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Order at the Bazaar: Power and Trade in Central Asia
Order at the Bazaar: Power and Trade in Central Asia
Order at the Bazaar: Power and Trade in Central Asia
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Order at the Bazaar: Power and Trade in Central Asia

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Order at the Bazaar delves into the role of bazaars in the political economy and development of Central Asia. Bazaars are the economic bedrock for many throughout the region—they are the entrepreneurial hubs of Central Asia. However, they are often regarded as mafia-governed environments that are largely populated by the dispossessed. By immersing herself in the bazaars of Kyrgyzstan, Regine A. Spector learned that some are rather best characterized as islands of order in a chaotic national context.

Spector draws on interviews, archival sources, and participant observation to show how traders, landowners, and municipal officials create order in the absence of a coherent government apparatus and bureaucratic state. Merchants have adapted Soviet institutions, including trade unions, and pre-Soviet practices, such as using village elders as the arbiters of disputes, to the urban bazaar by building and asserting their own authority. Spector’s findings have relevance beyond the bazaars and borders of one small country; they teach us how economic development operates when the rule of law is weak.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateAug 15, 2017
ISBN9781501712388
Order at the Bazaar: Power and Trade in Central Asia

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    Order at the Bazaar - Regine A. Spector

    ORDER AT THE BAZAAR

    Power and Trade in Central Asia

    Regine A. Spector

    CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

    To my family

    Contents

    List of Illustrations

    Introduction. The Possibility of Order

    1. Varieties of Order in a New Market Context

    2. Changing Meanings of Bazaar Trade in Central Asia

    3. Organizing Collectively at Dordoi Bazaar

    4. Adapting to Bazaar Ownership through Diplomacy

    5. Centralizing to Modernize at Osh Bazaar

    6. Becoming Trading Elders and Local Authorities

    7. Local Orders in Post-Soviet Bazaars and Beyond

    Conclusion. Rethinking Policy, Politics, and Development

    Acknowledgments

    Research Appendix

    Notes

    Index

    Illustrations

    Table

    A. Interviews referenced

    Figures

    2.1. Number of bazaars in Kyrgyzstan (1980–2005)

    2.2. Retail turnover in Kyrgyzstan (1994–2005)

    Photos

    2.1. Shuttle trade bags, Osh bazaar

    3.1. Bus terminal and buses, Dordoi bazaar

    3.2. Bus terminal and buses, Dordoi bazaar

    3.3. Trading row, Dordoi bazaar

    3.4. Double-stacked containers, Dordoi bazaar

    3.5. Open container, Dordoi bazaar

    5.1. Rice pavilion, Osh bazaar

    5.2. Street traders, Osh bazaar

    5.3. Street traders, Osh bazaar

    5.4. Main entrance, Osh bazaar

    6.1. Kyrgyz kalpaks, Karasuu bazaar

    Introduction

    THE POSSIBILITY OF ORDER

    Tatiana has worked at Dordoi bazaar selling Chinese-made children’s clothing for over fifteen years. Dordoi is located on the outskirts of Bishkek, the capital city of the Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan. Rising early to arrive at the bazaar by 7:00 a.m., she serves wholesale clients from all over Eurasia; they come by bus and minivan in the wee morning hours and leave later that day or the next with their wares. In this way, for over fifteen years, she has grown her business and provided for her children. Reflecting on the role of the bazaar in society, she described it as a spring that feeds and gives life to an entire river. Looking around Bishkek and the rest of the country today, she observed that many of those who built new homes and founded businesses such as beauty salons and cafés began at Dordoi bazaar. It all started with Dordoi, she said. That’s why Dordoi is a spring.

    By 2007, Dordoi bazaar had become a crucial Eurasian reexport hub and a foundation for Kyrgyzstan’s reputation as a trading state.¹ Prior to the country’s independence in 1991, a smaller number of bazaars existed in cities and towns as collective farm markets. Throughout the Soviet Union, these markets provided primarily local fresh produce and other food products. After the Soviet Union’s collapse, bazaars mushroomed in size and number, offering any consumer good imaginable—most made in neighboring China. Some expanded from their origins as collective farm markets; others were founded anew. In addition to people selling goods, such as Tatiana, customers, cart pushers, and other service providers such as café operators and money changers converged on these territories daily, forming a core pillar of economic activity within the country.

