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Contents
Overview
Background and Context
Key Concepts
Overview
The comparative, cross-societal project “Accounting for State-Building, Stability and Violent Conflict” explores the conditions for successful or failed defusing of conflict potential in the Caucasian and Central Asian societies. The project is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and hosted by the Institute of East European Studies in cooperation with the Institute of Social Anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin.
The ongoing empirical research focuses on (1) the conditions for successful / failed defusion of potentially violent conflict in the Caucasian and Central Asian societies. The analysis is placed (2) within the context of state building processes.
Methodologically, we rely on a multidisciplinary approach, combining political science, social anthropology and contemporary social history.
Regionally, the project focuses on the nineteen successor polities that have emerged in the Caucasus and in Central Asia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As of early 2005 the project also includes field research in Afghanistan. From this sample, extensive fieldwork is being conducted in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachaevo-Cherkessia and in Afghan Badakhshan, the Eastern Provinces of Nangarhar and Laghman and Paktia in the Southeast of Afghanistan. The fieldwork is carried out by eight research fellows in cooperation with local experts and research institutions.
Downloads:
- Project Proposal (pdf, 112 kB)
- Interim Report (pdf, 667 kB)
- Special CSCCA issue of the "Berliner Osteuropa Info" (pdf, 1,84 mB)
Background and Context
The imperial collapse of the Soviet Union posed a formidable challenge for the successor polities in the Caucasus and Central Asia: The centrally administered Soviet society has fragmented into multiple societies, which have to (re-) build state administrations, (re-) draw boundaries, (re-) invent loyalties. These societies have to establish new institutional arrangements for self-regulation in order to ensure security, political participation, economic development and inter-groups stability after the fall of the empire. These institutions have to be inscribed into a political space, the boundaries of which are often weakly defined and contested. Furthermore, ready-made historical templates are not available, since all of the Caucasian and Central Asian societies are latecomers and have not experienced significant periods of independent statehood.
All Caucasus and Central Asian societies of the collapsed empire faced this challenge. Not all societies, however, have managed to find a non-violent solution. Those administrative units of the collapsing empire, which have a multi-ethnical population, faced particular problems: here, the ambitions and fears of two or more ethnic groups have to be addressed, separatist tendencies have to be avoided, growing antagonism along ethnic (or else religious-ideological) lines need to be defused and attempts of ethnic entrepreneurs to conquer the state by using ethnicity as a resource of mobilisation have to be blocked.
Some of the post-socialist societies have successfully managed these tasks and have avoided violence. Others have succeeded in polity building, but only at the price of conflict and violence. And some of the new countries came close to complete failure – they lost a resemblance of statehood and internal violence became endemic.
The point of departure of the project is consequently to identify what conditions facilitate certain new orders. What actors, procedures and institutions are necessary to foster non-violent intra- and inter-group relations, particularly in dealing with conflicts? How does conflict interact with institutional change – both in terms of innovation, adaptation or breakdown of institutional arrangements? What combination of factors does it take to build or lose the state as the principle rule-setting agency? Are there alternative institutional arrangements for the provision of local governance as facilitator of non-violent and stable relations between and within groups?
Key Concepts
Conflict
"Conflict means the struggle over values and claims to scarce status, power and resources in which the aims of the opponents are to neutralise, injure or eliminate their rivals"¹
This classic definition, though some 50 years old now, still holds as working definition. It grasps the full range of what social conflict is about and what forms it may take (from non-violent competition to violent destruction).
Institutions
"Institutions are the rules of the game in a society or, more formally, are the humanely devised constraints that shape human interaction."²
Institutions are trained patterns of human interaction, which are codified in contracts and rules, or which are rooted in shared norms, values, and codes of behaviour. Because institutions are trained, repeated and “sticky” patterns of interaction, they stabilise social expectations and help reduce transaction costs.
¹ Coser, Lewis A (1956). The Functions of Social Conflict. London: Routledge & Kegan
² North, Douglas (1990). Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge: CUP
