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This essay considers the nature of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Central Asia. Rather than a "grand strategy" coordinated by Beijing, it is better seen as a decentered, contradictory network of transnational clientelist relationships and semiautonomous profit-seeking institutions. While building much-needed infrastructure, these projects serve to enrich local political elites while fueling resentment and suspicion among their populations. Evidence for this argument is presented from three spheres: the principal implementers of the BRI, the main projects that have been enacted under its auspices in Central Asia, and examples of how these projects have been marred by elite corruption and local protest.

This article explores the way in which Russian and Chinese governments have rearticulated global trends towards active citizenship and participatory governance, and integrated them into pre-existing illiberal political traditions. The concept of 'participatory authoritarianism' is proposed in order to capture the resulting practices of local governance that, on the one hand enable citizens to engage directly with local officials in the policy process, but limit, direct, and control civic participation on the other. The article explores the emergence of discourses of active citizenship at the national level and the accompanying legislative development of government-organised participatory mechanisms, demonstrating how the twin logics of openness and control, pluralism and monism, are built into their rationale and implementation. It argues that as state bureaucracies have integrated into international financial markets, so new participatory mechanisms have become more important for local governance as government agencies have lost the monopoly of information for effective policymaking. Practices of participatory authoritarianism enable governments to implement public sector reform while directing increased civic agency into non-threatening channels.

This essay is a critical reflection on the challenge to academic freedom presented by the globalisation of practices of knowledge production. It explores a tension within the logic of the internationalisation agenda: UK universities are premised upon forms of knowledge production whose roots lie in European Enlightenment values of rationalism, empiricism and universalism, yet partnerships are growing with universities premised on rather different, non-liberal and, perhaps, incommensurable values. Therefore, in advancing the internationalisation agenda in non-liberal environments, UK-based scholars find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place: either legitimising and sustaining the subjection of knowledge production to the state on one hand, or engaging in a form of epistemological colonialism by demanding adherence to 'our values' on the other. Using Chinese research culture as an illustration, the article contributes to ongoing debate on the ethics of social science research collaboration with universities based in contrasting epistemological cultures.

The region needs the Chinese infrasturcture network's investments and transportation links, but a lack of responsible oversight is abetting elite corruption and fueling popular resentment.

AbstractThis article examines the emergence of the concept obshchestvennyi kontrol' in Russian state discourse, the practices to which it has been attached and the legitimating narrative employed to justify them. It traces the concept of kontrol' from Leninist conceptions olrabochyi kontrol', through post-Stalinist discourses of narodnyi kontrol ', demonstrating that contemporary state-driven articulations of obshchestvennyi kontrol' exhibit a substantial amount of continuity in the conceptualisation of the role of the citizen as assisting the state in its pre-determined goals. However, in contrast to rabochyi and narodnyi kontrol', which were legitimated by various aspects of Marxist-Leninist theory, contemporary mechanisms of obshchestvennyi kontrol' are accompanied by a rhetoric of increasing international competitiveness, thereby allowing the Kremlin to respond to international norms of a 'small state', outsourcing and civic participation.