Since the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, there is a curious inconsistency in what authoritarian governments in the region do and fail to do. While state leaders have succeeded in building vast and effective surveillance systems to perpetuate their rule, they have often struggled to provide regular and uniform social services to all citizens, including electricity, heating and healthcare, as well as create sufficient economic opportunities for young and growing populations. 

An underexamined feature of Central Asia’s political landscape since the early 2000s is the prevalence of local power brokers who are non-state actors performing state-like functions on small scales, enabling citizens’ access to jobs, goods, services, pensions, aid, education, entertainment and religious worship. These patrons create businesses to generate wealth, dispense benefits for their constituencies to curry loyalty, establish systems to secure their own indispensability, and arrange political cover for these endeavors with government officials.  

Anecdotal evidence suggests that local power brokers, operating outside formal government frameworks, play an important role in preventing social discontent from boiling over. The systems they create are often corrupt and inefficient, but they nonetheless fill gaps in government services. In political terms, power brokers may well act like dark matter in maintaining order invisibly to outside observers. But just as astronomers have trouble directly observing dark matter and its workings, unofficial patronage arrangements in Central Asia are little documented or studied. 

My preliminary research, including interviews with Central Asian citizens, indicates that non-state patronage networks are operating across the region, although it is difficult to ascertain specific locations and patrons; power brokers tend to want to operate quietly lest undue attention from officials or rivals interferes with their operations. 

Local observers tend to have imprecise knowledge of arrangements not affecting them personally. It is also difficult to discern how government officials at all levels view these patronage networks. Do they want to quash them because they make the state look inadequate? Or are local power brokers succeeding in co-opting and convincing officials that their activities constitute no threat to the state, and even make officials’ jobs easier? Another broad question needing clarity is whether the needs of local communities are being met by government officials, power brokers, both, or none? If citizens are experiencing a “services void,” what recourse do they have? Determining answers to these and other key questions concerning power brokers will require time and resources for investigative reporting and fieldwork research.  

There are a few examples of influential power brokers from the early 2000s that highlight why such actors must not be overlooked. One involves Kadyrjan Batyrov, the grand Uzbek patron of Jalal-Abad, Kyrgyzstan, who was instrumental in building some basic infrastructure in that Uzbek-majority city before inter-ethnic violence of 2010 brought about the quick collapse of his fiefdom. 

Batyrov built and led an extensive suite of institutions that included a university, newspaper, publishing house, school, medical clinic, cultural centers, shops, bazaars, mosque and theater. His achievements appeared impressive on Jalal-Abad’s cityscape in the 2000s, especially given the troubled history of Kyrgyz-Uzbek relations in southern Kyrgyzstan. He enabled vibrant economic and professional activity because he cultivated a personal relationship with then-President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, an ethnic Kyrgyz also from Jalal-Abad. Batyrov also created political cover for himself by crafting a public image of being a loyal Kyrgyzstani citizen working for the republic’s common good. But after the 2010 clashes, Batyrov felt compelled to flee the country and seek political asylum in Sweden. He remained in self-imposed exile until dying in 2018. 

The most well-known, and controversial case of power-brokering involves Akrom Yuldashev, who founded and led an Islamist network known as Akromiya, in and around the Ferghana Valley city of Andijan in Uzbekistan. The group played a central role in catalyzing a violent government crackdown in 2005, remembered as the Andijan massacre. Sidestepping questions about what Akromiya might have been intending to do that constituted a security risk to then-Uzbek leader Islam Karimov’s government, one aspect of the group’s activities hasn’t received sufficient attention: Yuldashev was part of a collective of pious businessmen that provided credit, jobs, Islamic education, and aid to the city’s residents. Whatever else it might have been up to, Akromiya’s operations resembled similar Islamic business networks across Central Asia starting from the 2000s that provided material benefits to local communities. The group’s popularity was such that crowds of Andijanis voluntarily rallied on its behalf on the city’s central Babur Square for months before the 2005 crackdown. This may illustrate why Uzbek political leaders felt threatened by Akromiya: the group fulfilled socioeconomic needs in the city, underscoring the government’s shortcomings. The state, unable to brook this rival source of authority, ultimately moved decisively to dismantle it. 

The authority of Central Asian power brokers, even those who hold some sort of political office, tends to be rooted in personal trust and feelings of obligation. If these patronage networks are not state structures, neither are they part of civil society, as analysts and scholars understand the term. This Central Asian model of exercising power over communities carves out private domains that deliver influence to the patron and benefits to dependents. These arrangements are paternalistic and communalistic, bound by sentiments of personal loyalty between patron and clients. This is not a civil society of autonomous citizens in voluntary association. No NGO would conceive of such a paradigm for communal flourishing.  

It would be a mistake to assume that Central Asian citizens are content with patron-centered arrangements as the preferred option for regional social and economic development. The problem is, it is difficult to envision Central Asian citizens somehow organizing to shape better alternatives to existing systems. Yet, any viable development model for the region would nonetheless require their participation in crafting reform principles consonant with their understandings about community and trust, while at the same time avoiding the paternalism and partiality of patronage.