Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, has neither a Starbucks nor a McDonald's. Vendors in the city do not accept credit cards, only local currency. High-speed Internet access is nearly impossible to find. And if there is a lingua franca, it is Russian, not English. Thus, many might conclude that Tajikistan, like much of Central Asia, has been largely unaffected by globalization.
This may be true superficially, but the notion that the region remains unglobalized and disconnected from the rest of the world is a myth—one that Alexander Cooley and John Heathershaw decisively shatter in Dictators Without Borders: Power and Money in Central Asia. The authors convincingly demonstrate how elites in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan have embraced and harnessed globalization and liberalization since the fall of the Soviet Union, albeit selectively and to promote illiberal ends.
Consider for example the case of Mukhtar Ablyazov, who served in Kazakhstan's government during the 1990s, and then cofounded a pro-reform party in 2001. After a jail term and a brief stint abroad in Russia, Ablyazov returned to Kazakhstan in 2005, became chairman of the country's largest financial institution, and, with the help of Western brokers, used his position to embezzle billions of dollars through a multitude of offshore legal schemes. Once the bank collapsed and was effectively taken over by the Kazakh government, Ablyazov fled to London, where he owned property, to claim political asylum. Meanwhile the bank's litigators established jurisdiction in the United Kingdom and successfully sued to reclaim some of the bank's lost assets through foreign asset seizure. Throughout, the Kazakh government extensively used and misused Interpol's Red Notice system to track down Ablyazov and his associates across Europe.
This complicated case illustrates the various ways Central Asian elites have taken advantage of financial, political, and legal globalization when it suits their interests. Importantly, though, it also shows the extent to which Western institutions and intermediaries are complicit in this process: they not only enable capital flight and money laundering but also help extend the long arm of the authoritarian state in checking exiled political opposition.
The authors point out that the conventional wisdom that Central Asia remains isolated is not only wrong but also potentially hazardous, as it can lead to bad policy. U.S. and Chinese officials alike often invoke greater connectivity as a means of improving development in the region, as typified by China's Silk Road Economic Belt initiative. But, as the authors show, this focus on greater connectivity by itself may only further entrench the corrupt practices already occurring.
Few if any of the phenomena detailed in Dictators Without Borders are unique to Central Asia. Still, the authors deserve high praise for making an often-overlooked region the sole focus of serious scholarly inquiry, dispelling an array of misperceptions and proposing a number of commonsense policy recommendations along the way.
