature for the governance of modern economies
and societies” (Luke 1995; p. 57).

Political geographers have also assessed the role of discourse in the construction
of place and have often focused on the role of law as a “site of cultural production,”
although they have only recently turned their attention from urban (Blomley 1994,
Delaney 2001, and Mitchell 2000) to other spaces, i.e. nature (Delaney 2001, and
Delaney 2003). Delaney discussesd how law as social constructor distinguishes and
makes ordinary the distinction between categories, i.e. the distinction between private and
public or human and nature (Blomley 1994, and Blomley, et al. 2001). Just as power-
knowledge have been linked by Foucault, so too have power and law been linked by

Delaney and Blomley into a power-law construct (Delaney 2001).

26

Delaney argued that law is a particularly powerful discursive producer of nature
and its antithesis, due to the common assumption of law as unbiased authority, and due to
law’s unique ability to discursively erase its own complicity in its self-preservation. In
addition, for Delaney, other discourses of nature must arguably trace their material
consequences “to the degree that they were validated by law” (Delaney 2001; p. 489, and
Delaney 2003). For example, Delaney notes that the view of nature as resource provider
is linked to the legal conception of property and right of use (Delaney 2001). Thus, while
norms and values reﬂect the internalization of an environmental narrative, it is the law
that constitutes this social existence.

Finally, political geographers have also assessed discourses of nationalism,
identity, democracy, governance, and their relationship to place and development
(Agnew and Duncan 1989, Hardt 2001, Agnew 2005, and Harvey 2006). Much of this
work critiques the linkages and assumptions between speciﬁc interpretations of
democracy and capitalism in a globalizing world. Dalby questioned the assumption of
Western democracy as the sine qua non of sustainable development and environmental
protection. International relations scholars commonly ﬂaunt two sets of truisms
regarding the superiority of democracy: democracies rarely if ever ﬁght other
democracies; and, democracies have signiﬁcantly better environmental records. Dalby
pointed out the ﬂaw in this type of reasoning, noting that democracies often export
conﬂict to non-democracies, have actively engaged in the manipulation of developing
democratic processes, and neglect their own complicity in complex “third map” or
commodity chains and negative extemality dislocations. Therefore, while advanced

socialist states like the Soviet Union exhibited horriﬁc environmental practices, “might

27

this be because, at least in part, its resource extractions and dirty industries were within
its borders?” (Dalby 2002; p. 66).

In particular, the themes of empire and the neo-imperial orderings of global
space via neoliberalism have had a profound inﬂuence on writings of environment and
development (Agnew and Duncan 1989, Harvey 1996, Hardt 2001, Dalby 2002, Dalby
2004, Agnew 2005, Harvey 2005, and Harvey 2006). According to Simon Dalby, while
“environmentalists have long bemoaned the damage done by what is frequently termed
the domination of nature. Once one asks the simple geographical question, what is the
geography of the domination of nature? the answer fairly quickly reveals itself as the
history of colonization and imperialism” (Dalby 2004; p. 161). A postcolonial analysis
of the production of objects and subjects via discourse permeates the remainder of the
literature review of political geography and political ecology, although along slightly

different trajectories.

2.4 Natural Resources and Conﬂict: Environmental Security Discourses

Some of the most common and powerful human/environmental discourses
coalesce around nature as a resource that can spur human conﬂict. This has materialized
in Central Asia since the collapse of the Soviet Union with respect to water and energy
resources. Indeed, the linkages between natural resources and conﬂict are ubiquitous in
political geography and political ecology; “Resources have been used in the past, and
will be used in the future, as tools or targets of war and as strategic goals to be fought
for” (Gleick 1993). Despite near-unanimous disapproval in the academic community, the

vestiges of environmental deterministic thinking are apparent in the neo-Malthusian

28

linkages between population growth and resource scarcity, in no small part due to the
dynamic and high-proﬁle nature of the “scarcity equals conﬂict” discourse. The
overwhelming appeal in the mainstream media of Jared Diamond’s “Collapse” and
Thomas L. Friedman’s “The World is Flat” are a testament to the simplistic resonance
and eloquence of such narratives (Walker 2006). The resource and conﬂict literature has
three main iterations, each of which will be discussed brieﬂy: (1). scarcity and conﬂict,
(2). abundance and conﬂict, and (3). dependence and conﬂict (Deudney 1990, Anderson
1991, Le Billon 2001, Peluso and Watts 2001, Dalby 2002, Haas 2002, Dalby 2004, and
O'Lear 2004). Perhaps no individual is more synonymous with the scarcity and conﬂict
thesis than Thomas F. Homer-Dixon (Deudney 1990, Le Billon 2001, and Dalby 2002).
A foundational ﬁgure within the scarcity and conﬂict literature, Homer-Dixon’s
most notable research contributions focused on the construction of an international
survey that sought to identify the prospects for determining the likelihood of resource
scarcity and environmental degradation leading to civil, intrastate, and international
conﬂict (Homer—Dixon 1994). Homer-Dixon hypothesized that decreasing supplies of
simple resources (i.e. water, would lead to resource wars). Second, he hypothesized that
large-scale migrations due to resource shortages would fuel nationalistic and ethnic
conﬂict. Finally, Homer-Dixon hypothesized that shortages would also generate
economic collapse, leading to social and civil unrest within states. Homer-Dixon’s
alarmist ﬁndings asserted that environmental scarcities would lead to the collapse and
fragmentation of states, uncontrollable out-migration, and an increase in external

aggression among states to alleviate internal institutional stresses (Homer-Dixon 1994).

29

A new world order predicated on environmentally based conﬂicts required a new
international security agenda (i.e. environmental security).

In large part, the rise of environmental security can be traced to the fall of the
predominant global security discourse centered on bipolarity, spheres of inﬂuence, and
arms races, and the need for a new “doctrine” or discourse of international security
(Dalby 2002). According to Peter Has, “the attractiveness of these doctrines is not
solely the nature of the argument they make, but rather their afﬁnity to the values and
beliefs invoked by the person making the argument” (Haas 2002; p. 1). With the collapse
of the Soviet Union, the previous 70-year ideological war between First and Second
World to gain the “hearts and minds” of the Third World had largely evaporated. Its
institutional framework, policies, practitioners, and legacies were, however, still very
much in place.

Corresponding with Homer-Dixon’s “resource conﬂicts,” Thomas Kaplan’s “The
Coming Anarchy,” Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations?,” and phrases like
“population bomb” that had been in existence since the Club of Rome, environmental
threats found new vitality in the quest to bring the now “developing world” into the fold
(Dalby 2002). With the political ideological threat of communism dispelled, a new and
global ecological threat and global risk society was articulated to take its place (Dalby
2002).

Four general environmental discourses invoking resource access have been
articulated: Boserupian or comucopian (human innovation would extend the limits of
nature), Malthusian (population growth would exacerbate a limited supply of earth’s

resources), sustainable development (proper management of earth’s resources would

30

offset natural limitations), and postmodern (resource distribution and uneven
development, not resource supplies, are key) (Haas 2002). While much of the recent
debate regarding resources and conﬂict has been conducted between Malthusian and
Comucopian theories, a post-Rio Conference shift towards sustainable development has
occurred (Haas 2002). This marks a transition in the debate that has been critiqued as a
redistribution of blame rather than a more egalitarian redistribution of resource access
and environmental justice, linked to Harvey and Escobar’s neo-liberal
reconceptualization of nature and Luke’s discussion of the process of environing (Luke
1995, Escobar 1996, and Harvey 1996).

As Dalby points out, so-called “global environmental threats” are often
unabashedly linked to “poor indigenous land use practices” (i.e., the ‘ﬁrpstream-
downstream argument”) (Blaikie and Muldavin 2004) with little attention afforded to the
larger-scale inﬂuences of “ecological shadows” cast by advanced industrialized states
(Dalby 2002; p. 150). Concepts such as the ecological shadow and footprint call for
more nuanced understandings of the commodity chains that situate resource extraction
and depletion, i.e. negative extemalities or bads (Luke 1995) in far-off localities while
the beneﬁts are reaped in the industrialized and now post-industrialized West. Therefore,
it is cruelly and doubly ironic that geographic imaginaries of these places as exotic
paradises are disseminated on the one hand, initiating grand lamentations when
purportedly endogenous environmental degradation is revealed. Western development
and scientiﬁc experts levy burdensome International Monetary Fund and World Bank

austerity measures against these countries, blaming localized degradation exclusively on

31

the local without ever implicating the more powerful and perhaps more culpable
exogenous actors.

A signiﬁcant portion of the resource scarcity and conﬂict/cooperation literature
pertains to water (Wolf 1989, Gleick, et al. 1991, Gleick, et al. 1993, Wolf 1995, Wolf
1996, Gleick 1998, Giordano and Wolf 2002, and Wolf, et al. 2002). However, this
literature complicates Homer-Dixon’s assumptions by focusing on water and
conﬂict/cooperation from a comparative institutional perspective that varies between the
local, state, transnational, and international scales. Giordano, Giordano, Wolf
(Giordanoand Wolf 2002) have constructed event databases that quantify water-related
conﬂicts (violent, legal, or otherwise) at each scale. Their studies address the apolitical
notions in Homer-Dixon’s hypothesis by highlighting the complexity inherent at each
scale and between scales, as well as the strong variance in characteristics among states.
For example, in their cross-study analysis of Israel, India, and South Aﬁica in relation to
their neighboring riparian states, the authors ﬁnd that the complex nature of these
relationships “highlights not only the intricacies of hydro-political dynamics and their
variation across geographic space, but also the need to consider the often-distinct
historical and political conditions within a region or basin if water relations are to be well
understood” (Yoffe, et al 2003; p. 9). Other contingent factors include the existence and
strength of international water laws, institutions, and treaties, the type and quality of
governance within riparian states and across basins, and the role of uncertainties
including climatic variation and the ability of institutions to adapt to these uncertainties

(Yoffe, et a1, 2003).

32

By and large, the apocalyptic prophecies of Homer-Dixon, Kaplan, and
Huntington have failed to materialize on a global scale, and in instances where resource
issues are implicated in conﬂict, myriad complications to Homer-Dixon’s hypothesis are
apparent (Dalby 2004). Two other bodies of resource and conﬂict literature build on the
shortcomings of Homer-Dixon’s hypothesis. First, in contrast to the resource scarcity
literature, the resource abundance literature elaborates upon the concept of a resource
curse (Auty 1994, Le Billon 2001, Sachs and Warner 2001, and Collier and Hoefﬂer
2005)

In this argument, scarcity is not the primary motivator for conﬂict, but rather the
complications that arise from abundant resources make states more susceptible to
violence. Conﬂict is a result of resource abundance-derived rents being used to fund
economically rather than politically driven internal conﬂict, as ruling elites and
opposition forces compete for highly taxable resource supplies (Le Billon 2001). In
addition, resource abundance is linked to “poor economic growth and development,” due
to the disproportionate amount of institutional and ﬁnancial assistance that is wrapped up
in mono-resource economies. Therefore, much of the resource abundance literature
demonstrates a strong positive correlation between resource abundance-fueled economic
stagnation and internal conﬂict (Auty 1994, Sachs and Warner 2001, and Collier and
Hoefﬂer 2005).

The third and ﬁnal resource and conﬂict thesis modiﬁes the abundance theory,
arguing that abundance alone is not a causal factor for conﬂict, but rather resource
dependence (i.e. resource curse). As Le Billion wrote, scarcity and abundance

themselves are social constructs of the environment when seen outside of their explicit

33

social and political contexts. The critical methods of political ecology in particular have
highlighted the need to assess the historical context of resource dependence within
countries, the material and social characteristics of a particular resource, and its speciﬁc
political economy (Harvey 1996, Le Billon 2001, Peluso and Watts 2001, Haas 2002, and
O'Lear 2004). According to Le Billion, “resources and armed conﬂicts are related to the
distortionary effects of dependence upon valuable resources on societies, the
conﬂictuality of natural resources and their political economies” (Le Billon 2001, p. 566).
These “distortionary effects” and their conﬂict economies have various economic,
social, and spatial implications. The resource curse or “Dutch disease” is a common
affliction of resource-rich countries by which export-oriented income causes national
currencies to rise (Le Billon 2001, and O'Lear 2004). In Central Asia, this phenomenon
has been noted with respect to energy resources in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and
Turkmenistan (Luong and Weinthal 2001, and Kim 2003). Agricultural resources, like
cotton, are also linked to the resource curse literature with respect to Uzbekistan (Kim
2003). The impact on non—resource related sectors is two-fold. First, non-resource-
related sectors experience a talent and brain drain to the more competitive and lucrative
resource-oriented sector and the afﬁliated rent-seeking associated with the resource
sector. The impact on more socially beneﬁcial sectors (education, research, health)
through a loss of hrunan and physical capital is exacerbated, of course, by the currency
appreciation (Le Billon 2001, Peluso and Watts 2001, and O'Lear 2004). Resource rents
provide viable sources of income and power for maintaining entrenched political
leadership, reinforcing patronage systems and kleptocracy. Such systems are often

classiﬁed as failed governments or failed states due to the emphasis they place on

34

personal wealth and accumulation over and above the social welfare of the population
(Le Billon 2001).

In addition, certain spatial characteristics of resources contribute to spaces prone
to conﬂict. Resources may be classiﬁed as either point source (located heterogeneously at
explicit locations, i.e. mines, oil and gas wells, etc) or diffuse (homogenously distributed,
i.e. agricultural resources) (Le Billon 2001, Peluso and Watts 2001, and O'Lear 2004).
Additionally, resources may exhibit ﬂagmentation, or isolation that increases the
likelihood of territorial competition for resource sites and creates vast spaces of no-
man’s land between resource sites. A corollary effect of resource fragmentation is
peripherality. As resource sites become increasingly contested and dangerous,
comparatively safer trans-border trade increases, exacerbating outﬂows of human and
physical capital and leading to further fragmentation (Le Billon 2001, Peluso and Watts
2001, and O'Lear 2004). Finally, as O’Lear demonstrates, borders themselves play a role
in the nature of resources and conﬂict, as those borders that lack concrete
conceptualization increase the likelihood of contestation (O'Lear 2004, and Diehl 2007).

There are several possible outcomes associated with these spatial characteristics
of resources. “Resource lootability” (Le Billon 2001; p. 569, and Collier and Hoefﬂer
2005) is attributed primarily to point-source, extractive resources and increases the
likelihood of fragmentation and opposition to political regimes and elites. There are also
tactical locations (Le Billon 2001) along resource supply chains that serve as secondary
points of interruption. At both the point source and tactical locations, the establishment

of heavily governed militarized spaces (pipelines and rigs in particular, but also dams,

35

mines, railroad and shipping networks, etc.), which are prone to conﬂict among
competing entities, serve as another point of capital divergence from other sectors.
However, the postmodern environmental discourse advocated by some further
complicates the picture (Le Billon 2001, Peluso and Watts 2001, Watts 2003, Peet and
Watts 2004, and Watts 2004). Building on the framework of govemmentality while
inverting Foucault’s outcome of “govemable spaces,” Watts emphasized how a particular
type of resource “economization” (in this case “oil capitalism”) produces various
“ungovernable spaces” that represent a variety of contentious and unpredictable violences
(Watts 2004). In Watts’ account of oil-oriented “violent environments” in Nigeria,
struggles among new players (local chieftainships), ethnic groups, and the nation-state
complex highlight the weakness in articulating any simplistic accounting of resources and
conﬂict, whether they be associated with scarcity or abundance (Watts 2004). The power
relationship between the discursive transformations of environment and development are

called into question.

