The weaker states of Central Asia have relied on the social salience of clans to secure their own legitimacy through pacts and informal agreements.
These pacts guarantee that the clans have informal access to power and resources and have allowed for the clans to become central actors in post-Soviet politics[3] Whereas Czarist colonialism had generally left Central Asia’s clans alone, Lenin declared in 1918 that the Bolsheviks would modernize the region and make its peoples into “Soviet nations.” But the vast communist bureaucracy of the Soviet party-state often failed to provide the social and economic goods it promised, and Soviet-forged identities (whether ethnonational or communist) put down only the shallowest of roots in Central Asia.
During the three decades under Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, moreover, Moscow intervened relatively little in Central Asia’s republic-level politics, and both larger and smaller clans were able to maintain their networks with resources from the Soviet state.
Clans reasserted themselves, seizing opportunities to coordinate against Moscow and show that they would no longer remain quiet under its heavy hand.
They used the ethnic unrest and riots of 1989–90 to delegitimize Gorbachev’s appointees and put forward their own candidates for the high post of republic first secretary, which in a nutshell is how both Akayev and Karimov first rose to power.
Unlike clientelism, clans are entire webs or networks of relations, horizontal and vertical, which remain bound by identity bonds as the economic necessity of patronage rises and falls.
Although often regionally based, since localism helps maintain ties, clans depend upon the genealogical or kinship relationship, which supersedes migration, language or religion.
[6] The particularistic ties and repeated interactions that characterise clans build trust and a sense of reciprocity, enabling the people involved to make contracts that extend over time.
The informal ties and networks of clan life reduce the high transaction costs of making deals in an environment where impersonal institutions are weak or absent and stable expectations are hard to form.
The élite need the support of their network in order to maintain their status, protect their group and obtain gains within the political and economic system.
The non-élite need the senior clan members in order to find work, have access to scholastic institutions, do business at the bazaar, obtain a loan or procure goods.
[3] Data from three Central Asian countries-Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan-suggest that clan identity is more salient than ethnonationality and religion and is the critical variable in understanding stability and conflict.
Since 1991, Central Asians themselves have repeatedly worried aloud about the corruption and destabilization sown by klannovaya politika (“clan politics”).
In the weaker Central Asian states, a clan assumes ever greater political importance because the bureaucracies cannot adequately provide for the needs of the society and the formal institutions lack legitimisation.