Suchergebnisse

This article discusses how Russian and Russian-speaking (Ruszabon) inhabitants of Dushanbe, the capital city of Tajikistan, shape and maintain their securityscapes through languages, identities, memories, networks and physical structures of the urban space. Securityscapes are physically built and mentally imagined spaces securing individual or collective life from what people perceive as existential dangers. These dangers reflect both objective and imagined conditions threatening individual and collective extinction. Depending on different existential contexts, securityscapes serve either as distinct or as merged and intertwined spatial categories of individuals and collectives. When the Ruszabon face violence in public due to their ethnic and religious origins, they hide their identities or adapt their lifestyle to the hegemonic demands of the Muslim society. Social networks and the physical structures of urban neighbourhoods shape inner securityscapes, as reflected in the physical isolation of individuals and segregation of families,family friends and religious communities from the public. In particular, the memories of the interethnic clashes in the 1990s in Dushanbe, which are substantially influenced by political interpretations, condition and diminish the everyday practices and future expectations of the Ruszabon.

For the sake of a modest contribution to Crossroads Studies, this article argues that state and society in Tajikistan is embedded into personal (kinship, patron-client, etc.) networks of people. These networks structure social interactions by crosscutting institutional and spatial boundaries and frameworks. Notably, the networks are not stable per se especially in the aftermath of the post-Soviet and post-Civil War transformations of Tajik society. Rather, the case study of mahalla shows that the elites and their local mediators mobilize the material and immaterial resources of local people, religious and state institutions, and international donors to enforce these contested networks. Especially due to the state elites' limited material and military power, therefore, there is a reliance on local mediators, including family elders and religious notables, who shape the mahalla's committee. The concept of 'ontological security' explains how mahalla mediation is an effective strategy to frequently mention about chaos, uncertainty and insecurity.

In cooperation with researchers in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, BICC (Bonn International Center for Conversion) is conducting a three-year research project on everyday security practices in Central Asia, which is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. The project was launched in July 2015. While security has become an important focus of academic work on and in Central Asia, most studies highlight the geo-strategic importance of the region and underline the threats to states posed by non-state armed groups and transnational criminal organizations. The research project proposes a radically different approach to studying security in Central Asia. As a point of departure, it understands security as an everyday practice of people that consists in identifying and engaging perceptions of existential threat. It asks: How do various groups of people deal with security issues in their daily lives? For the purpose of addressing this question, it develops and applies the innovative concept of securityscapes, which is partly inspired by the work of the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai as well as recent debates in sociology and political science on studying security as a constitutive practice and in a less state-centric manner.

Moving beyond state-centric and elitist perspectives, this volume examines everyday security in the Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and written by scholars from Central Asia and beyond, it shows how insecurity is experienced, what people consider existential threats, and how they go about securing themselves. It concentrates on individuals who feel threatened because of their ethnic belonging, gender or sexual orientation. It develops the concept of 'securityscapes', which draws attention to the more subtle means that people take to secure themselves – practices bent on invisibility and avoidance, on disguise and trickery, and on continually adapting to shifting circumstances. By broadening the concept of security practice, this book is an important contribution to debates in Critical Security Studies as well as to Central Asian and Area Studies