2.5 Resource Governance: Scale frames, Conservation, and Hydropolitics

The ﬂipside of the resources/conﬂict literature, in conjunction with work done by
individuals like Wolf and Gleick, has concentrated on examples of resources and
interstate/intrastate cooperation. Within this literature, particularly that which focuses on
natural resources and institutional arrangements, much emphasis is placed on scales of
governance and the various roles of international, regional, state, and local entities. This
literature assesses which governmental scale is the most appropriate level for

concentrating environment and development reforms, often based on the assumption that

36

decentralization of environmental conservation, governance, and development initiatives
to the local level through community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) are
likely to be the most “democratic” and beneﬁcial to local populations (Berkes 2004).
lntemational development agencies such as the World Bank, lntemational Monetary
Fund, and Asian Development Bank have made CBNRM their modus operandi (Leach et
al. 1999, and Tsing et al. 1999). With respect to Central Asia, much of the research
traces the failure of transboundary water agreements to the vestiges of the Soviet-era.
Berkes proffered that, in order for community-based conservation to be effective,
it is essential that a cross—scale approach consider the scale at which the complex
ecological problem is articulated, and the scale at which it is to be managed. Therefore,
an international environmental issue such as climate change can be micro-managed at the
local scale only if it is couched within an effective international scale management plan.
However, scale as a seemingly innocuous concept is itself shown to be highly objective.
The local, for example, can only be understood in relation to particular perceptions of
what constitutes locality, as competing groups within the same “locality” may be shown
to have highly differing interpretations of the said space (Mitchell 2000, and Walker and
Fortrnann 2003). At this point, it is necessary to focus on political geography’s
discussion of scale, particularly in John Agnew and David Delaney’s argument regarding
the articulation or construction of scale, and the historical particularities that make such
imaginaries of scale seemingly indispensable. In Central Asia, local control of water
allocation and management evaporated beneath the Soviet legacy of centralized

governance.

37

For Delaney and others (Smith and Dennis 1987, Herod 1991, and Delaney and
Leitner 1997; p. 93), “nested political scales of authority,” the institutional and societal
arrangements from household to neighborhood and from local to global are constantly in
transition. Peter Walker’s discussion of conﬂict among residents in Sierra County,
California, is demonstrative of this. Both long-term ranching residents as well as recent
migrants consider themselves as locals. In addition, large mining companies with vested
interests in Sierra County operating at regional, national, and international scales
successfully inject themselves into the political debate as local entities (Walker and
Fortmann 2003). For Delaney, these scales are negotiated and/or projected upon the
landscape, often covertly. Therefore, before the more complex arguments about scale
can be deconstructed, the scale of representation itself must ﬁrst be deconstructed
(Delaney and Leitner 1997).

John Agnew built on this concept in terms of its most common incarnation within
political geography: the Westphalian modern nation-state. Agnew refered to the
dominance of state-centric realist conceptualizations of international relations as a vestige
of the European ocularcentrist organization of global space, based in the Cartestian
history of observation as central to science and reality. Therefore, the very mapping of
global space, from cartography to urban planning, is centered on perspective, ﬁxed in the
tradition of the “European gaze.” The linkage between the visual and the known can be
seen today in the predominance of European or other Western geographic imaginaries, as
evidenced by postcolonial critique (Agnew 2003).

Today, however, the problems of a state-centric international order are evident in

the “friction” between realist frameworks and rhetoric, and a globalizing society of

38

porous and increasingly irrelevant borders (Tsing 2004). A rigid and impractical system
of state-centric international relations, overlain by an increasingly complex global
problematic, is what Agnew refered to as the “territorial trap” (Agnew 2003; p. 53).
Subsequent scholars have commented also on the state-centric systems inability to
successfully manage complex environmental scales, from ecosystem to global (Dalby
2002). Several political ecologists have modiﬁed Agnew’s and Delaney’s territorial trap
and constructions of scale in their critiques of the local trap of CBNRM. Much of this
work builds on Ferguson’s discussion of instrument effects associated with downscaling
power and authority (Ferguson 1990). Several key points arise in their critique of scalar
assumptions, democracy, development, and environment.

Much of the scholarship critiquing scales of governance and the territorial trap
pertains to assumptions implicit in the linkage between environmental management and
democracy. Often democracy is viewed as both necessary and sufﬁcient for so-called
sustainable development, and democracy is assumed to be at its purest incarnation at the
local level. There are a few logical leaps made within these assumptions, the ﬁrst being
that environmental management is best achieved by Western (and speciﬁcally U.S.)
development regimes’ agendas for sustainable development.

Aside from negating the complicity of the developed world in the developing
world’s environmental problems, as Simon Batterbury and Jude Fernando pointed out,
sustainable development initiatives tend to pay attention only to circumstances where
“states and capital interests coalesce,” despite their strong argument for decentralizing
control to the local (Batterbury and Fernando 2006). Therefore, commitments to cultural

sensitivity in the governance agenda are tolerated only if they are compatible with

39

capitalism and modern state structures (Batterbury and Fernando 2006). This begs two
questions in line with the ecological fallacy: that the concerns of the local are those of the
state and international, and that everyone’s interests are best served by Western models of
development. Not only is development assumed, but also that Western models of
democracy are the logical pathway by which to achieve this (Batterbury and Fernando
2006).

The second assumption being critiqued is that the local scale is inherently prone
to more egalitarian and democratic institutions for adjudication and distribution (Purcell
and Brown 2005; Batterbury and Fernando 2006; Blaikie 2006). However, a cadre of
“local trap” critics demonstrates that there is, in fact, “nothing inherent about any scale,”
and that “the agenda of those who are empowered” determines the outcome of any
development initiative (Purcell and Brown 2005). Purcell and Brown showed in their
analysis of bee-keeping projects in the Brazilian Amazon that a discourse centered on the
local is often stressed because it is an effective strategy for obtaining and consolidating
power. In addition, many competing groups may simultaneously use the local frame
while articulating competing claims for legitimacy (Walker and Fortmann 2003, and
Purcell and Brown 2005).

As Purcell and Brown’s case study illustrated, factions may arise within
previously uniﬁed local scales, i.e. the splintering of the beekeeper’s collective. Finally,
as Watts’ case study of ungovemable spaces and factions associated with the Nigerian oil
economy demonstrates, local scales are as prone to despotism as states (Watts 2004,
Purcell and Brown 2005, and Blaikie 2006). Blaikie demonstrated this in his assessment

of CBNRM in Malawi and Botswana, in which he uses the term “decentralized

40

despotism” from Mamdani (Blaikie 2006, 1943, and Mamdani 1996). In addition,
Blaikie critiqued the validity of inscribing internationally generated (and speciﬁcally
Western) deﬁnitions of local in place, prior to an assessment of the particularities of
place. Batterbury and Fernando provided a series of potential solutions to these concerns.
First, they agreed with Blaikie that “good governance” needs to adhere to “local context”
(Batterbury and Fernando 2006).

Finally, governance, environment, culture, and place are all framed by meaning,
as well as corresponding threats to these imaginaries of place. Dalby addressed these
notions in his discussion of “external threats” and local communities in relation to the
“not in my backyard” (N IMBY) phenomenon (Simon and Mackenzie 1997). Different
incarnations of local community may form and disperse in response to perceived external
threats. Hilda Kurtz refered to this as a process of “naming, blaming, and claiming”
through the construction of “scale frames and counter-scale frames” (Kurtz 2003, p. 249).
In the NIMBY example, despite the fact that there may be internal needs associated with
an external threat (the local community beneﬁts from the electricity from a coal-ﬁred
power plant) responsibility for negative extemalities can be displaced, depending on the

strength of the coalition and its ability to create an imaginary of place.

2.6 Critical Legal Geographies

Central to the discussion of resources and governance is the role of law. In
Central Asia this has emerged, not only with respect to the discussion of transboundary
water agreements, but also in relation to the role of law in the production of Western-

style market democracies. However, a more recent offshoot of political geography

41

concerns its engagement with the critical legal studies movement initiated in the 19805 by
jurist Roberto Unger, and its critique of law and law’s impact on space. Essentially,
Unger sought to unravel the discursive transformations perpetrated within the legal
profession that served to self-substantiate the law’s claim to be an objective and apolitical
juridical science (Unger 1983). Unger articulated that law is, in fact, a purely political
ﬁeld, in which the subject matter and the practitioners themselves are embroiled in a
strategic agenda of representation, legitimation, and inclusion, as well as the antithesis of
these statements. Unger focused his critical lens on the historical and political
construction of two seemingly untouchable ideologies: Western ideals of democracy and
free markets. These two concepts have received signiﬁcant critical attention within
geographic analyses of environment and development; however, this has rarely been
undertaken in relation to the legal constructions that have helped to sustain them.

Law has historically been conceptualized as an articulation of the practical and the
logical, and legal scholarship reinforces this notion in a three-fold process. The main
objective of legal scholarship is the “rationalization of the real,” (Blomley 1994; p. 9)
meaning that law, as a body of knowledge, makes practical sense in relation to the
activities of daily life, i.e. protections for individuals, property, etc. Second, legal
scholarship is particularly adept at justifying its own existence, via a seemingly tightly
woven history of case studies, legal precedents, and rulings. Finally, legal practice itself
is steeped in a mythology of rationality and order, appearing as socially respectable,
reliable, and unbiased (Blomley 1994, and Blomley, et al. 2001). However, as Unger
initially points out in his critique, law is not objective and is actively engaged in the

erasure and re-inscripition of its own history. Legal geographer Nicholas Blomley has

42

shown that history is not the only thing that law is engaged in the construction of. Space
and law are also mutually constitutive.

Nicholas Blomley was one of the ﬁrst geographers to explicitly state that legal
practitioners had for too long engaged in an overt exclusion and/or decontextualisation of
spatial concepts. Consequently geographers, perhaps in part due to a legacy of inferiority
complexes in relation to the hard sciences (of which law was essentially claiming to be)
tended not to critically engage juridical concepts in their work (Blomley 1994). Blomley
argued that, with respect to geography, “law does indeed matter” and demonstrates many
ways in which the critical legal geographic project has, since Kropotkin’s critiques of the
geographical imaginary of “statist nationalism,” sought to shed light on the “effect of
legal practice on space” (Blomley 1994). Kropotkin’s particular interest in human-
environment interactions, and his historical legal geography of the downfall of
“communal economic free Spaces” and the rise of “commercial Roman law” and the elite
“hierarchical” ordering of space (Blomley 1994) serve together as an ideal segue into the
current body of human-environment literature that considers the role of legal institutions.

Paul Robbins noted that while Blomley and other legal geographers have focused
on the role of law in the production of urban spaces (Blomley 1994; Mitchell 2000;
Blomley, Delaney et al. 2001; Mitchell 2003), there is plenty of room for including legal
constructions of nature in the critical legal project (Robbins 1998). A signiﬁcant portion
of this literature review has been devoted to the discursive construction and destruction of
nature. Legal dimensions of this process have received some attention (Delaney 2001;
Delaney 2003), by way of law’s ability to construct and/or permit spaces where particular

understandings of nature persist.

43

For example, the international frameworks promoting sustainability and
conservation have set the limits of the discussion by deﬁning what pristine natural spaces
are, who can access them, and who is allowed to make decisions regarding use, access,
and exclusion (Robbins 1998; Hecht and Saatchi 2007). In addition, law helps constitute
the boundaries of the legal process, and therefore the boundaries encompassing the space
where the legal process takes place, by arbitrating among truth regimes and the
geographic imaginaries constructed by these regimes. Due to the speciﬁc role of the
legal process, legal constructions of space defer to those geographic imaginaries that are
backed up by accepted standards of evidence, often those from the privileged perspective
of ofﬁcial or expert knowledge, often to the disadvantage of traditional or local

knowledge (Robbins 2000).

2.7 Legal Geographies of Water

The literature pertaining to water law is extensive, diverse, and cross-disciplinary.
As such, I touch brieﬂy on some of the foundational elements of transboundary water
principles and networks. I also assess the water law literature as it pertains to
Orientalized geographic imaginaries. This literature surveys the historical precedents that
separate water law from other forms of property or land-based law in the European legal
context. Much of this is tied to the complex spatial character of the hydrologic cycle; due
to water’s literally ﬂuid, exceptionally dynamic, and interdependent materiality it has
traditionally confounded historically situated predominate legal systems. Water, by its
very nature is transboundary in character with respect to all boundaries, whether human,

political, or otherwise (Teclaff 1991). As such, most of the writings on the historical

44

development of watercourse access and use law and transboundary water management
access adhere to the principles of the UN Water for Life Resolution in which access to
clean water is deemed a fundamental human right. Management of water is assessed
through three primary areas of study: treaties and agreements that fail to allocate water
effectively; treaties that effectively allocate water among internal states; and effective
international transboundary water treaties (Kliot 2001).

Historically, the Westphalian nation-state system promoted territorial
sovereignty, often extending this sovereignty over territorial waters. The result was the
partitioning and defense of fractured lentic and lotic ecosystems (Teclaff 1991). There
are notable exceptions to the territorial claims upon watercourses. Freedom of navigation
was a commonly documented phenomenon along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in 5000
BCE. These practices continued in Europe and the Middle East through the Roman
Empire and Middle Ages, and were ofﬁcially codiﬁed by the French Executive Council
in 1792 through its natural law evoking proclamation that “navigable rivers” were to be
shared by all states (Teclaff 1991). The state-centric emphasis is notable, particularly as
applied during the colonial period. For example, while contestations would arise over
navigation rights of the primary rivers of Europe based on historical access and use
claims, the European colonizers adopted these rulings unequivocally in places like
Africa, due to the fact that Africa’s rivers were deemed to be “unencumbered” by a
history of use. Aﬁican human history was ignored as the rivers were essentially rendered
natural and without prior human ownership or usage (Teclaff 1991).

The history of water use contrasts starkly with that of navigation. Cultural

characteristics are often used to deﬁne different customary law approaches to water

45

allocation. One of the most well known examples of this is the Oriental Despot in which
large-scale irrigation projects are linked to particular ruling elites. As the name indicates,
the Oriental Despot reinforces the East/W est binary, as it is deemed a cultural
particularity unique to the East. Grounded in the various economic theories of
individuals as divergent as Richard Jones, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and Friedrich
Engels, is their distinction between “Asiatic” and “industrial modes of production”
(Wittfogel 1953; Wittfogel 1960).

Oriental Despotism was grounded in a set of assumptions. Oriental or
“agrodespotism” differed from industrial despotism in that the “old society was semi-
managerial” encompassing total political power while allowing for “limited social power
whereas the industrial despot maintained control over all forms of power” (Wittfogel
1960; p. 29). It was claimed that the Oriental Despot maintained total control, through
the leveling of status within society. The ruling elite maintained all power within a single
family or individual without the existence of other nobility. Fear was the essential
element of the Oriental Despot’s power (Wittfogel 1960). The theory was popularized
under the writings of Karl Wittfogel, who often compared the despotic character of
communist states to the Oriental Despot.

The Oriental Despot was thus linked to culturally speciﬁc mechanisms for water
allocation: the large-scale irrigation project and the lack of European conceptions of
private property in the East. One was contingent upon the other, since under the Oriental
Despot “public works were deemed the realm of the central government” and through the
control of these public works, the Oriental Despot controlled the entirety of society

(Ervand 1974; p. 6). This “Orientalized” conceptualization of water law continued to

46

permeate discussions relating to transboundary networks in the East, although the body of
Islamic law pertaining to water conﬂicts describes water as a gift from God accessible to
all (Ahmad 2000).

In terms of geographic considerations of legal frameworks, J.A. Allan, Abdel
Metawie, and others have analyzed the resource scarcity argument for water in the
Middle East and Africa through an assessment of the effectiveness of legal mechanisms
for arbitrating conﬂicts among water users (Allan 2000, Allan 2002, and Metawie 2004).
Kathryn Furlong and others debate the complexities of Mekong Basin hydropolitics by
assessing how ecological arguments, scales of representation, and mechanisms for
controlling access and use of water are included in the institutional process of drafting
policy (Bakker 1999, Klein 2003, Furlong 2006, and Sneddon and Fox 2006). Similar
research has been conducted for the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta (Brichieri-Colombi
2003), the Tungabhadra River Basin (Mollinga 2001), the Indus River Basin (Mustafa
2007), and the Amu Darya and Syr Darya (O'Hara 1997, O'Hara and Harman 1999, Uitto

2002, and Wegerich 2008).

