Deciphering dictators’ discourse on Indigenous democracy: a case of Karimov’s Uzbekistan
Tutumlu A. Önemli B. Rustemov I.
2025Routledge
Central Asian Survey
2025#44Issue 164 - 84 pp.
Why do dictators ‘indigenize’ democracy? This article analyses discourses on democracy in a consolidated authoritarian regime to show how it assists in authoritarian regime-building. The article shows that in the case of Uzbekistan, Karimov’s rhetoric selected and essentialised features of an Uzbek nation, such as community, solidarity and fairness. The regime imposed such features on the Indigenous self-governing institutions, known as mahalla, to foster authoritarian control by turning community to guarantee ideological coherence, by imposing state hierarchy in the name of solidarity and by establishing local networks of patron-client relations in the name of fairness. Through quantitative content and critical discourse analyses of Karimov’s speeches from 1995 to 2015 published by the official press in Russian, the authors operationalise Karimov’s rhetoric on Indigenous democracy and through the analysis of legal acts that governed mahalla, they illustrate how such interpretations strengthened the authoritarian regime.
authoritarianism , community , fairness , Indigenized Uzbek democracy , official mahalla , solidarity
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Department of Political Science, Near East University, Lefkoşa, Turkey
Department of Economics, Izmir Katip Celebi University, Izmir, Turkey
Department of Transport Construction and Production of Building Materials, Kazakh Institute of Automobile and Road Construction named after L. B. Goncharov (KazADI), Almaty, Kazakhstan
Department of Political Science
Department of Economics
Department of Transport Construction and Production of Building Materials
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Книга Публикация научной статьи Волощук 2026 Book Publication of a scientific article 2026