Encounters in "Transitionland": Western Advisers and National Cadres in 1990s Central Asia

When international development organization’s began working in post-Soviet Central Asia in the 1990s, they encountered newly independent countries that did not fit the hierarchies of development familiar from previous decades. They relied on local experts, activists, and interpreters to make sense of the places they encountered, design assistance programs, and carry out interventions. This talk will explore how international development workers and their counterparts in the region made sense of each other, and how their interactions shaped mutual perceptions that would continue to affect the way donors approached the region and how locals viewed the development enterprise.  

 

 

Artemy Kalinovsky is Professor of Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet Studies at Temple University. He earned his BA from the George Washington University and his MA and PhD from the London School of Economics, after which he spent a decade teaching at the University of Amsterdam. His first book was A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Harvard University Press, 2011). His second book, Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Cornell University Press, 2018), won the Davis and Hewett prizes from the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. He is currently working on a project that studies the legacies of socialist development in contemporary Central Asia to examine entanglements between socialist and capitalist development approaches in the late 20th century.

 

Ed Schatz (Chair), Director of the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, Director of the Belt and Road in Global Perspective, Director of Eurasia Initiative, Professor for the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. His latest book, Slow Anti-Americanism: Social Movements and Symbolic Politics in Central Asia, was published with Stanford University Press. His previous books include Paradox of Power: The Logics of State Weakness in Eurasia (2017) and Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power (2009). Professor Schatz is currently working with Professor Rachel Silvey on a SSHRC-funded project about the downstream effects of China’s Belt and Road Initiative and directs CERES’ Eurasia Initiative.