2.8 Critical Geopolitics and Critical Environmental Geopolitics

However, central to the ﬁeld of political geography (and an ideal topic for
political ecology to merge with) sits the critique of resource oriented classical geopolitics.
In addition, nowhere has classical geopolitics played a more seminal role than Central
Asia. The history of classical geopolitics can be traced to the writings of statesmen and
scholars of the Great Powers in the ﬁnal decades of the 19th century. Following a wave

of colonialism that culminated with the Scramble for Africa, all of the world’s “empty

47

spaces” had been declared claimed by the European gaze (O Tuathail, et al. 1998, Agnew
2003, and Dodds 2007). The world was now stated to be “at the end of geography” and a
new articulation of geo-power, the ordering, naming, and describing of geographic space,
was oriented around a new “closed global space” in which all places must be treated as
part of the global totality. Tuathail wrote, “It is no longer possible to treat struggles for
Space in isolation from each other, for all are parts of a single, worldwide system of
global space” (O Tuathail, et al. 1998; p. 21).

Geopolitics can therefore be deﬁned as “the politics of writing global space” (O
Tuathail 1996). Central to the geopolitical writings of Halford Mackinder, Friedrich
Ratzel, Alfred Mahan, Rudolph Kjellen, Karl Haushofer, and Nicholas Spykman, was the
construction of a geopolitical gaze within this closed global space that sought to establish
tactics for organizing and controlling the new geographic arrangement. Their writings
elicited strong nationalistic and masculinist claims, creating narratives of global others
and promoting notions of neo-imperial expansion, not only for dominating global space,
but for saving the inhabitants of these other (read non-European) global spaces from
themselves (O Tuathail 1996, Agnew 2003, and Dodds 2007).

Mackinder’s “The Geographical Pivot of History” for example, constructed a
theory of world domination that established Central Asia as the global pivot (Mackinder
1904). Essentially, Mackinder argued, whoever controlled the pivot region or Heartland
could control the outer rims of the globe (O Tuathail 1996, O Tuathail, et al. 1998,
Agnew 2003, and Dodds 2007). His thesis served as a fundamental backbone of early
twentieth century international relations that prevailed throughout the Cold War and

arguably continues to inﬂuence international affairs. Perhaps most importantly

48

geopolitical writings, often endorsed if not implicitly written by “military and political
elites,” created distinctly subjective narratives or geographical imaginaries that were
treated as concrete and scientiﬁcally objective geographic realities. In the words of
Nicholas Spykman, “Geography does not argue, it just is” (O Tuathail 1996; p. 52).
Critical geopolitics are a body of strategies that seek to “challenge the
‘geographing’ of global political space as a pre-given system of containers for politics, a
state-centric system of space” (O Tuathail 1996; p. 62, and O Tuathail, et al. 1998). The
critical geopolitical method has traditionally utilized Derridean methods of textual
deconstruction to establish a F oucauldian archaeology of geo-power discourses.
Originally aimed at the writings of statecraft (speeches, policy documents, treaties, and
laws), of individuals acting in the capacity of states, “speaking power to power” (O
Tuathail 1996, O Tuathail, et al. 1998, Agnew 2003, and Dodds 2007), more recently
critical geographic studies have demonstrated how geographical imaginaries of place are
created and reproduced via popular media, i.e. television, newspapers, tabloids, ﬁlm, and
music (Dalby 1990, Dalby 1996, Dodds 1996, Myers, et al. 1996, Sharp 1996, Boland
2000, Sharp 2000, Sparke 2000, Klein 2003, Culcasi 2006, and Debrix 2008).
Orientalist discourses that simultaneously exoticize the places of the East, while
characterizing them as developmentally backwards, dangerous, prone to conﬂict and
savagery, and in stark contrast to modern Western society are particularly abundant (Said
1979, Myers, et al. 1996, Sharp 1996, Sharp 2000, Klein 2003, Sharp 2006, and Sharp
2008). Finally, a more recent push has sought to include ethnographic accounts of
various forms of resistance or beneath hegemonic discourses. For example, Nick

Megoran used a combination of ethnography and critical geopolitical deconstruction to

49

assess “everyday resistance” to state discourses of fear and violence regarding a disputed
border between Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan (Megoran 2004, Megoran 2004, Megoran
2005, Megoran 2005, Megoran 2006, Megoran 2007, and Mt’rller 2008).

However, rarely has the critical lens of critical geopolitics been directed at
environmental issues, despite signiﬁcant attention to the construction of environmental
security discourses, from climate change to the “who will feed China?” media campaign
(Dalby 1996, Boland 2000, Dalby 2002, Barnett 2003, Debrix and Weber 2003, and
Dalby 2004). Fewer still have focused on the geopolitical discourses inherent in
discussions of environmental policy, environmental institutions, and development policy.
Simon Dalby’s account of the Rio Conference as presented in the United States press is a
notable example (Dalby 1996). Fairly detailed historical, political, and legislative
accounts exist with respect to hydropolitics in the American West (Worster 1992),
including media accounts of hydropolitical debates (Sonnett, et al. 2006), yet there is
much room for expanding this line of inquiry to other spaces of environment and
development. As such, my purpose in this thesis is to full the lacunae in the literature
regarding critical environmental geopolitics, focusing on Uzbekistan in particular.

To demonstrate the potential beneﬁts of fully integrating critical geopolitical lines
of inquiry with the subject matter of political ecology, I use Paul Robbins’ metaphor of
political ecology as both “hatchet” and “seed” (Robbins 2004). As hatchet, political
ecology seeks to conduct archaeologies of the power relations behind dominant
discourses pertaining to humans and environment, and to deconstruct the fundamental
elements that reinforce and recreate these discourse on the landscape. Critical geopolitics

has sought to do the same, in relation to the activities of government and political

50

regimes. In effect, both disciplines emphasize the power of geographic imaginaries of
place, however, critical geopolitics attention to practice of “framing,” through law,
speeches, government documents, and popular media, needs to be more fully engaged in
deconstructing the linkage between international affairs, development and environmental
institutions, and the politics of othering. As “seed,” according to Robbins, by
deconstructing power relations, the doorway has been opened for inserting new narratives
in place of the old dominant ones. Real options for environmental and social justice can
be inserted and negotiated within these new discursive interstices.

Since the end of the Cold War, debates have raged over the shape of the new
world order and the existence of national and international secruity concerns that
potential threaten to disrupt the global system. However, “there are not only struggles
over security among nations, but also struggles over security among notions. Winning
the right to deﬁne security provides not just access to resources, but also the authority to
articulate new deﬁnitions and discourses of security” (Lipschutz 1995; p. 8).
Environmental security has clearly been posited as one of these new discourses I also
argue that this takes place within nations as well, however each scale is interwoven in the
process. The Karimov regime’s efforts to further securitize Uzbekistan beneath the
questionable claim of “Islamic extremism” and the exacerbation of economic and
environmental degradation in Uzbekistan can be linked to the US. geopolitical topoi or
discourses of “Communism,” “Islam and terrorism,” and “environment and democracy.”

I argue that the critical geopolitical method is well positioned to productively
contribute to the body of literature that extends between political geography and political

\

ecology, particularly with respect to the legal geographies centered on discourses of

51

environment and development. In the section that follows, I outline my critical
geopolitical methods for assessing U.S. geographical imaginaries regarding democracy,

security, and environmental degradation in Uzbekistan.

52

3. HISTORICAL CONTEXT AND GEOGRAPHICAL SETTING
3.1 Geopolitics and Hydropolitics in Central Asia

Within the broadly deﬁned ﬁeld of "’postsocialist studies” a concerted effort has
been made to assess development regimes and the discourses of development and '
transition in the countries of the former Soviet Union. This literature has sought to
untangle the interwoven notions of “property relations and private ownership, the
promotion of multi-party politics, and the status of NGOS” (Hann 2006) and to
deconstruct the assumption of a single, linear path to prosperity via a de facto course of
Western modernization (McMichael 1997, and Humphrey and Sneath 1999). In short,
the prospect for a multiplicity of “modernities” must be taken into account, and those
practices previously conceived of as traditional should be reevaluated if a lasting social,
environmental, and economic stability is what is truly sought. However, most of these
writings are outside the ﬁeld of geography, in rural sociology and economic
anthropology. In addition, this work has tended to concentrate on East Asia, Russia,
Inner Asia-Mongolia, and China (Humphrey and Sneath 1996, Humphrey and Sneath
1999, Humphrey 2002, Verdery and Humphrey 2004, and Hann 2006).

A critical evaluation of environment and development is lacking with respect to
post-Soviet Central Asia. For example, the literature on the hydropolitical debate in
Central Asia continues to problematize the ongoing “water crisis” as a matter of
technopolitics and/or a source of conﬂict; as an issue that can be solved through
technological solutions (i.e. sustainable water resource management) and as a source of
potential international instability between competing parties. Thus environmental

security platforms are Often endorsed with respect to this region. For example, in 2002

53

the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), then United Nations Environment
Program (UNEP), and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE)
launched the Environmental Security initiative (ENVSEC) in conjunction with the United
Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE); the Regional Environmental
Center for Central and Eastern Europe (REC), and the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) (Tookey 2007).

UNDP-UNEP-OSCE-NATO have produced several reports identifying
“environmental security hotspots” throughout Central Asia through annual ENVSEC
reports, couched in neo-Malthusian vocabulary that can be traced back to the Brundtland
Report. These reports argue that local communities and NGOS need to play a greater role
in enacting and monitoring their own policies and that political leadership needs to play a
greater role in promoting transboundary cooperation and environmental awareness.
However, it is expected that these goals will be in conjunction with OSCE-UNDP-
UNEP-NATO guidance and mandates (Tookey 2007). Most development assessments
agree that progress is impeded by the vestiges of Soviet engineering (both social and
technical), as well as the cultural particularities of Central Asia, particularly its Islamic
history. “A sharper focus and commitment is needed by the governments of Central
Asia. They must overcome the legacy from the days of the former Soviet Union, where
the environment suffered” from Soviet style industrialization and agricultural practices,
speciﬁcally mining (uranium), cotton production, and weapons manufacturing (Tookey
2007). However, there are lacunae in these historical descriptions that require further

attention, particularly the more recent history from Perestroika forward.

54

One would be hard-pressed to ﬁnd much disagreement with the critical
assessment of most Soviet environmental practices. However, the policies that would
eventually lead to the human-induced depletion of the Aral Sea were themselves a
product of geopolitical motivations: spheres of inﬂuence, arms races, and nationalism.
One of Josef Stalin’s primary goals was to ensure the Soviet Union’s primacy in the
global system through domineering agricultural prowess. He envisioned a transformation
of the seemingly blank and barren deserts of the south into an agricultural powerhouse.
This was to be achieved through the diversion of vast quantities of river water for
intensive irrigation of the region, and by ignoring the indigenous knowledge regarding
irrigation practices that had been in place for decades. In particular, the practice of
individuals in the community voting in local mirabs and aksakals (literally ‘white-beards’
or village elders, often experienced in the usage and allocation of water for agricultural
purposes) was abandoned (Zavgorodnyaya 2002). Soviet engineers began to draw up
their own plans for the irrigation of Central Asia’s vast deserts.

Early on, in the drafting of their plans, it was acknowledged that diverting large
amounts of water from tributaries in the region would halt the ﬂow of waters into the
Aral Sea. However, Soviet engineers remained unconcerned, declaring the Aral Sea as “a
mistake of nature” that would be rectiﬁed by the superiority of Soviet science and
planning. In this sense, nature itself was problematized and the solution would be found
in the privileged expansion of Soviet technology and policy throughout the region,
particularly through agricultural developments as envisioned by Grigory Voropaaev
(Wegerich 2008). Following in the footsteps of his predecessor, Nikita Khrushchev

implemented the next wave of Stalinist-inspired reforms by enacting the Virgin Land

55

Policy of 1953, which included the expansion of irrigation throughout Central Asia
(Wegerich 2008). Eventually, this policy would lead to an increase in irrigated land from
4.5 million hectares in 1965 to 7 million hectares in 1991 (Wegerich 2008).

Large-scale development projects, particularly dams and canals, were constructed
to facilitate this transformation. Similar to Tim Mitchell’s case study of Egypt (Mitchell
2002), massive irrigation projects such as the Nurek Dam in Tajikistan and pumping
stations throughout Turkmenistan rapidly changed the landscape of the region and
created a complex, interconnected development network that diffused the water
allocation and irrigation apparatuses unevenly (Wegerich 2008). In essence, water
management infrastructure was constructed or implemented where it made sense in terms
of resources and technology, but not socially (Wegerich 2008). While the Central Asian
states’ political borders were consciously drawn up in an effort to divide the peoples of
Central Asia into nationalistic categories and steer their allegiances toward their northern
neighbor, the hydropolitical borders completely ignored these political boundaries.

For example, the utilization of the Amu Darya did not correspond to any
administrative boundaries (Wegerich 2008). Central planning from Moscow directed
water management throughout Central Asia, focusing on the drafting of basin plans by
regional design institutes (from the Syr Darya Basin plan completed in 1982 to the ﬁnal
Amu Darya Basin Plan drafted in 1987) that designated limits for water allocation
between republics and set targets for the eventual development of irrigated lands within
each basin sector (Burghart and McKinney 2002). In addition, in response to breaches in
the plan by local authorities during periods of drought-induced water scarcity, Moscow

imposed Basin Water Organizations (BVOs) in each administrative area run by central

56

officials to ensure that basin plans were complied with. Communal maintenance of land,
a type of agricultural practice that had been essential during the pre-Soviet era, was
abolished and replaced with government bodies such as the Regional Directorates of the
Ministry of Land Reclamation and Water management (O'Hara and Harman 1999).

In terms of infrastructure, hydro-electric power plants, darnns, and large canals,
were overwhelmingly located in the upstream states, particularly Tajikistan, while the
bulk of irrigated cotton production was concentrated in Uzbekistan and parts of
Turkmenistan. For example, the construction of the Bassagi-Kerki Main Canal, the
predecessor to the Karakum Main Canal, began in 1954 and today has diverted 12.9 cubic
km of water across the Karakum Desert in Tajikistan (O'Hara and Harman 1999). In
addition to irrigation, Soviet policy promoted the usage of highly mechanized farm
implements, resulting in an exponential increase in ﬁeld size and the corollary need for
24-hour irrigation (O'Hara and Harman 1999).

During this 25-year period, Soviet water policy tended to favor Turkmenistan and
Uzbekistan while Tajikstan became a water supplier and Afghanistan was ignored as a
buffer state (Wegerich 2008). However, the circumstances that favored Uzbekistan as the
so-called hydro-hegemon would rapidly change following the collapse of the Soviet
Union and the advent of sustainable water resource management in the region with the
declaration of the Aral Sea as an ecological crisis. While Soviet scientists and ofﬁcials
claimed that the death of the Aral Sea was a necessary evil (Rakhimov 2005), as Mitchell
showed with respect to the unforeseen outcomes of using DDT on mosquitoes in the
Mediterranean (Mitchell 2002), the Aral’s demise had much more far-reaching

consequences then could ever have been predicted. The most extreme effect, by virtue of

57

its dramatic visibility, was the physical transformation of the Aral Sea itself and its
surrounding environment. As is Figure 1 below makes quite apparent, the Aral Sea, once
the fourth-largest lake in the world, had lost 90% of its volume and 74% of its area within
the span of less than 30 years (Stone 1999).

In fact, the Aral is no longer one single body of water, as Figure 1 illustrates.
Beginning in 1987, the Aral had begun to separate into two bodies of water connected by
a small channel: the smaller North Aral Sea fed by the Syr Darya and the larger South
Aral Sea fed by the Amu Darya (Micklin, et al. 1996, and Micklin 2002). The shrinking
sea exposed 3.6 million hectares of salty seabed. In addition, the salinity of the reduced
water bodies increased from 10 to 100 grams of salt/liter, killing of virtually all species of
ﬁsh as well as most other life within the Aral (Micklin, et al. 1996, and Micklin 2002).

