Book Review: Challenging myths about Central Asia

‘Dictators Without Borders’ sheds light on the inner workings of a little-understood corner of the world.
Updated 19 September 2017
Follow

Book Review: Challenging myths about Central Asia

Central Asia brings back the romance of the old Silk Road, one of the greatest trading routes in the world, and perhaps more notably, an avenue for the exchange of ideas and technologies. This ancient world in modern ferment has acquired considerable geostrategic importance due to the situation in Afghanistan, its natural resources, and its location between Europe, Asia, Russia, China, India and Iran.
“Dictators Without Borders: Power and Money in Central Asia” sheds light on the close link between secret financial transactions and political machinations in the Central Asian republics that became independent in the 1990s.
Central Asia made headlines worldwide when the Panama Papers were leaked to the press. The secretive world of tax havens became public knowledge. Politicians, celebrities, oligarchs — no one was spared. It became clear that Central Asian elites and businesses, far from operating in isolation, are embedded in a highly globalized system of shell companies and offshore intermediaries.
Alexander Cooley and John Heathershaw take us behind the scenes through an obscure network of bankers, lawyers and lobbyists in Frankfurt, London, New York and other financial capitals. They challenge the myth that Central Asia is remote and isolated from global influences. In fact, Central Asians are more knowledgeable about global popular culture than we are about them.
Another myth the authors refute is that Central Asia’s lack of economic liberalization has caused its economic and governance problems. Although the old Soviet-Russian ruble was immediately replaced by new currencies in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, privatization policies instigated by Western experts were not governed by the rule of law, but “by the principles of neo-patrimonial relations, where ruling elites provided assets to relatives and allies in return for their absolute loyalty and a cut of the spoils,” write Cooley and Heathershaw.
These states, which have embraced economic liberalization while retaining authoritarian rule, are referred to as “hybrid regimes.” They are defined by the quasi absence of a boundary between politics and economics, and between the public and private sectors.
“Crony capitalism” has connected Central Asia to the hidden and complex global system of tax havens and shell companies, which provide the world’s mega rich with the means to dodge their taxes and protect their unlawful fortunes.
In “Tax Havens: How Globalization Really Works,” authors Christian Chavagneux, Richard Murphy and Ronen Palan explain that in financial circles, “those who know do not talk and those who talk do not know. In tax matters, those who know talk, sometimes, but those who do not know talk a lot. The world of tax havens is opaque, confusing and secretive. It is a world that is saturated with stories and anecdotes. Yet the veritable flood of information can sometimes hide a dearth of solid data.”
The post-Soviet-state-building coincided with the rapid expansion of globalization. But Eastern Europe and Central Asia took different paths. For East European countries, joining the EU dominated their political agenda.
Central Asian states were originally interested in joining European institutions, but in time they became closer to China and Russia, and joined the Eurasian Economic Union and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Under Russian President Vladimir Putin, Central Asia became a stratregic priority.
Following the 9/11 attacks, Central Asian rulers became new allies in the global “War on Terror.” Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan provided logistical military bases for Operation Enduring Freedom, and all the Central Asian states provided transit rights for resupply and refueling. In return, the EU and US turned a blind eye to their increasingly authoritarian practices.
The Central Asian states skillfully juggled the new opportunities, institutions and legal tools provided by globalization to pursue their private economic agendas on a more global scale. Their use of shell companies played a key role in covering up their personal transactions and corrupt deals.
Corruption and environmental abuse watchdog Global Witness, in a report on Turkmenistan’s intermediary energy trading companies, says: “These companies have often come out of nowhere, parlaying tiny amounts of start-up capital into billion-dollar deals. Their ultimate beneficial ownership has been hidden behind complex networks of trusts, holding companies and nominee directors and there is almost no public information about where their profits go.”
Since many Central Asian shell companies are registered abroad, legal jurisdiction and contestation have shifted to foreign courts. In 2011, the Financial Times reported that about half of all active cases in the English Commercial Court were linked to Russia and the former Soviet states.
But this legal globalization has not advanced global governance or standards of accountability. Central Asian states have used and abused legal proceedings for their own purposes, mixing without qualms their personal business with state obligations.
Central Asian elites and oligarchs have also acquired passports and citizenship by taking part in a growing number of investor-residency programs. Countries such as Portugal, Cyprus and Malta provide passports to investors, which gives them free movement and residency rights in the EU’s Schengen area.
The UK, another popular destination, offers the Tier 1 Investor Residency program, which according to the Home Office is for people with a high net worth who want to make a substantial financial investment in the country.
The memory of the road that saw all the treasures, ideas, inventions, products and skills of the peoples of Eurasia remains alive. Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced in 2011 the concept of a New Silk Road (NSR), a web of economic and transit connections that will bind together a region too long torn apart by conflict and division. The NSR strategy continues to be a centerpiece of US policy in Central Asia and Afghanistan.
Two years later, in September 2013, Chinese Premier Xi Jinping declared that his country would promote a Silk Road Economic Belt. A few months later, he said the land-based belt includes building transportation networks (high-speed rail, airports and roads), energy infrastructure (power generation and energy pipelines) and a 21st-century Maritime Silk Road Belt. These two belts are known as One Belt, One Road (OBOR). This project, worth $1 trillion, is far more ambitious than the NSR.
Today’s Central Asian autocrats defend their authoritarianism and protect their activities as global individuals. They benefit from the complicity of Western institutions, companies, banks, regulators and politicians, and from the indifference of the rest of the world.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Designing San Francisco’ by Alison Isenberg

Updated 24 May 2025
Follow

What We Are Reading Today: ‘Designing San Francisco’ by Alison Isenberg

“Designing San Francisco” is the untold story of the formative postwar decades when US cities took their modern shape amid clashing visions of the future.

