Interrogating Illiberal Peace in Eurasia: Critical Perspectives on Peace and Conflict (Global Dialogues: Non Eurocentric Visions of the Global)

Draws together analyses of new approaches to peacebuilding and conflict resolution in a politically turbulent region and offers students and researchers an in-depth and theoretically guided empirical analyses of post-Western and decolonial approaches to peacebuilding in Eurasia. The collapse of the USSR wrought dramatic changes in Eurasia, both in terms of the structure of state power within the region, and the ways in which Western states and international organisations engaged with it. Analyses of conflict in this region remain rooted in supposed g̀lobal models', often assuming that patterns of state failure are due to resistance to the liberal model of peacebuilding. This book sets out a challenge to these assumptions and framings. It not only questions but resolutely dismisses the notion that the peacebuilding methods favoured by Western states remain the most salient in Eurasia. Instead, it develops a framework that seeks to conceptualise the ways in which non-liberal actors contest or transform globally promoted norms of conflict management and promote alternative ones in their place. Authoritarian Conflict Management (ACM) consists of an ensemble of norms and practices in which non-liberal actors attempt to exert sustained hegemonic control over the local discursive, economic and spatial realms in a given territory. With case studies ranging from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan, Xinjiang to the Caucasus, the chapters shed light on the ways in which local and regional actors enact practice of ACM in order to impose stability in conflict-prone localities, thereby challenging the Western-led consensus known as the l̀iberal peace' Introduction : illiberal peace and authoritarian conflict management : empirical and theoretical contexts -- History, memory and the quest for conflict resolution in southern Kyrgyzstan and the Ferghana Valley / Jeff Sahadeo -- China's approach to countering religious extremism among Uyghurs in Xinjiang / Adam Jones -- Women and literature in Azerbaijan : creative literacy as an asset model of peace-building / Alison Mandaville -- A negative post-liberal peace? : inquiring the embeddedness of everyday forms of peace in Central Asia / Philipp Lottholz -- "Everyday peace" in Jabbor Rasulov, Tajikistan : local social order and possibilities for a local turn in peace building / Khushbakht Hojiev and Anna Kriekemeyer -- Nation-building in Central Asia : towards a new ethnic policy / Valeriy Khan -- Clashes of universalisms : Xinjiang, Tianxia and changing world order in 19th century / Zhiguang Yin -- Spatial security during ethnic riots in Osh : how spatial factors and the built environment affect the local dynamics of violence and neighborhood security / Joldon Kutmanaliev -- Bottom-up peacekeeping in southern Kyrgyzstan : how local actors managed to prevent the spread of violence from Osh/Jalal-Abad to Aravan, June 2010 / Alisher Khamidov, Nick Megoran and John Heathershaw -- Conflict management, extractive industries, and the 2014 Iiternational military exit strategy in Afghanistan / Timor Sharan and Srinjoy Bose -- Positive incentives to stop insurgency? : Russian conciliatory tactics in the North Caucasus / Elena Zhirukhina