The effect on the human environment was equally extreme. The extermination of
the ﬁsh populations was a moot point and only added insult to injury to the dozens of
small ﬁshing villages that once dotted the Aral’s coastline. Fishing villages like Muynak,
Uzbekistan, full of ports and canneries, now sat 70 km or more from the closest shoreline
(Stone 1999). The climate itself was irrevocably altered by the Aral’s disappearance.
Toxic dust storms ravaged the barren salt ﬂats of the dried lake bed. The Karakalpakstan
autonomous region of Uzbekistan has one of the highest recorded death rates from
respiratory illnesses at 167 per 100,000 (Stone 1999).

The ﬁnal blow was dealt to the very reason the Aral was drained (i.e. cotton).

The changing microclimate itself, a regional drought that has been directly linked to the
loss of the Aral’s maritime effect, has negatively impacted Central Asian cotton

production. Most Soviet methods for irrigation of cotton and management of its

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production were maintained after the collapse of the Soviet Union, although with a
signiﬁcant reduction in the funding available maintain these practices.

The Soviet irrigation network could never have been deﬁned as efﬁcient.
Lacking the requisite funding to repair and maintain the irrigation network canals ﬁll
with mud and salt and require dredging. Outdated pumping equipment, with little
possibility of acquiring replacement parts, rusts and is ultimately abandoned (O'Hara and
Harman 1999). An estimated 28 percent of water simply evaporates; some argue that this
ﬁgure is in fact quite conservative and the actual amount of water lost to leakage and
evaporation is probably closer to 60 percent (Wines, NYT 9 December 2002; 14A).

While a rapidly deteriorating irrigation system lacking a sufﬁcient supply of
human and physical capital functions improperly, salinization associated with a rising
water table from over-irrigation ﬁlls ﬁelds with as much as 700 tons of salt per hectare
(Stone 1999). With the earth literally salted over, $300 million is lost in crop production
each year (U itto and Duda 2002), forcing the exile of over 250,000 former inhabitants
from the region (Blua, RFERL 12 April 2005). lntemational reaction, after decades of
ignorance, was shocked out of its stupor when the Iron Curtain lifted and the extent of the
devastation was plainly visible. A massive body of water, on par with that of the Great

Lakes, had nearly been destroyed by so-called technological expertise.

3.2 Shelving Perestroika: An “Environmentally Benign Democratic Peace”?
However, by the mid 19803, amidst Gorbachev’s calls for reform and referendum
and a “revolution from above” as part of the newly enacted policies of Glasnost (frank

discussion) and Perestroika (restructuring), an increasing awareness of environmental

59

degradation and a signiﬁcant groundswell of environmental activism among the general
populace materialized (Robinson 1988). Alongside the establishment of Union-wide
environmental organizations, such as the newly constituted State Committee on
Environmental Protection (Goskompriroda), community-sponsored environmental NGOS
and other grassroots environmental movements appeared on the Soviet landscape,
including those whose speciﬁc concern was the protection of water resources (Sievers
2003). From Islamic laws extolling water’s importance within a “community of water
use,” (Ahmad 2000) to the widespread usage of age-old aphorisms regarding “water as
gold” as state propaganda, Eric Sievers questioned how a society that continuously places
as much emphasis as it does upon the intrinsic, social, and economic importance of water
can continue to systematically degrade it (Sievers 2003).

In pursuit of this question Sievers engaged in an analysis of the various stocks of
capital and their usage within the former Soviet states of Central Asia. As he points out,
while each state maintains natural, human, social, and organizational capital, the
continuing practices of environmental degradation are best linked to the poorly
understood situation of organizational capital in the region. Sievers ﬁrst presented a clear
deﬁnition of organizational capital as “the rules and various organizations within a
community and [that which] refers functionally to the ways in which these rules and
organizations shape incentives related to actions intended to impact the social and natural
environment” (Sievers 2003; p. 71).

Essentially, this is a sticks and carros legal framework that either encourages or
discourages individuals and groups from participating in the political arena. These rules,

intentional or otherwise, “impact and shape the social and natural environment” (Sievers

6O

2003; p. 71). Sievers wrote that, while there is extensive research within the development
community relating to stocks of organizational capital, it tends to be framed exclusively
within the Western developmental paradigm. Thus, terms such as “capitalism,
communism, democracy, rule of law, subsidiarity” are viewed within a particularly
exclusive and predetermined context (Sievers 2003; p. 70).

An effect of this is the assumption that certain characteristics of organizational
capital are necessarily associated with certain “normative aspirations” (i.e.
“sustainability, human rights, and the eradication of poverty”) (Sievers 2003; p. 70).
Democracy is excluded from this list by Sievers due to the fact that, while democracy is
often associated with hmnan rights compliance, it is neither necessary nor sufﬁcient for
its existence. “Democracy and communism are not only not the only possible types of
government [and] they are also not unifome practiced. . . .democracy is rarely argued for
democracy’s sake, but rather for democracy as a proxy for some other aspiration.” In the
case of Western democracy, democracy is often proximally associated with market
economies (Sievers 2003; p. 70).

Sievers stated that, by semantically confusing organizational capital in the post-
Soviet states of Central Asia, its real inﬂuence on the environmental landscape of Central
Asia is being overlooked within the overall scheme of development in the region. Much
of this damage goes in hand with the discursive shell game that is being played by IGOs,
NGOS, and governmental ofﬁcials. Western newspapers in the late 19803 tended to focus
on extreme Soviet projects for environmental reform, rather than the expansion of
grassroots environmental movements. For example, an article from the 20 December

1988 edition of the New York Times regarding the status of the Aral Sea references the

61

“ambitious and controversial engineering scheme: tapping two Siberian rivers and
diverting their water to Central Asia” (Keller, NYT 20 December 1988; p. 1C). A similar
article also referenced the project in relation to the ongoing demand for water to irrigate
the ever-expanding cotton ﬁelds of Uzbekistan (Keller, NYT 20 December 1988; p. 1C).
Perestroika-era environmental groups are all but omitted in these journalistic accounts,
and if they are they are often mischaracterized.

While much of the current state of water and land degradation is continually
(and appropriately) associated with past Soviet practices, both government ofﬁcials and
international development organizations are guilty of continuing this damaging legacy as
well. According to Sievers, “if a problem of the post-Soviet era in Central Asia is that
development agencies incorrectly conﬂate paper plans with real world impacts, the
practice is not unprecedented in the region, but, rather echoes Soviet-era practices of
tweaking paper reports for political purposes” (Sievers, 2003; p. 195).

Sievers pointed to the period both immediately preceding and following the fall of
the Soviet Union as essential to understanding the current state of organizational capital
in the region today. Perestroika allowed for a sharp increase in established NGOS in the
region. Of the 2,500 — 4,000 registered NGOS in Uzbekistan, only 158 of these
organizations are still active (Sievers 2003). However, while 60% of these organizations
indicate that they are comprised of “citizens interested in environmental protection,” less
than 20% report that they are involved in the drafting of conservation and environmental
laws in their region (REECA). Less than 10% of organizations surveyed in the report
utilize public reviews in relation to forestry and water resource protection and energy

efﬁciency programs (REECA). Perhaps even more telling is the scale of involvement of

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the various organizations, from local to regional, national, and international. Overall,
35% of all environmental NGOS that are active in the region are constituted at the local
level (villages and towns), with 29% at the regional, 28% at the national, and 14% at the
international.

Sievers pointed to the fact that traditional structures of community governance
(mahalla residential community associations) allowed for the ﬂourishing of
environmental NGOS during Perestroika. However, while these local associations have
survived into the post-Soviet period, the emphasis on problematic transboundary
agreements for water use by international NGOS and IGOs alongside new reforms
(particularly in Uzbekistan) that seek to incorporate mahalla organizations within the
state structure have resulted in an overall weakening of citizen involvement in the
environmental reform process. This process has been exacerbated by the entrenchment
of the Soviet-era Nomenklatura in positions of power within each of the individual state
governments (Sievers 2003).

How and why was this entrenchment allowed to come about? Political stability
and economic reform was sought over the uncertainty of democratic reform, and this
stability was ultimately supported (tacitly or otherwise) by Western developers who
immediately engaged in their familiar mantra of privatization and sustainable
development (Sievers 2003) alongside the emerging notion of environmental security.
For example, a New York Times article from 1993 references how President Karimov
engaged in a “crackdown on political opposition,” which allegedly had ties to Islamic
fundamentalist groups. As the article points out, the US was quick to open an embassy

in Tashkent, “seeing Uzbekistan as a bulwark against Iran-style Islamic rule, which

63

seems to have replaced Communism as the West’s nightmare of choice” (Erlanger NYT
13 Feburary 1993; p. 4).

The legacies of the Russian imperial “Muslim question” (i.e. the fear that political
Islam would topple tsarist rule in Russia as discussed in Crews 2006, and Burbank, et al.
2007) Mackinder’s heartland thesis, Orientalist thinking, and the Islamic extremist topo
linger heavily over Central Asia and in Uzbekistan in particular. Just as the Russian
imperial elite debated the imminent threat of a consolidated Islamic uprising against the
Russian empire, so too have US ofﬁcials from all branches, from military to foreign aid,
constructed a discourse of post-Soviet Central Asia as a potential hot-bed for Islamic
extremism. However this discourse reﬂects a poor understanding of Central Asia’s
unique history in relation to Islam. A3 Adeeb Khalid (2007) illustrated in Islam after
Communism, Central Asia has never had a strong history of political Islam and this
subdued “everyday life” articulation of “Muslimness without Islam” was further
enhanced by 70 years of Soviet secular policies.

Being a Muslim in Central Asia is fundamentally different than in the rest of the
so-called Islamic world in that Muslimness is part of an identity that is linked to
community and tradition, not necessarily political and strong theological beliefs (Khalid
2007). Therefore, despite the widespread appeal of narratives positing Central Asia as
the new Afghanistan, i.e. the alarmist writing of Ahmed Rashid in Jihad: The Rise of
Militant Islam in Central Asia (Rashid 1994, and Rashid 2002), and despite Central
Asia’s bordering Afghanistan, the unique history of civil society and religion in this

region makes such predictions largely false and irresponsibly dangerous (Khalid 2007).

64

However, the Uzbek government has been a strong ally in US. led actions against
drug-runners and fundamentalist elements since 1999 and most recently in the “War on
Terror,” since 2001. In 2002, the US and Uzbekistan signed a declaration of strategic
partnership, with Karimov being a strong supporter of US foreign policy “from Iraq to
Cuba” (Khalid 2007; p. 184). Karimov has been quick to link any acts of resistance or
violence in Central Asia to “extremists,” “fundamentalists,” or “Wahhabis,” largely
conﬂating the meanings of these terms to his own ends. In particular, the Islamic
Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and the Islamic Revival Party (IRP) (a legally
recognized political party in Tajikstan, since the end of the Tajik civil war) have been
labeled as factions of larger scale terrorist organizations (Khalid 2007).

The IMU fought alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan and is a registered terrorist
group with the US. State Department. However, their links to international terrorist
elements are tenuous, and it appears that their existence is more closely associated with
local level political dissatisfaction (i.e. Karimov himself) (Khalid 2007). While the
relationship between Uzbekistan and the US. has cooled since the violent shooting of
hundreds of protestors at Andijon in May of 2005, as Khalid argued, this is largely due to
Karimov’s own interests in re-orienting power relationships away from the West; US.
international policy is still interested in reopening strategic points of access in the region
(Khalid 2007). However, it is clear that Karimov’s primary interests have been served by
his relationship with the US government and his support of the discourses of terrorism
and Islamic extremism: further penetration into Uzbek civil society.

This loss of emphasis on local involvement is a fundamental agent in the further

decline of the environmental condition in the region. As resources shift from local

65

initiatives to protect the environment toward international environmental agencies, small-
scale yet tangible, on-the-ground environmental reforms have been replaced by large
scale, on-paper, environmental draft laws, annual conferences, and seminars where
legislation is adopted over issues that have already generated consensus (prevention of
wildlife poaching) (Sievers 2003). As Sievers states, the end result has been sustainable
development efforts that are, in essence, “a strategy, wrapped in a program, inside a plan
[where] the language and unchallenged ideological platitudes of the international
environmental sphere are, especially within the post-Soviet republics, no different and no
less rich than Orwellian doublespeak” (Sievers 2003; p. 200).

Sievers described two primary reasons for the current status of organizational
capital in the region. The ﬁrst relates to structural alterations in the global economic
system due to globalization (tight commodity markets, increased personal mobility). The
second contributing factor relates to the strict policies of international donor
communities, primarily, the “distortion of local societies and the lack of emphasis on the
stronger aspects [of community] in Central Asia, i.e. education, science, and Perestroika
expressions of consensus for substantive democratic reforms” (Sievers 2003; p. 201). By
completely excluding all things “Soviet” in the region, Western developers and policy
makers have adopted the security-laden post-Cold War discourse of environmental
security, exacerbating the conditions for those very things they purportedly wished to
eliminate (i.e, a “foreign aid enterprise. . .although directed towards building the non-state
economy, democratic accountability, and a new reliance on effectiveness over jingoism
that has itself been almost exclusively state directed, unaccountable, and deﬁnitely

managed for ideological and political correctness”) (Sievers 2003; p. 202).

66

The result of the refusal to incorporate Perestroika-era social and environmental
reforms is a continued policy stalemate among the entrenched leadership of the post-
Soviet Central Asian republics, the gradual incorporation and/or disenfranchisement of
the local-level environmental NGOS, and the continued degradation, loss, and overuse of
Central Asia’s environment, especially water. “The actions of Western development
agencies, especially Americans, in ignoring Perestroika dialogs and advocating what, in
effect, was a tabula rasa approach to democracy, rule of law, and civil society. . .derailed
much of the potential for reform in the region” (Sievers 2003). Rather, the region itself is
continuously characterized as lacking the capacity for real democratic reform; as this New
York Times articles laments, that it “display [3] little appetite for either democracy or
open markets. Political repression is intense, corruption is widespread and economic
policy owes more to Stalin than George W. Bush” (Andrews, NYT 31 May 2002; p. 10A
my emphasis).

The political repression of the nomenklatura is directly addressed, but in such a
way as to assume it is, was, and always will be the status quo of the region. In some
instances, almost paradoxically, Central Asia’s independence alone is seen as the culprit
for the collapse of the Soviet water use system. From the NYT: “What ultimately caused
trouble was the potent brew of independence, which collapsed the central control and
socialist economics that underpinned the tradeoffs for so long’” (Wines 2002 December
9) From statements such as these, the old geographical imaginary of the Oriental Despot
is alive and well.

In Uzbekistan, this climate has resulted in an environmental legal framework that

relies on technological solutions adapted from Western and Soviet methods, and an

67

annual meeting of the ICWC lntemational Fund for Saving the Aral Sea that ultimately
fails to come to an agreement on a water-management pact (Parshin 2008). In addition,
development policy is seen as a corollary of security policy (i.e. the emphasis on
development schemes in line with ENVSEC). As Mitchell and Ferguson pointed out,
experts are often not aware of placed-based particularities and tend to focus on the
suspensions of politics from situations through technopolitcal solutions. For example,
those individuals and groups working on the partial restoration of the North Aral Sea
have lauded it as a triumphant comeback and a resounding success (Micklin 2002). If the
Aral Sea was destroyed by humans, surely it can be saved by them as well? All that is
needed is an agreement on sustainable resource use that satisﬁes each individual state.
However, by endorsing these environmental security and technologically oriented
solutions, the place-speciﬁc democratic institutions associated with Perestroika and the
most effective instruments for social and environmental progress (i.e. mahallas and
NGOS) have been impacted negatively by the Karimov regime’s further penetration into

Uzbek civil society.