In this pathbreaking and richly illustrated book, Alison Isenberg shifts the focus from architects and city planners—those most often hailed in histories of urban development and design—to the unsung artists, activists, and others who played pivotal roles in rebuilding San Francisco between the 1940s and the 1970s.


What We Are Reading Today: Supply Chain Justice by Mary Bosworth

Updated 23 May 2025
Follow

What We Are Reading Today: Supply Chain Justice by Mary Bosworth

In the UK’s fully outsourced “immigration detainee escorting system,” private sector security employees detain, circulate and deport foreign national citizens. Run and organized like a supply chain, this system dehumanizes those who are detained and deported, treating them as if they were packages to be moved from place to place and relying on poorly paid, minimally trained staff to do so. In “Supply Chain Justice,” Mary Bosworth offers the first empirically grounded, scholarly analysis of the British detention and deportation system. Drawing on four years of extensive ethnographic research, Bosworth examines what keeps the system in place and whether it might be effectively challenged.
Told by a senior manager that “this is a logistics business,” Bosworth documents how the public and private sectors have built a supply chain in which people’s humanity is transformed both symbolically and tangibly through administrative processes and bureaucracy into monetized, measurable units.
Like all logistics, the system has failure built into it.


Book Review: ‘America’s View of the East, Cinematically’ by Abdulmohsen Al-Mutairi

Updated 22 May 2025
Follow

Book Review: ‘America’s View of the East, Cinematically’ by Abdulmohsen Al-Mutairi

Saudi journalist, filmmaker and cultural commentator Abdulmohsen Al-Mutairi launched his long-anticipated book — “America’s View of the East, Cinematically” — at last month’s Saudi Film Festival.

Cementing his reputation as a vital voice at the intersection of cinema and Arab identity, the book is a natural progression from his award-winning documentary, “Memories From The North,” tackling Western portrayals of the East with the same precision, intellect and emotional clarity.

Al-Mutairi drew wide attention for his documentary, which offered a poetic look at the Gulf War of 1990-91 and was named best short documentary at the 2022 festival.

“The documentary looks to me like a chapter in a book, because both memories and the war look like chapters to us. To me, the war is a timeline, there is a beginning, middle and an end,” Al-Mutairi told Arab News at the time.

“America’s View of the East, Cinematically” continues that mission, serving as both critique and chronicle of how Arab and Eastern identities have long been distorted by the cinematic lens of the West.

“This encyclopedia will be a building block added to what the Saudi Film Festival has started since its launch in 2008 and an effective tributary in the path of Saudi cinema, reinforcing what the festival organizers believe in and what they seek to achieve by emphasizing that the film industry must be accompanied by a knowledge industry directed at those working in the local and Arab cinema field,” according to its introduction.

More than critique, the book offers a kind of cinematic reclamation.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Book of Alchemy’ by Suleika Jaouad

Updated 22 May 2025
Follow

What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Book of Alchemy’ by Suleika Jaouad

In “The Book of Alchemy,” Suleika Jaouad explores the art of journaling and shares everything she’s learned about how this life-altering practice can help us tap into that mystical trait that exists in every human: creativity. She has gathered wisdom from one hundred writers, artists, and thinkers in the form of essays and writing prompts. Their insights invite us to inhabit a more inspired life.


What We Are Reading Today: Pico Iyer’s essay ‘The Joy of Quiet’

Updated 21 May 2025
Follow

What We Are Reading Today: Pico Iyer’s essay ‘The Joy of Quiet’

Pico Iyer’s essay “The Joy of Quiet” dissects modern life’s paradox: the louder our world grows, the more we crave silence. The essay was first published in 2012 in The New York Times.

With the precision of a cultural surgeon, Iyer — a travel writer famed for his meditative prose — exposes how digital noise erodes human connection, leaving us drowning in a sea of notifications yet thirsting for meaning.

But this isn’t a diatribe against technology; it’s a forensic examination of our collective burnout.

He maps a silent counterrevolution emerging in the unlikeliest corners: Silicon Valley CEOs fleeing to Himalayan monasteries, Amish-inspired “digital sabbaths” trending among younger generations, executives paying to lock away their phones and nations like Bhutan trading gross domestic product for “Gross National Happiness” as radical acts of cultural defiance.

Iyer’s genius lies in reframing silence as an insurgent act of self-preservation. A Kyoto temple’s rock garden becomes a “vacuum of stillness” where fractured minds heal; a tech mogul’s secret retreats — funded by the same wealth that built addictive apps — mock his own industry’s promises of liberation.

The essay’s sharpest insight? Our devices aren’t just distractions but “weapons of mass distraction,” systematically severing us from presence, empathy and the sacred monotony of undivided attention.

Critics might argue Iyer romanticizes privilege (not everyone can jet to a Balinese silent retreat), yet his message transcends class: in an age of algorithmic overload, solitude becomes not a luxury but psychic armor.

He anticipates today’s “attention economy” battleground, where mindfulness apps monetize the very serenity they promise to provide.

His closing warning: “We’ve gone from exalting timesaving devices to fleeing them,” feels prophetic in 2025, as AI chatbots colonize conversation and virtual reality headsets replace eye contact.

Less self-flagellating than Orwell’s colonial reckonings, “The Joy of Quiet” offers no easy answers.

Instead, it dares readers to ask: When every ping demands obedience, what revolution begins with a silenced phone? What if reclaiming our humanity starts not with consuming more but with the radical courage to disappear?