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4. METHODS
4.1 Frames and Narrative Analysis

My research assesses the framing of environment, democracy, and security
through the production of a particular geographic imaginary with respect to Uzbekistan.
This geographic imaginary emphasizes the policy goals of environmental security, as it
has been articulated since the end of the Cold War and the drafting of the United States
National Security Strategy of 1991 (Dalby 2002). I assess critically the development of
this environmental secruity inﬂuenced geographic imaginary of environment, security,
and democracy in Uzbekistan by engaging in narrative or discourse analysis of popular
media representations of the region, policy documents and statements, and speeches.
Qualitative methods such as narrative or discourse analysis are the predominant research
methods of critical geopolitical practitioners (Dalby 1996, Dodds 1996, Myers, et al.
1996, Sharp 1996, Boland 2000, Barnett 2003, Megoran 2004, Mercille 2008, and Muller
2008) and have also been a foundational component of political ecology (Peet and Watts
2004, Blaikie 2004, and Robbins 2004). Narrative analysis has also been an increasingly
vital component of environmental policy related research (Richardson 2001).

The narrative analytic method differs from the content analytic method in that
content analysis in the social sciences is quantitatively driven with standardized programs
and methods for coding content data genuinely agreed upon, whereas no standardized
method exists for narrative analysis. Preponents of narrative analysis, in the tradition of
Derrida and Foucault, argue that positive-empiricist methods claim objectivity through

mechanistic assumptions and are problematic in that they often obscure their own

69

historicity and require deconstruction in order to understand the power-laden dynamics
that have rendered them as expert and objective understandings of a singular truth or
reality, at the expense of all other interpretations (Smith 1992). In essence, purely
objective analysis of highly subjective and complex matters is argued to be problematic
as “more than three decades of science studies have shown us that a crude, empiricist
‘test’ that can yank the rhetorical illusion cleanly from the ‘facts’ is chimera” (Hartmann
2005; p. 9). The facts themselves must also be questioned.

By avoiding “context-free” understandings, narrative analysis actively engages
context and seeks out underlying meaning, demonstrating the important contingencies of
history, politics, culture, geography, and environment with respect to communicated
word, imagery, and sound. Through a critical reading of the content of policy documents,
media accounts, speeches, and literature, “narrative analysis permits a holistic approach
to discourse that preserves context and particularities. . .which may not be available by
other methods” (Smith 1992; p. 327). Narrative analysis facilitates the archaeology of
powerful frames, or widely circulated and sustained representations of people and place,
(Hartmann 2005) which are complicit in the longevity of particular geographic
imaginaries (i.e., Orientalism); thus the processes of legitimation and dissemination
behind a geographic imaginary can be excavated and critiqued.

In this research I utilize narrative analysis in order to parse out the complex
relationships imbedded in the environmental security discourse with respect to
Uzbekistan. I engage in narrative analysis of several sources from within the United
States and the Karimov regime of Uzbekistan, as well as the policies of various

intergovernmental agencies with which these countries are afﬁliated. This approach to

70

discourse analysis assesses the frames of environment, security, and democracy that are

articulated and sustained within a post-Cold War geographical imaginary of Uzbekistan.

Narrative analysis will be conducted with respect to the following sources:

1. United States

a. lntemational Policy and Security Organization Documents

i.

ii.

iii.

iv.

vi.

vii.

viii.

ix.

National Security Strategy of the United States, 1991 (N 8891)

National Security Strategy of the United States, October 1998
(N 8898)

Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe,
Noverrnber 1999 (OSCE-ISD) - Istanbul Summit Declaration

Heritage Foundation, 30 August 2002 (HF) — US. Policy in
Central Asia and the War on Terror

Brookings Institution, 5 April 2004 (BI) — Central Asia ’s
Failing State

Strategic Studies Institute, May 2004 (881) — Strategic
Consequences of the Iraq War: US. Security Interests in
Central Asia Reassessed

Rand Project Air Force 2005 (RAND) — US Interests in
Central Asia: Policy Priorities and Military Roles

lntemational Security Affairs, 23 March 2006 (ISA) —
Geopolitics and US Security Policy in Central Asia

Congressional Research Service, 7 August 2008 (CRS) -
Uzbekistan: Recent Developments and US. Interests

United Nations Environmental Programme, United Nations
Development Programme, Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe, North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(UNDP-UNEP-OSCE-NATO) - Environment and Security:
Transforming Risks into Cooperation (EnvSec)

b. Four major US newspapers (1988-2008)

i.

New York Times (N YT),

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ii. Washington Post (WP)
iii. Christian Science Monitor (CSM)
iv. Boston Globe (BG)
2. Uzbekistan
a. President I.A. Karimov — Uzbekistan on the Threshold of the 21‘"
Century
b. Uzbek NGO Registration Law (N GOR)
c. Uzbek Mahalla Consolidation Law (OFJ)
The structured analysis of these documents proceeded as follows. Primary international
foreign policy documents authored by organizations and think tanks in the United States
were selected for analysis due to their capacity to illustrate concisely US foreign policy in
Central Asia. Each document reﬂect the interests of the political parties and
corresponding administrations that engaged issues of environment, security, and
democracy in Central Asia, from President George H. W. Bush and the dismantling of the
Soviet Union, to President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore and the rise of
Environment Security following the National Security Strategy of 1991, to President
George W. Bush and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In addition, each document highlights fundamental policy shifts that took place in
the region during the period from 1999 and 2008. These policy shifts will be placed in
context with events that transpired in Uzbekistan between 1999 and 2008. Of particular
importance are two watershed moments: events immediately following both the launch
of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan in late 2001 and the brutal quelling of

the Andijon uprising on May 14‘”, 2005. Media accounts from both US. media outlets,

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as well as international organization such as Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty (RFERL)
and Eurasianet. org will be used to construct an historical background to these policy
documents.

Finally, each documents was reviewed 5 times in order to verify the narrative
content, paying careful attention to any references made regarding environment, security,
and democracy, and the linkages among these concepts. This exact method of narrative
analysis was then performed on the US. afﬁliated international governmental
organization documents. The content of both sets of documents was used to articulate the
dominant topoi or frames of Central Asia within US. foreign policy with respect to the
linkages among environment, security, and democracy.

In conjunction with this formal critical geopolitical analysis, I assessed how the
formation of these frames of Uzbekistan within US documents of statecraft were
disseminated as a popular geographical imaginary via four major US newspapers: the
New York Times (N YT), the Washington Post (WP), the Christian Science Monitor
(CSM), and the Boston Globe. These papers were chosen due to their wide circulation,
and their signiﬁcant contribution of content to smaller national, regional, and local
newspapers throughout the country. I collected, read, and analyzed all stories in these
four newspapers that referenced Uzbekistan between 1 January1987 and 28 February
2009. This time span was chosen to include references that were made regarding the
region during the Gorbachev Perestroika years.

During this 22-year span, “Uzbekistan” was mentioned the following number of
times: NYT 7, WP 3, BG 3, CSM 3. In order to broaden the scope of my analysis, I

widened the search term to reference “Central Asia,” which thus included the common

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reference to the region as the “Former Soviet States of Central Asia.” During this 22-
year span ‘Central Asia’ was mentioned the following number of times: NYT 22, WP 14,
CSM 12, BG 2. While the wider search string was less speciﬁc, it yielded signiﬁcantly
more results, allowing for a greater assessment of the US. policy framing of Central Asia
and how it has been captured by the popular media. These newspaper articles will also
lay a foundation of historical events that correlate to policy shifts in the region, as
evidenced by the analysis of the geopolitical policy documents.

Cross-comparative analysis of the environmental security frames was then
compared to Uzbek President Islam Karimov’s writings on the topic of security.
Ultimately, much of the press coverage in Uzbekistan reﬂects the positionality of the
Karimov regime as free press is non-existent in the region (Freedman 2005). Free news
agencies that cover Central Asia, such as Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty (RFERL) and
Eurasianet. org are banned within Uzbekistan, as are many other independent news
agencies (Tynan 2008). Therefore, the internal topoi of environmental security tends to
be dominated by the monolithic framing by the Karimov administration. Finally, I place
this two-way frame in conversation with recent legislative actions undertaken by the
Karimov regime: the NGO re-registration law (N GOR), and the mahalla consolidation
law (OFJ).

Through narrative analysis of these policy documents, I will demonstrate the
linkage between US. framings of environmental security in Uzbekistan and US. policy
interests in the region in conjunction with the geopolitical discourse of environmental

security. I then placed this discourse in conversation with Karimov’s own political and

legal actions in Uzbekistan. As stated in my hypothesis, section 1.3, I argue that these

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frames present Uzbekistan as an environmental security risk where the potential for
conﬂict is linked to environmental degradation, the failure of democracy in the region,
and the strong potential for Islamic extremism to take root. Meanwhile, the US. pursues
its own geopolitical agenda in the region, under the auspices of promoting environmental
sustainability and democratic reform through the geopolitical frame of “enviromnental
security.” As previously stated, I goal was to show that “environmental security” has
been realized primarily as the build-up of military infrastructure, the reinforcement of a
brutal authoritarian regime, and the continued degradation of environmental and social
conditions in the region; the self-fulﬁlling prophecy of Thomas Homer-Dixon’s resource

conﬂicts are essentially reiﬁed.

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5. NARRATIVE ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION

5.1 Creating the Frames of Environment, Security, and Democracy in Uzbek
Central Asia: Critical Geopolitical Analysis of Major Policy Documents

5.1a National Security Strategy of 1991

While the foundation of the current US. policy position with respect to
environmental security in Uzbek Central Asia is grounded in decades Of Cold War
ideology and posturing, its current discursive formation (i.e. the transformation of global
spheres of inﬂuence into global socio-environmental threats) was articulated within
President George H W Bush’s National Security Strategy of 1991 (Barnett 2001, and
Dalby 2002). This declaration trumpets the collapse of the Soviet Union as the end of an
era, and the beginning of a new one marked by “new crises and instabilities.” The
document openly indicates U.S. reluctance to deviate from traditional foreign policy
paths, however, emphasizing the former Soviet Union’s residual capacity “to destroy
American society with a single, cataclysmic attack. . . [with the] retention of more than
6,000 strategic weapons” (N SS 1991). By emphasizing early on the need for cautious
demilitarization in light of the “dangers that remain,” the US. presented its argument for
the maintenance of signiﬁcant military spending and an ongoing global military presence
(N SS 1991). These unclassiﬁable and unpredictable “dangers” frustrated attempts at
articulating a coherent military strategy that fully justiﬁed such expenses both at home
and abroad.

However, while the dangers themselves are not fully deﬁned, their geographic
locations certainly are. Although Central Asia itself is not referenced, the “troubled
evolution of the Soviet Union or the volatile Middle East” are presented as almost

guaranteed sources of future conﬂict: where the vestiges of communism and the

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revitalized threat of Islamic extremism meet (N SS 1991). In the NSS91 section entitled
The Soviet Future (N SS 1991), the former Soviet Union is presented as a region in which
the “die-hard adherents” of communist ideology are expected to clash violently with
proponents of long-overdue democratic reform.

The NSS91 clearly indicates where the US. position is with respect to democratic
reform in the former Soviet Union; it will assist them on a path to democracy that is only
structured in line with IMF and World Bank “technical advice” offered at the London
Economic Summit of July 1991 (N SS 1991). Democratic values are linked to the
promotion of market-principled economic reform throughout the document, and
inextricably tied to the promotion of peace through “IMF, World Bank, and GATT
sponsored policies” which will “allow friendly states to achieve the security and stability
essential for political freedom and economic growth” (N SS 1991). Market-based
economic principles are seen as necessary and sufﬁcient for the promotion of real
democracy.

In addition, “competition” is reinforced between the former polar powers, as
reference is made to the ever-present threat of conﬂict between the two powers. The
East/W est binary is also strongly evoked, but in a particularly Malthusian context, as new
European security risks are deﬁned as population and migration-based. According to the
NSS91, “from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, from North Africa and the Near
East, we could see thousands ﬂeeing economic hardship and seeking a better life. For
Western European countries there could be enormous economic, social and political
strains. . .an unprecedented challenge to the new Europe, testing its moral and political

character” (NSS 1991).

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From another segment of the document: “malnutrition, illiteracy, and poverty put
dangerous pressures on democratic institutions as hungry, uneducated or poorly housed
citizens are ripe for radicalization by movements of the left and the right” (my emphasis
(N SS 1991)). The image of mass, migrating, poor populations as sources of extremist-
based conﬂict would continue to proliferate in discussions of new global security
initiatives, especially after the publication of Robert Kaplan’s The Coming Anarchy,
eventually becoming one of the cornerstones of environmental security itself. The
NSS91 interestingly deﬂects any current and future claims made by the former Soviet
Union to US. complicity in the internal problems of the former Soviet Union, which the
NSS91 claims are entirely “problems created by decades of domestic tyranny, misrule
and mismanagement” (N SS 1991).

Although brieﬂy, the NSS91 does speciﬁcally reference the environment, and this
reference narrowly articulates the foundational concerns of environmental security.
“Global environmental concerns. . .ozone depletion, climate change, food security, water
supply, deforestation, biodiversity and treatment of wastes. . .respect no international
boundaries. The stress from these environmental challenges is already contributing to
political conﬂict” (N SS 1991). The document goes on to vaguely call for “global
stewardship”; however, the implications of the proceeding statement are clear, especially
when seen in context with the previous discussion pertaining to the threat of mass
population migration. Environmental stressors are linked to population pressures and
conﬂict, the central argument of Thomas-Homer Dixon and the other resource and

conﬂict scholars.

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5.1b National Security Strategy of 1998

While the Bush NSS91 is held up as the ﬁrst national security document to
promote population and scarcity-driven factors for human-ecologically derived conﬂict in
the post-Cold War context, the Clinton National Security Strategy of 1998 (N 8898)
directly states that “natural resource scarcities can trigger and exacerbate conﬂict” (N SS
1998). As the title of this document implies, a “National Security Strategy for a New
Century” is one that must take into serious consideration this environmentally driven
conﬂict mechanisms.

Thus, the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) of 161 member states and the
Environmental Security Initiative (ESI) was described as a means for “addressing
regional environmental concerns and thereby reducing the risks to US. interests abroad”
by “undertaking the development of an environmental forecasting system to provide U.S.
policymakers advance warning of environmental stress situations which have the
potential fro signiﬁcant impact on US. interests” (N SS 1998). Such stress factors are a
Malthusian checklist: “resource depletion, rapid population growth, environmental
damage, new infectious diseases and uncontrolled refugee migration” (N SS 1998) The
direct causal models of Homer-Dixon are evident in this statement, which proposes a
system based on population and resource statistics for predicting sites of state failure,
political contestation, and violent conﬂict. Notably, globalizing factors as a whole are a
recurrent theme, and transnational concerns are placed alongside the increasingly visible
threat of terrorism (particular ongoing concerns relating to the activities of Osama bin

Laden), extreme nationalism, and international crime (N SS 1998).

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The seriousness with which the Clinton Administration advocated the new ESI is
evident throughout the NSS98. For example, while the intelligence community has long
provided support to a range of US military, diplomatic, and law enforcement activities,
US environmental agencies and activities are explicitly included in the new intelligence
network (N SS 1998). Environmental provisions are expanded within the international
economic sphere as new environmental regulations are added to the World Trade
Organization (WTO) agenda and a new WTO Committee on Trade and Environment is
established. “Environmentally sound” and “sustainable” development are seen as the
lynchpin for promoting Western democratic principles worldwide (N SS 1998). This is
only a slight modiﬁcation from the NSS91 and it retains much of the heavy reliance on
free market principles. This is especially true in relation to discussion of US motives for
promoting democracy in the newly independent states (N IS) of Eastern Europe in
particular. Similar to those concerns put forth in the NSS91, the NSS98 also warns of the
potential threat destabilized NIS pose to the security of Western Europe. Central Asia
itself receives only one passing mention in the entirety of this document — as a potential

source of vital energy resources (N SS 1998).

5.1c OSCE Istanbul Summit, November 1999

With the new emphasis on environmental security tentatively established, the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe met in Istanbul in November of
1999 in order to discuss ongoing threats to European security. While much of this
document concerns tensions in the increasingly “Balkanizing” region of the former

Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the ﬁve state of Central Asia receive considerable

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attention, particularly the “signiﬁcant increase in [OSCE] cooperation with the ﬁve
participating states in Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan,
Uzbekistan) (OSCE 1999). Of note is the three-part emphasis on “strengthening the rule
of law [and] the respect for human rights” while rooting out sources of “international
terrorism, violent extremism, organized crime, and drug and arms trafﬁcking” and
addressing the sources of “economic and environmental risk,” including those related to
“water resources, energy, and erosion” (OSCE 1999). The speciﬁc response to these
concerns will be fruther addressed in the section dealing with the UNDP-UNEP-OSCE-

NATO ENVSEC Program.

5.1d Heritage Foundation 2002

While founded in 1973, the Heritage Foundation gained signiﬁcant visibility as a
conservative think-tank under the Reagan administration, gaining further ascendancy
within the political power structure underneath the presidency of George W. Bush. Its
prominence during this period was the impetus behind my decision to include HF’s
Central Asian Policy document as part of my analysis. Although short, its message is
clear and powerful with respect to US. interests in the region. In addition, while also
invoking the realist Soviet-era critique and the environmental security paradigm that
precedes it, it simultaneously revitalizes the sleeping specter of Mackinder and the notion
of Central Asia as global pivot that pervades policy documents regarding Central Asia
today.

Central Asia is thrown into the US. spotlight after nearly a decade of relatively

quiet and neglected decay. These same neglected states are now re-imagined as

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“breeding grounds for international terrorist groups aimed at the United States” due to
economic and environmental stressors and the failure of democratic reform, doomed to
follow in the footsteps of southern neighbor Afghanistan. Again, broad economic reform
is posited as the means for avoiding such an outcome in order to integrate “these states
into [the] competitive global economy” and reengineer them as partners in the new post-
Cold War geopolitical framework: the so-called War on Terror (Pascoe 2002).
Partnerships among the United States, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan and peaceful
democratic reforms in the region are stressed, in ironic contrast with the simultaneous
promotion of increased support for US. funded “military infrastructure, training, military
exchanges, and development of interoperability with US and international forces” for
weeding out terrorist cells and sources of terrorist capital (Pascoe 2002).

Uzbekistan is referred to as “the most interesting test case of our policy of
enhanced engagement” (Pascoe 2002). The U.S.-Uzbek Declaration of Strategic
Partnership (DSP) asserts that the US. will assist the Uzbek government in the promotion
of a “secular state based on the rule of law, market based economy, and effective social
safety net” (USDOS 12 March 2002). The HF document points out that the Uzbek
government has improved its human rights record in line with the DSP, including new
engagement with US. sponsored economic institutions (IMF), the release of 860 political
prisoners, the legalization of the “Birlik” opposition party, and the invitation of the UN
Special Rapporteur on Torture to visit and ﬁle a report (Pascoe 2002). The HF report
also laments the lack of US. media coverage of these “promising steps” being taken in
Uzbekistan (Pascoe 2002). Karimov of course is very interested in promoting a particular

formulation of a secular state based on his rule of law, in which most forms of religious

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observation become Wahhabi or extremist. In addition, he also seeks to advance the
Uzbek market economy through the unrelenting production of cotton. The secular state
and market-based conceptualizations are just as easily perverted as the communist or

theocratic conceptualizations of governance.

5.1e Brookings Institution 2004

Identifying itself as one of the oldest “independent research and policy
institute[s]” (B1 2009) in Washington DC, the Brookings Institute report from 2004
reﬂects the change in US engagement with Central Asia that transpired following the
U.S.-led war in Iraq. The Brookings Institution report is a bleak assessment of security
and terrorist-related activities in the region. It opens by linking a recent “set of suicide
bomb attacks and violent encounters with police” in Uzbekistan to the Uzbek
govemment’s new alliance with the United States against al Qaeda sponsored terror (Hill
2004). While the document does relate the events to the increasingly repressive actions
being taken by the Karimov regime (e. g., “mass arrests of observant Muslims as
suspected members of radical Islamic groups”), it does so by conjecturing that
disenfranchised Uzbek citizens, frustrated by poor environmental and economic
conditions and government repression, are actively turning to Islamic extremist groups
“like the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan which. . . gained traction by recruiting among
disaffected young Muslims.” Authoritarian regimes and “largely unreformed economies”

are recognized as key factors in transforming Central Asia into the “breeding grounds for

further terrorism” (Pascoe 2002).

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According to Hill, “Islamic radicalism, militancy, and violence” is the main
culprit “ﬁlling the political space between the people and the government in Uzbekistan”
(Hill 2004). This document correctly highlights the negative social attributes of political
oppression and degradation, but addresses the alleged symptom (Islamic radicalism)
rather than the disease (political repression) as the fundamental threat to security: US.
security. It does so in such a way as to simplistically assume a particular form of Muslim
culture in the region; one that arguably does not exist. As previously discussed in section
3.2, Central Asia’s speciﬁc Islamic cultural history is apolitical, and focused on custom
and tradition, not religious-political based institutions. The dissatisfaction is with the
Karimov regime, although in general the Uzbek experience with everyday life,
conditioned by its particular traditionalist culture articulation of Muslim identity and the

secular inﬂuences of the Soviet era tends to promote quiet acceptance of political
repression. Finally, it is also of note to point out that, in terms of environmental security,

US. policy dominated by narrow terrorism-centric terms have generally eclipsed any

references to viable environmental options for achieving said security.

5.1f Strategic Studies Institute 2004

The Strategic Studies Institute, a division of the US. Army War College, is the
US. Army’s primary core of security studies analysts. In addition, the Institute also
provides auxiliary research assistance to ofﬁcials within the Department of Defense.
This report also reﬂects the recent events in Iraq and critiques US. policy that is solely
focused on promoting antiterrorism efforts in Central Asia as “counterproductive” thus

“contributing to the radicalization of political opposition movements and discrediting

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both democratization and the US. commitment to it” (Wishnick 2004). The report is
correct to critique the US. emphasis on counterterrorism tactics that support the
strengthening of regional authoritarian leaders. However, a return to the geographical
framing of the region from the perspective of Halford Mackinder, and the overtly
simplistic rendering of religion and culture in Central Asian, are particular questionable.
In addition, while the report recognizes “simultaneous, interrelated political, economic,
social, environmental, and military security threats” it does not elaborate upon those
threats (Wishnick 2004).

The report can be broken down into several sections. First is an overview of US.
relations with the ﬁve former Soviet republics since the onset of Operation Enduring
Freedom in Afghanistan, beginning with then-US. Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld’s visit to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, for the signing of an agreement allowing the
US. to stage 1,500 military personnel at Karshi Khanabad airbase. As part of this
agreement, the US. agreed to target IMU training camps in Afghanistan, vocal opponents
of the Karimov regime (Wishnick 2004). Uzbekistan also assisted US. Central
Command (CENTCOM) since December, 2001, signed an ofﬁcial “strategic partnership”
allowing the US to remain in Uzbekistan for “as long as necessary to complete
antiterrorism operations in Afghanistan,” and assisted NATO by providing “medical and
logistical assrstance” since May 2003 (Wishnick 2004). Several of the initial agreements
were established largely in private (Wishnick 2004) although Karimov was quick to tout
his new US. alliance, at home and regionally, as a vocal supporter of the War on Terror.
Images have sinCe been published depicting Karimov’s visit to the 9-1 1 memorial at the

World Trade Center site in New York City.

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The second section of the paper outlines US. military and strategic interests in the
region: security, energy, and internal reform (Wishnick 2004). In terms of security, the
document quickly reinvigorates Mackinder’s vision of Central Asia as pivot, claiming
that an increased US. presence will draw regional players into the “Central Asian arena”;
particularly Russia, China (the old Great Game actors) and potentially India, further
complicating security interests. The renewal of a “Great Power rivalry” is deemed
evident in the document. Energy and internal reform are tied together, as valuable energy
resource deposits in Central Asia are seen as the mechanism for brining market reform
and thus democratic prosperity to the region (Wishnick 2004).

The bulk of the document goes on to explain the appropriate US. national
security strategy for achieving these goals. The Middle East, Central Asia, and
Northeast Asia are framed as an “arc of instability” composed of “weak states vulnerable
to radical movements.” The suggested U.S. strategy: continued preemption, as originally
advocated in the US. National Security Strategy of 2002 (i.e. “the only defense is to take
the war to the enemy). The best defense is a good offense” (Wishnick 2004). The eight
pages immediately following this statement discuss the appropriate siting of bases from
Afghanistan to Turkey.

This section is followed by an interesting discussion of opinions in Central Asia
regarding the U.S.-led War on Terror. The article notes that, with the exception of
Uzbekistan, the four additional Central Asia leaders were critical of US. intervention.
This is linked to Uzbek interest in reorienting its position westward while the remaining
states retained closer ties with Russia. However, the 881 states that the primary reasoning

behind the other state’s critiques, especially Kazakhstan’s, was the fear that an increased

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ﬂow of oil from a US. occupied Iraq would decrease prices in the regional and global
markets.

The document then reasserts the claims of policy documents that have proceeded
it; there is “some evidence” that Central Asia is a potential source of Islamic extremism
and has already witnessed the rise of various extremists groups (i.e. the IMU and the
IRP). The report goes on to claim that citizens in the 5 Central Asian states are exhibiting
signs of increased distrust due to continued penetration of local religious organizations
and the widespread “repression of Islamist activity, mass arrests, and the mistreatment of
prisoners. . .as a result, Islamist groups may retain greater support in the absence of other
means of channeling political support and in the face of mounting discontent” (Wishnick
2004)

The document ends by addressing a greater need to focus on elements of “human
security” (Wishnick 2004) in the region, yet if fails to deﬁne what this might entail. The
entire region retains the imagery of a vast Islamic powder keg, where Russian and
Chinese interests lie just over the horizon waiting to take advantage of a highly
destabilized region that is also in conﬂict over energy resource sites. The closest that the
SSI comes to providing a policy solution for the region is its support of demining efforts
and increased surveillance of drug-trafﬁcking, through a combined focus on the
geopolitically oriented notion of Mahan’s soft and hard powers: focusing on the
advancement and dispersal of superior US. military technologies with allied states.
(Wishnick 2004). However, these concerns are not linked at all to the previous
discussion of security-based concerns within Central Asia itself. They reﬂect US.

security interests in “a key theater in the war on terror” but do not highlight the beneﬁts

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for individual Central Asians. The human—ecological sustainability of the region and the
promotion of human rights mechanisms are left unaddressed, aside from a casual

reference to the 1994 UN Human Development Report (Wishnick 2004).

5.1g RAND Project Air Force 2005

Rand Project Air Force is a subsidiary of the larger Rand Corporation, a non-
proﬁt policy institution, and is the Air Force’s “federally funded research and
development center for studies and analysis” (Oliker 2005). The tone of this RAND
document is perhaps most interesting due to the time of its publication: after the events in
Andijon, Uzbekistan, in May 2005. The RAND report opens by bluntly stating that “the
current US military presence in Central Asia is something of an historical accident. The
question is whether or not it is also an anomaly” (Oliker 2005). While all the previous
documents since the War on Terror began recognized the crucial geopolitical position of
Central Asia for US. security interests, the RAND report suddenly posits that although
OEF certainly elevated the status of Central Asia for US. policy makers, the region itself
is of only short-term interest and is of greater value as a bargaining chip among other
regional powers, particularly China and Russia (Oliker 2005)

The RAND report makes several policy suggestions along this line of reasoning.
In terms of a role for the military in general, the RAND advocates a continued focus on
the strategic placement of “semi-warm” bases throughout the region (those that can be
fully staffed within a short period of time) but, as the SSI document also advocated, also
promotes the training and modernization of local militaries in response to the ongoing

War on Terror, arms control, and drug trafﬁcking (Oliker 2005). It would appear that,

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after Uzbekistan requested that the US. abandon its post at Karshi Khanabad air base due
to a disagreement between the two states over the legal status of US involvement in the
area, the difﬁculties that the US. military were experiencing engaging in contract
agreements with authoritarian regimes was fully realized. Secondly, the report
acknowledges that on an international scale of relevance, maintaining permanent
presence in the region is not worth diminishing relationships with Russia and China, and
that the US. would be better suited in pursuing its strategic interests through regional
third parties that are already allies (i.e. Turkey).

At several times, the RAND report invokes the language of Cold War bipolarity,
“i.e. Russia’s continuing distrust of US. imperialism” and the rapid “realignment” of
Uzbekistan with China and Russia following the events of Andijon (Oliker 2005). The
RAND report recognizes that language emphasizing the “zero-sum” game of alignment is
a “relic of the Cold War era.” However, this “relic” will apparently continue to inform
US. military strategy in the region, despite a general lack of direct economic or strategic
beneﬁt to the US. (Oliker 2005). The RAND report conceptualizes the Caspian Basin
and'other Central Asian energy resources as of little interest to the United States (contrary
to ongoing discussions regarding Caspian pipelines), but as strategically important to
Russia in particular, and by default, a geopolitical interest of the US. (Oliker 2005).
However, these interests are short-term, as “US. interests in the region should end once

OEF has been completed” (Oliker 2005).

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5.1h International Security Affairs 2006

However, as I have previously discussed, the events of Andijon only brieﬂy
altered US. policy objectives with respect to Central Asia, and Uzbekistan in particular
as the 2006 policy brieﬁng from lntemational Security Affairs (ISA) regarding security
issues in Central Asia demonstrates. ISA is one of the primary advisory groups to the
Department of Defense; as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for ISA serves as the
principal advisor to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and the Secretary of
Defense on international security strategies, especially as they pertain to NATO, the
Middle East, and Aﬁica.

The language of this ISA document, given as part of the Annual ISA convention
in San Diego, is a distubing endorsement of the traditional geopolitical writings of
Mackinder, Spykman, and Mahan. As the document states in its introduction with
respect to East Europe and Central Asia, “this [current] situation creates an area in which
different axis as strategic, geopolitical, raw materials and energy-related issues, and even
ideologies converge” a “return of the Great Game to Central Asia. . .highlighted after the
publication of works as Brzezinski’s The Grand Chess Board, and Michael Klare’s
Resource Wars” (Cantalapiedra 2006).

While the ﬁrst half of the document contains a synopsis of Mackinder and
Mahan’s writings regarding the “Heartland” and “Shatter-Belt” respectively, placed in
historical context with developing US interests in Central Asia, the second half of the
document discusses the Bush policy for the region, ﬁrst advanced in the National
Security Strategy of 2002 (N S802). Much of the NSSOZ rearticulates the revisions to

containment policy expressed in the NSS91 and NSS98, namely the positions of Primacy

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and Selective Primacy (Cantalapiedra 2006). The “Primacy Posture” basically states that
all international security policies should promote a global mandate of “democracy and
free markets,” of which the US. would the central or “prime” (singular) component. In
addition, the corollary states that in order to achieve this, the US. must actively block
attempts by other powers to control “a region whose resources would, under consolidated
control, be sufﬁcient to generate global power.” The report goes on to state that
“preponderant power must be the object of US policy” (Cantalapiedra 2006).

The spread of democracy was central to this position, ala President George W.
Bush, although the ISA makes it abundantly clear that the conditions of such a
democracy would be under no uncertain terms. As stated in the Clinton administration’s
Engagement and Enlargement Strategy, “the successor of a doctrine of Containment must
be a strategy of Enlargement, Enlargement of the world’s free community of market
democracies” (my emphasis) (Cantalapiedra 2006). The ISA recognizes critical
positions to this strategy, especially those that questioned the juxtaposition of realism and
liberalism, yet claims that the new “Grand Strategy” of President George W. Bush
addressed these concerns by emphasizing the threat of “uncertainty” associated with a
post 9-11 world (Cantalapiedra 2006). Market based democracies are argued to be the
sole protection against a new world disorder, i.e. “an international order according to US.
values” (Cantalapiedra 2006).

The ISA concludes by addressing how the Bush Grand Strategy should be
understood with respect to Central Asia. Essentially, it is argued that the US.
engagement in Central Asia responds to a new reading of the Monroe Doctrine and

Manifest Destiny through the preservation of American principles in a larger ideological

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sphere of inﬂuence and “a posture of avoiding the rise of challenger powers that seek
regional or world hegemony” (Cantalapiedra 2006). The ISA reverses the claims made
by RAND, emphasizing the geopolitical and “geo-energy”—based importance of the
region; competing claims for Central Asia’s resources alongside unstable social
arrangements require a strong US. presence. Ultimately, the ISA claims that the US. has
the “techno-militaristic” capability to project power across Mahan’s “Middle Strip” in
order to dominate the “Heartland” of Central Asia for the promotion of “prosperity” and
“stability” (Cantalapiedra 2006). The statements are grandiose, yet once again,
conceptualizations of security are overwhelming addressed in terms of US. interests.
While “stability” is sought through market-based reforms, the vast interrelated complex
of social and environmental degradation within the region is left completely unanalyzed
aside from another passing reference to resource conﬂict among states. At this realist
scale, the dynamics of everyday life on the ground are completely invisible or over-
generalized. In the next subsection, I assess how these framings have been reformatted
under the umbrella of “environmental security” in Central Asia, as a program designed in
conjunction with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the United
Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the Organization for Security and

Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

5.1i UNDP-UNEP-OSCE-NATO Environmental Security

How are political, cultural, and social “security” concerns implicated in, and
linked to, concerns over environmental degradation and resource access within Central
Asia broadly? The most visible application has been a joint effort between the United

Nations Development Programme (UN DP), the United Nations Environmental

92

Programme (UNEP), the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE),
and the North Atlantic Treaty Organizations joint Environmental Security Initiative
ﬂlNDP-UNEP-OSCE-NATO ENVSEC, from now on just ENVSEC) that aims to link
security concerns broadly with issues of environmental degradation and development
(Schlingemann 2005).

While the term environmental security has been in existence since the mid-19803,
brought into the mainstream political and academic circles through the research of
Gunther Baechler and Thomas Homer-Dixon and given an “ofﬁcial” stamp of approval in
the National Security Strategy of 1998, the ENVSEC initiative began to codify the
theoretical framework of Baechler and Homer-Dixon into guidelines and principles based
upon conditions in regional case study sites. Working papers were drafted during the
pilot phase of the program in 2003 for Southeast Europe (the Balkans) and Central Asia.
Similar working papers were drafted for other regions beginning in 2004, including
Eastern Europe and “the Circumpolar Arctic” (Schlingemann 2005). Background data
for these papers and the studies that would follow were compiled from an assortment of
international agencies, including not only the four contributors to ENVSEC but also the
Asian Development Bank (ADB), UNICEF, the World Bank, and the individual
ministries of foreign affairs within each state (Carius, F eil et al. 2003). Ultimately, local
and environmentally based conﬂicts are conceptualized as international security threats,
particularly to US. interests in the “crucial part of Central Asia” and its role in the
ongoing War on Terror (Schlingemann 2005).

The ENVSEC theoretical foundation follows Baechler’s Environmental Conﬂict

Project (ENCOP) and Homer-Dixon’s Environmental Change and Acute Conﬂict Project

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(ECACP). Figure 1 demonstrates how ENVSEC has integrated the main arguments of
Baechler and Homer-Dixon into their regional policy analysis, focusing on a relatively
linear pathway that takes population pressure as its starting point, assumes environmental
degradation as a given, and then predicts conﬂict among competing groups linked to the
loss of livelihood that develops under these conditions. More speciﬁcally, these
“conditions,” i.e. limited supplies of resources and inadequate mechanisms for their fair
distribution, are deﬁned as “social consequences” derived from “ecological
marginalization” and “environmental discrimination” - Baechler and Homer-Dixon’s
exact terminology (Schlingemann 2005).

In Central Asia, ENVSEC assesses population growth and migration as two of the
key components that could potentially incite conﬂict, particular in regions of formerly
limited population, as well as areas where there are dense concentrations of ethnic
diversity, postulating that conﬂicts over limited resource access would be exacerbated by
the existence of ethnically driven tension. Population and ethnicity mapping feature
prominently in the ENVSEC assessment of conﬂict in the region, particularly centered
upon the densely populated (and prone to high population growth) F erghana Valley in

eastern Uzbekistan, western Tajikistan, and southwestern Kyrgyzstan.

94

 

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Figure 1 This diagram, prepared as part of the official ENVSEC initiative, demonstrates
the Malthusian causal pathway that links population growth, resource scarcity,
environmental degradation and the potential for conﬂict

htt ://ma 3. 'da.no/ o/ hic/causual athwa of conﬂict over resources

 

While “ethnic dimensions” are described in relation to the potential for water
conﬂict, no empirical evidence is provided to corroborate this claim. ENVSEC maps
identify areas of key environmental concern, placed in context with the population-based
conﬂict factors. Even at this regional scale though, the particular conﬂict sites remain
broadly deﬁned in terms of population and resource based generalities. In the local case
studies, i.e. agricultural production in Uzbekistan for example, political economic factors

(how has restricted agricultural privatization been enforced and why do incentives for

95

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efﬁciency remain low while the extent of cultivated land expands?) behind accelerated
agricultural production are not discussed.

Homer-Dixon and Baechler’s framework for resource scarcity-based conﬂicts has
been critiqued within political ecology and political ecology for either not taking the
wider political economy of natural resources into account (what larger-scale factors
produce particular markets and how do these markets materialize at nested scales?)
and/or for narrowly conceptualizing the historical, political, and cultural processes that
underlie resource economies. For example, in the case of water in Central Asia, while the
ENVSEC correctly blames centralized water allocation mechanisms and a weak interstate
framework for water allocation as contributing factors to inefﬁcient water distribution
and management, it frames the problem as a vestige of Soviet planning (both the water
network and the state boundaries) trapped in a new era of “national identity creation,”
failing to recognize the continuing Soviet character of these supposedly new national
identities (Schlingemann 2005). Karimov himself is an ongoing “vestige” of the Soviet
era; he and his policies are not an artifact, but a concrete reality that exists due to initial
and ongoing US. support for “stability” in the region after the Soviet Union collapse
(Sievers 2003).

Islam is also drawn into the discussion as a potential factor in the strengthening of
“national and political identities,” thus leading to further destabilizing conditions.
However, in the same paragraph the authors recognize that “Soviet policies of
secularization [contributed to] a popular identiﬁcation with Islam as somewhat more of an
ethnic/identity determinant than an indicator of religious belief” (Schlingemann 2005).

The two statements seem to negate each other. If, as the document states, a paradigm

96

shift has occurred transforming local identity-centered understandings of Islam (in
existence well before the Soviet era (Khalid 1998, and Khalid 2007) has occurred, then
why haven’t political Islamic groups been successful in establishing a strong foothold in
the region? Despite continued U.S. concerns regarding the rise of extremist Islam across
Central Asia (which the US. military itself attempted to foment during the late Soviet-era
via the distribution of Uzbek translations of the Koran in an attempt to incite Islamic
revolt in the region. The effort ultimately failed.) such events have not occurred, despite
brutal authoritarian violence, (i.e. Andijon), in which only a year later Uzbek citizens
themselves tend to downplay the events, largely out of fear of retaliation and/or
incredulity at the perceived “foolishness” of Uzbeks who would protest (Khalid 1998,
and Khalid 2007). The ENVSEC is correct to describe Islam as a locally “stabilizing
factor,” but perpetuates the alarmist Islamic extremist argument by labeling it a
“mobilizing factor” (Schlingemann 2005).

Perhaps most ﬁ'ustrating is that ENVSEC recognizes cultural and historical
characteristics as integral to the environmental and political situation in Uzbekstan, but
limits them to the archaic and oriental geographic imaginaries, i.e. the “persistence in
Central Asia of pre-Russian, pre-modem conservatism, especially concerning the
legitimacy of power” (Schlingemann 2005). Prior “modernization” efforts, i.e. the
Jadidist movement in the early twentieth century (Khalid 1998, and Khalid 2007), and the
Perestroika-era reforms (Robinson 1988, and Sievers 2003) are discursively erased in
favor of the environmental and political imaginary of the Oriental Despot, now coupled
with the international security notions of Mackinder, and the simplistic resource scarcity

and conﬂict arguments of Baechler and Homer-Dixon.

97

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5.2 Disseminating the Frames of Environment, Security, and Democracy in Uzbek
Central Asia: Critical Geopolitical Analysis of Major US Newspapers

Popular media renderings essentially reﬂect three post-Soviet geographical
imaginaries of Central Asia: US. strategic interests framed in the imagery of the “New
Great Game,” the role of Islam, and the linkage among environment, sustainability, and
security. Policy based framings of environmental security, political Islam, and the
selectively interpreted legacy of the Soviet era have been picked-up, reinforced, and
disseminated by the popular media. Newspaper accounts in four of the most widely
circulated U.S. newspapers (New York Times NYT, Washington Post WP, Christian
Science Monitor CSM, and Boston Globe BG) highlight the power of these framings of
Central Asia — and Uzbekistan in particular -- and the existence of story archives
facilitates comparative and historical narrative analysis. A cross-time narrative analysis
of these geographic framings reﬂects the evolution of US. policy interests in the region,
particularly the transition from “containment” and “spheres of inﬂuence” to
“environmental security.”

Media coverage of Central Asia during the late Soviet Perestroika and Glasnost
years portrays the region as an anomaly, unstable and at the mercy of seemingly
incompatible culture, political, and geographic circumstances. Islam in particular is
rendered as an ever present threat lurking just beneath the omniscient Soviet eye,
awaiting any sign of weakness in the Iron armor. In the 12 February 1988 NYT article
Allah and Gorbachev Mixing in Central Asia (Keller 1988), statements from Russian
K.G.B. mirror earlier comments by Russian Imperial authorities regarding the dangers of
Islamic uprising (i.e. the so-called “Muslim Question”). For example, one K.G.B chief,

Vladimir V. Petkel, states, “clerics who favor a jihad or Islamic holy war, have set out to

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inﬁltrate party, government and law” (Keller 1988). The ongoing existence of “Islamic
traditions” such as arranged marriages, the “underground” and “unofﬁcial Suﬁ
brotherhood,” the recent proliferation of mosque construction, and increasing ties with
Afghan clergy were described as examples of the resiliency of Islam in spite of Soviet
policy and the possible rise of political Islam (i.e. Iranian style) in the region (Keller
1988)

The narrative of political Islam as incendiary threat was vivid in several headlines
during the late Perestroika and Glasnost era, reﬂecting U.S. international security
documents. Examples includedMartha Brill Olcott’s (professor and chair of Political
Science at Colgate University) 29 January 1990 CSM article Soviet Central Asia: Next to
Erupt? (Olcott 1990) and Grace Halsell’s 21 March 1991 CSM article A Muslim Time
Bomb (Halsell 1991). Comparing the situation in Central Asia to previous events in Iran
and Afghanistan, Olcott described how under Perestroika and Glasnost, the prospects for
“secular nationalism” were simply not possible in the Central Asian republics and that, by
default, Islam would be the rallying force in the region due to its inﬂuence as a marker of
“communal identity.” Environmental security was invoked by the imagery of a rapidly
expanding Muslim population, livelihood declines, and social and environmental
degradation, which would ultimately result in widespread rioting and attacks on the
“Christian colonizers — the Russians” (Olcott 1990). Halsell offered a similar narrative
and furthered the environmental security argument, adding Mackinder to the mix as well,
by describing how Russia’s dependency on Central Asian resources would likely
exacerbate violent conﬂict in the region, as the former colonizer will do battle with

“Central Asian Muslim revolts” over the contested commodities of cotton, oil, coal, and

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gold (Halsell 1991). Similar statements are also made in the 31 May 1992 article NYT
U.S. Remains Moscow-Centric on Once-Soviet Asia (Crossette 1992), in which Islam was
described as having “a stronger hold on the masses of Central Asia than Orthodox
Christianity had on the Russians.”

Gorbachev’s reforms were also tied to narratives of environmentally based
instability in the region, especially as US. foreign policy increasingly shifts its traditional
Cold War strategy to environmental security. Counter to those who were arguing that
Islam would become the primary threat to stability in the region, the 6 November 1988
NYT article Will Czar Cotton Still Reign Across Soviet Central Asia? (Keller 1988) and
the 20 June 1992 NYT article Uzbeks, Free of Soviets, Dethrone Czar Cotton, argued that
the legacy of “Stalinist demand for self sufﬁciency in cotton” (Erlanger 1992) would be
the primary factor inﬂuencing conﬂict in the Central Asia, particularly with respect to
soil and water degradation. The prospect for peace, it was claimed, was to be found in
Western based economic reform of the cotton sector, speciﬁcally the privatization of the
cotton farms and the neoliberalization of state production mechanisms, redistributing
agricultural management local and private enterprises, thus ending the “tyranny of
Uzbekistan’s farms” (Erlanger 1992). Immediately following the collapse of the Soviet
Union, media coverage of Central Asia presented a positive image of the region as
potentially productive, abandoning much of the chaotic imagery that proliferated during
Perestroika. This optimiSm, however, would prove to be short lived.

New security threats were identiﬁed, including the rise of narcotics trafﬁcking
linked to organized crime and terrorist funding in Central Asia ’s Drug Bazaar, NYT 16

November 1992 (Lubin 1992) and The World; Meet Stan, and Stan, and... NYT 7 May

100

1995 (Specter 1995), as well as ethnic-based conﬂicts such as in Chechnya, the Caucasus
(i.e., conﬂict between Armenians and Azerbaijanis), and the Tajik Civil War of the mid-
19903 (Bronner 1993). In addition, earlier positive hopes for democracy and
environmental sustainability in the region have all but evaporated; and in their place,
articles that reﬂect on entrenched authoritarian regimes and desiccated water bodies are
commonplace (Specter 1995). In less than three years, Central Asia reverted from a land
of promise where “rational water use and economic reform” were extolled (Erlanger
1992) back to a regionally and potentially global security threat (i.e., a 2nd to 3rd World
shift). Specter’s statement summed up this reemergent geographic imaginary, framed in
the environmental security paradigm shift; “The thing about the stans that keeps Russia
and the West nervous is that they could be much more dangerous than they are” (Specter
1995)

Mackinder’s enduring inﬂuence in the minds of western observers was apparent
in the new environmental security framing of Central Asia, as evidenced by the articles
Buffeted by Big Powers, Central Asia Gravitates Closer to Russia’s Orbit CSM 19 March
1996 (Greenwald 1996) and Fear and Loathing in the ‘Stans ’ 2 August 2000 (Rumer
2000). This re-emergent emphasis on Central Asia as prize (i.e., natural resources) or
peril (i.e., prone to instability and conﬂict, and therefore difﬁcult to manage) was often
described as a “new Great Game.” However, as late as 2000, editorials like Rumers’ were
suggesting that the US should back out of the any activity in Central Asia and allow
Russia and China to move in, suggesting that the costs of the region were simply not

worth the alleged beneﬁts of engagement. Rumer suggested that “American interests

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would best be served if the struggle for inﬂuence there could be avoided altogether”
(Rumer 2000).

The events of 11 September 2001 dramatically altered the importance of Central
Asia to US security interests, however and once again the region received considerable
attention, in particular as a battleground in the “War on Terror” -- as well as a source of
potential allies and militarily strategic bases. Islam was once again rendered a signiﬁcant
security threat in Islamic Militancy in Central Asia 28 CSM February 2002 (Norton
2002), Fighting Terror Regional Tensions BG 27 October 2002 (Filipov 2002), Islamist
Gambit in Central Asia CSM 19 July 2005 (Weir 2005), Rice, on Way to Central Asia,
Reprimands Uzbekistan 11 October 2005 (Wright 2005), Cutting Deals in Democracy ’s
Dead End NYT 3 February 2008 (Chivers 2008), and After ’05 Uzbek Uprising, Issues
Linger for West NYT 29 May 2008 (Tavemise 2008). These articles shared a common
theme in that, while they acknowledged that the repressive authoritarian regimes of
Central Asia, (i.e., Karimov) were likely implicated in the rise in extremist related
activities in the region (particularly after events in Andijon), they also echoed the
sentiments of the US. international security documents (i.e., SSI, ISA, etc.) placing U.S.
strategic interests above human rights concerns and social and environmental degradation
within Central Asia.

Central Asia is suddenly transformed from troubled land, too mired in its own
past to be salvaged and of any use to US interests (even its energy resources were
described as of marginal interest to the US (Rumer 2000)) to a region of “strategic
importance to the US.” (Tavemise 2008). Just three years earlier, the leaders of the

former Soviet republics were described as practically begging for US. assistance -- but to

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no avail (Rumer 2000). Now the region is of prime strategic importance in several
arenas, both in terms of military strategy and energy resource access, as referenced in the
article Central Asia on Front Line in Energy Battle NYT 20 December 2007 (Kramer
2007). According to United States Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman, in contrast to
the RAND report from 2005, “opportunities [in Central Asia] are opening that could not
have been imagined even a year ago” (Kramer 2007 my emphasis).

In particular, despite widespread acknowledgement of President Karimov’s
human rights abuses, Uzbekistan was described as a vital ally in the War on Terror.
Three articles in particular, - Air Base Flap Reﬂects Tension Over US Presence in
Central Asia CSM 6 February 2009 (Lubold and LaFranchi 2009), US. to Widen Supply
Routes in Afghan War NYT 31 December 2008 (Shanker and Oppel 2008) and Conﬂict
Narrows Oil Options for West NYT 14 August 2008 - demonstrated how the US.
reluctantly and quietly acquiesced to the status quo in Uzbekistan in order to secure
supply routes for medical supplies, oil and gas, and other “non-lethal goods” (Shanker
and Oppel 2008).

These media accounts reﬂected a transition in US. policy, whereby
environmental security policies gradually placed the threat of Islamic extremist oriented
terrorism above social and environmental degradation. These accounts often provided
direct quotations from US. international affairs analysts, U.S. diplomats, and military
officials, who acknowledged that despite the repressive regimes of individuals like
Karimov, US. ties with Central Asia were a necessary evil in a greater struggle.
According to Martha Bill Olcott, “if we didn’t have a war in Afghanistan, we might have

the luxury to take a moral stance” (Tavemise 2008). One Western diplomatic ofﬁcial,

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who wished to remain anonymous, stated, “Uzbekistan is simply too important to ignore.
Once you go into isolation mode, you lose the ability to engage with the rest of the
population” (Tavemise 2008). However, the US. was willing to engage in a policy of
“isolation” with respect to other “rogue” states (i.e., Iran and North Korea). An unnamed
European ofﬁcial responds to this by stating, “You can’t compare Uzbekistan and North
Korea. . .not every right is violated all the time. It’s not that systematic” (Tavemise
2008)

Even the events of Andijon were not “systematic” enough to force the US. to
confront the Karimov regime with stiff sanctions. In fact, as previously stated, in a show
of force and deﬁance in the face of international pressure Karimov initially kicked the
US. out of its Karshi Khanabad airbase (as well as expelling countless international
NGOs and media groups including RFERL and Eurasianet) and reoriented itself toward
China and Russia, only to have the US. quietly engage in talks with Uzbek officials for
the reopening of supply routes two years later. Admiral William J. Fallon, after a visit
with Uzbek diplomats, stated, “I told them that we couldn’t do much about that past, but
that we could look to the future” (Chivers 2008). As this same article aptly summarized,
“the exuberant vision of nurtruing pluralistic societies and governments responsive to
popular will” as articulated in the NSS91 and NSS98 “has been quietly recalibrated.
Democracy promotion is not gone, but has taken its place in a wider portfolio of
interests” including military, counter-narcotic, and counter-terror (i.e., US. interests)
(Chivers 2008).

Why such a complex, contradictory, and shifting geographic imaginary of Central

Asia in such a short period of time? Why has US. policy posited environmental security

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as the new “Grand Strategy” for the region, yet relatively little attention is paid by the
popular media to the meaning of environmental security? In fact, the only narrative that
remains consistent with respect to Central Asia is the ongoing coverage of the Aral Sea
desiccation and the failure of transboundary water agreements in the region (e.g., Despair
Looks Like a Sea that Died NYT 4 March 2001, (F rantz 2001) and Old Farming Habits
Leave Uzbekistan 0 Legacy of Salt NYT 15 June 2008 (Tavemise and Stern 2008)) which
do reﬂect the environmental security narrative in their repetitive coverage of the negative
impacts of population growth, the potential for ethnic and/or Islamic-oriented conﬂict,
and the legacy of a Soviet-Orientalized culture on environmental policy in the region.

Clearly, environmental security as a project of promoting ecological stability and
Central Asian-speciﬁc democratic reforms took a secondary position to the larger US.
security concern amid the ongoing War on Terror. Under this speciﬁc framing of
environmental security, Karimov positioned himself as dominant ally in the ﬁght against
Islamic extremism. His own framing of security issues in Uzbekistan, aided by the
narrative of environmental security linking degradation to Islamic extremist uprising,
have resulted in the regime’s deeper penetration of Uzbek civil society, further
weakening both democratic and environmental reform and reinforcing the reiﬁed
imaginaries of a failing despotic Uzbek state. In relation to water in particular he has
accomplished this through the dismantling and reorganization of local NGOS and local
social organization units (i.e., mahallas), which were the original centerpieces of

Perestoika and Glasnost-era environmental reform.

105

5.3 Reinforcing the Frames of Environment, Security, and Democracy in Uzbek
Central Asia: Critical Geopolitical and Legal Analysis of Uzbek Environmental
Security

5.3a Islam Karimov’s Uzbekistan on the Threshold of the 21“ Century

Karimov himself invoked environmental security in his book Uzbekistan on the
Threshold of the 21‘" Century in which he outlined factors or “threats” to Uzbekistan,
linking together “security, stability, and sustainability” (Karimov 1997). Preceding the
release of the NSS98 by a year, Karimov promoted security as ﬁrst and foremost, a
statewide interest that must seek contain “ethnic, regional, and local conﬂicts and
aggressive separatism” in order to maintain “[state] interests, and zones of inﬂuence or to
change the strategic balance of power in their favor” (Karimov 1997).

Karimov invoked Mackinder when he declared that Uzbekistan’s unfortunate
geopolitical positioning at the “strategic center of the crescent comprising the richest oil
and gas preserves of the Persian Gulf, Caspian Sea and Tarim Basin. . .are expected to
play a role in the future of Euro-Asia and ultimately the whole world” (Karimov 1997).
He then proceeded to link Mackinder to the emerging neo-Malthusian arguments of
Homer-Dixon and Baechler, stating that demographic and ethnic pressures threatened to
transform Uzbekistan into a new Afghanistan, a “hotbed of instability. . .tom by internal
conﬂicts which are encouraged by religious extremism, ethnic intolerance, drug
trafficking, and external forces of different kinds” (Karimov 1997). He continued to
emphasize emphatically that stability cannot be achieved in the region until the
transboundary effects of terrorism, drugs and arms trade, and ironically, environmental
degradation, and human rights violations would no longer proliferate throughout the

region.

106

Finally, in a statement of self legitimation, Karimov argued that “international
relations should stipulate the right of each sovereign state (deriving from its own national
interests) to identify the extent of its participation in international entities and collective
agreements on security, in order to ensure its own independence ad stability. Naturally,
we imply that the protection of security and the unacceptability of infringements of other
states’ interests should be ensured, and there should be no return to the anguish and
tragedy of the military-political confrontations of the recent past” (Karimov 1997). Just
as Karimov has argued that the environmental legacy of Uzbekistan is “Soviet vestige”
and that the water that was taken from the Aral “was forgotten [to be] drained blood from
the sea,” (Karimov 1997) he also endeavored to separate himself from the Soviet past,

despite the fact that he himself is a Soviet vestige.

5.3b Loss of Organizational Capital: Uzbek NGOS and Mahallas

Yet Karimov is deeply embedded in the ongoing social and environmental
degradation of Uzbekistan. His call for self determination of national security,
juxtaposed alongside the geopolitical gamesmanship of alternating between Russian
economic and US. security interests disproportionately beneﬁts the reinforcement of his
own power over and above the interests of the Uzbek state, let alone its people or
environment. For example, KarimOV’s “Law for Non-State Non-Proﬁt Organizations”
(1999) has direct implications for local NGO involvement within Central Asia
hydropolitics. Article 2 recognized the authority of international law above and beyond
state law “in cases of discrepancy” (1999). This stipulation in and of itself is particularly

interesting, in relation to water, as the international precedent for universal access to

107

water mirrors Uzbekistan’s own argument within the trans-boundary framework. Article
2 was arguably the most important aspect of the law with respect to NGO activities as it
protect them from being discredited by the media, while Article 10 protects them from
state intervention. The relevance of this law in relation to the involvement of local level
NGOS in the environmental movement will be addressed in the ﬁnal section.

By refusing to recognize Perestroika era reforms in the region, Western
development organizations stiﬂed place-speciﬁc democratic reforms in Central Asia.
The effect was the loss organizational capital directed towards social, political, and
environmental reform in the region. From the environmental perspective, the grassroots,
locally based NGOS established during Perestroika in Uzbekistan were either
incorporated into the new state framework, or were made irrelevant (Masaru 2006). For
example, the rise of “quasi-NGOS with ofﬁcial government support” (Farmer 2001) and
the establishment of a re-registration process for NGOS amidst President Karimov’s calls
for “ochiqﬁrqarolikjamiyati” (i.e., open civil society) (Masaru 2006) are indicative of
the current situation. In effect, Western development organizations missed out on a
perfect opportunity to support free and open reforms in the region, particularly in
Uzbekistan.

Uzbekistan’s historical geography is one punctuated by waves of conquest and
consolidation. As such, its people have tended to develop highly adaptive and
“hybridized” conceptions of civil society, particularly since independence. “Thirteen
years of independence have nurtured in this country a unique hybrid of national and
Muslim symbolism, rule by decree, and a statist approach to socio-economic

development. However, since the entrenchment of the nomenklatura, the Uzbek people’s

108

own inclination toward localized civil society, often referred to as mahalla (roughly
translated as neighborhood or local) has been adapted by the state government as its
ofﬁcialfuqarolikjamiyati, or civil society” (Masaru 2006). The implications for
environmental NGOS are particularly revealing in relation to the legal framework that
now exists.

The ﬁrst implication is that while Uzbekistan remains fairly rich in various forms
of physical and human capital that can be directed towards environmental reform, these
stocks are rapidly being depleted, squandered, and lost (Sievers 2003, and Masaru 2006).
The increasing “brain drain” of Soviet-era engineers and scientists coincides
paradoxically with an increased emphasis on technological solutions to the region’s
environmental problems. The governmental process itself appears fractured as it
continues to pursue on-paper development plans that and water use forums that
ultimately break down. The situations is consistently presented as contentious by
Western media and IGOs and “the very imagery of Uzbekistan as a developing country
(despite the fact that just over a decade ago there was much evidence to the contrary)
(Sievers 2003, and Masaru 2006) implementing step-by-step reforms has proﬁted the
administrators by protecting their ofﬁce and tight control over the populace. . .while their
self-fulﬁlling prophecy of ‘Islamic extremism’ served to radicalize small groups of
Islamist movements...” (Masaru 2006). By failing to allow for democracy to take its own
form, democracy of any form is now under calculated assault in Uzbekistan (Masaru
2006).

Secondly, and more directly related to locally-based environmental NGOS,

President Karimov has steadily worked to consolidate the most integral component of

109

Uzbek civil society, the mahalla, fully into the state apparatus. The government run or
quasi-NGO, “Mahalla Foundation,” was established as the umbrella organization that
would unify the once autonomous individual mahallas (Masaru 2006). Through the
incorporation of mahallas, the re—registration of coinciding NGOS, and the legitimation of
quasi-NGOS, local knowledge is not being eliminated — it is being absorbed and
neutralized and replaced by a system dominated by the Western incarnation of
sustainable development that problematizes environmental degradation through
technology and science while suspending the role of local governance from the
hydropolitical debate. This is made apparent in the legal framework of the ICWC and

Uzbek NGO registration law in particular.

110

6. IMPLICATIONS AND CONCLUSION

Geopolitical discourses typically reinforce the geopolitical imaginary which they
create. This is accomplished through a cyclical process of producing, validating, and
disseminating “easy to manage chunks of the world” (Dalby 1996). A new dominant
global discourse to replace the Cold War geopolitical imaginary of bipolarity and spheres
of inﬂuence has yet to fully take shape. In its stead, discourses relating to terrorism
(often represented as Islamic extremism), development, and environmental degradation
compete and coalesce (Dalby 2002). In my thesis, I have argued that political interests
in Uzbekistan (i.e., in the Karimov regime) have harnessed the U.S.-sponsored discourse
of enviromnental security in order to consolidate power by inﬁltrating Uzbek civil
society. As such, continued environmental degradation is reinforced as an “instrument
effect” (Ferguson 1990).

In terms of theory, I advocated in this thesis for a deeper exploration of the nexus
between critical geopolitics as an assessment of geopolitical discourses (i.e., writings of
global space by intellectuals of statecraft as well as the guardians of popular culture and
information) and critical legal components of political ecology (i.e., mutual landscape
effects/controls of institutions, laws, governance, and the politicized nature of law and
space as they interact with each other while simultaneously excluding each other). I did
this by engaging in a critical geopolitics that assesses both news [i.e., wide-circulation
U.S. newspapers such as (i.e., NYT, WP, CSM, BG)] and non-news (e.g., development
project papers and documents, and text of speeches) in accordance with widely accepted

critical geopolitical and critical legal geographic practices (Dodds 1996).

111

However, I also echo the concerns of Martin Muller and propose that a further
investigation associated with my research will need to take into account discourse as “not
only language, but language in practice” (Muller 2008). Further research must pay
careful attention to the hegemonic discourses at play in Uzbekistan (external via the
media and internal via the Karimov regime) and the examples of emerging and/or stiﬂed
local discourses that “transgress and subvert the divisive logic of separate spaces which
emanated from official, text-based narratives” (Megoran 2006). As such, I advocate an
ethnographic assessment of this research, in order to determine how local strategies are
adopted in response to environmental security. What is the lived environment of
environmental security in Uzbekistan? How do people negotiate the securitization of the
social and natural environment? Are the events in Andijon an appropriate regional proxy
or an anomaly? Such an ethnographic account would resemble Nick Megoran’s analysis
of security discourses on the Uzbekistan-Kyrgyzstan border (Megoran 2004).

My research shed light on the geopolitical discourse of environmental security in
Central Asia that has direct implications for the social and physical landscape of this
region. Despite increasing global attention with respect to multi-scale, hydropolitical
debates not only in Central Asia but throughout East Asia, South-East Asia, South Asia,
Africa, and the western United States, few critical geopolitical studies of this topic have
been done. Fewer still have focused on the nexus between critical geopolitics and
environmental issues. None have focused speciﬁcally on Central Asia. This critical
geopolitical approach assessed the effect of a process of representation with regards to
environment, security, and democracy in Central Asian Uzbekistan. Ultimately, I

demonstrated that there is a circular self-sustaining connection among these concepts that

112

helps reinforce a particular geographic imaginary of Central Asian Uzbekistan. Rather,
new narratives of cooperation that explore the myriad connections historically among the
ethnic groups of the region, particularly between Persian and Turkic culture, should be
emphasized over conﬂict.

The promotion of Malthusian and Orientalist-inspired understandings of the
social and environmental condition of Uzbek Central Asia have helped to realize the
formerly reiﬁed geographic imaginary of the region. Karimov has been able to maneuver
aptly beneath the US. environmental security discourse, and in doing so, has succeeded
in dismantling the very social organs that were most likely to stimulate social and
environmental reform in Uzbekistan. Environmental security, articulated as a means for
realizing short-terrn US. security goals in the region, cannot achieve the requisite long-
terrn environmental, social, and broadly conceived “democratic” reforms that are
necessary for the advancement and freedom of the Uzbek people as long as the
predominate assumptions associated with “security” in Central Asia continue to trump

the processes that beneﬁt human-environment interaction.

113

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