    This dynamism appears puzzling given what a casual observer might see at or hear about the country’s bazaars. It could appear to be chaos—consumers competing with cart pushers to get through loud and crowded alleyways, traders complaining of the summer heat and the winter cold, visitors being warned of those who mug and swindle hovering unseen within the bazaar, officials randomly demanding bribes of traders and consumers. Such observations comport with Kyrgyzstan’s low scores on global indicators related to rule of law and security of property rights. The country’s weak state capacity, frequent political instability, and high levels of corruption regularly relegate the country to the bottom of major global rankings.² Typically, such conditions are presumed to lead to economic decline or stagnation and are reflected in discourses of market disorder and dispossession.

    Yet closer investigation reveals that while many bazaars are indeed crowded and exposed to the elements, the challenges related to disorder presupposed by these indicators—corruption, predation, instability—had largely disappeared at some bazaars in the two decades since the country’s independence. Order at the Bazaar seeks to explain how this happened. In short, in the absence of a coherent national government apparatus and a bureaucratic state that provide such order, those involved at the bazaar create it themselves. The findings have relevance beyond the bazaars and borders of this small country; they teach us how economic development operates in weak rule-of-law contexts, and more specifically how a variety of organizational forms come to constitute the order that underpins market economies within such countries.

    This book begins from the premise that national-level economic statistics and governance indicators in this region are at times not only unreliable; they also conceal islands of order, including those that undergird bazaar dynamism.³ Furthermore, many existing analyses of the post-Soviet region focus on narratives of crisis, chaos, and conflict, and in doing so miss the important sociopolitical work that constitutes the creation and ongoing maintenance of order at the bazaar.

    In this book, I identify who has stakes in Kyrgyzstan’s bazaar economy, what problems they face over time, and how they articulate and work to realize their visions of order at the bazaar. In addition to traders who populate the bazaars and engage in the daily work of commerce, private owners of bazaar land and municipal officials play important roles. This book tells the story of how traders, owners, and officials interacted in an often fluid and crisis-ridden context to define and establish what they believed to be appropriate relationships, rules, norms, rights, and responsibilities that provided the foundation for their work at the bazaar.

    The book contrasts these processes in the two largest bazaars in Kyrgyz-stan’s capital, Bishkek. I find that differences in their geographic location and integration into Soviet governance institutions shape the divergent privatization processes and subsequent relations between traders, owners, and officials. Dordoi bazaar’s location on the outskirts of the city and its status as an occasional flea market during Soviet times set the stage for one main owner to quickly privatize and expand the bazaar to service foreign consumers. In contrast, Osh bazaar’s central location in the city and its integration into collective farm market governance structures during the Soviet period led to myriad owners in an opaque, fragmented privatization process.

    Traders worked and maneuvered in these two different bazaar environments initially navigating highly uncertain, dangerous, and risky commercial relations with suppliers, buyers, and transport and travel companies. This book puts the spotlight on older, more established traders and the crucial roles they played in creating islands of order at bazaars. By mobilizing their ideas and experiences, they adapted different Soviet-era and pre-Soviet organizational practices to the new market-based setting, laying the foundation for a variety of legitimate orders at bazaars against the backdrop of initial domination of traders by private bazaar owners and the state. These older traders engaged in a range of activities in their roles, including deliberating and advocating favorable policies and bazaar conditions, mediating disputes, channeling information, and serving as role models for traders.

    At Dordoi bazaar, these senior leaders are called starshie in the Russian language. They are informally elected from each trading row at the bazaar and constitute the core leadership of the trade union at the bazaar, founded in the mid-1990s. This trade union’s governance system via starshie draws on labor and residential norms and organizational forms established under the Soviet Union. At Osh bazaar, a different type of leadership emerged in some trading areas, known as aksakals (males) or baibiches (females) in the Kyrgyz language. While the starshie have their origins in Soviet-era governance arrangements, the aksakals and baibiches have their origins in rural, pre-Soviet, nomadic Kyrgyz society.

    Through an analysis of these older traders and their roles, we see that despite common structural conditions in the country’s capital city—a weak state and privatized bazaar land with owners who collect rental fees from traders—different forms of authority undergird legitimate order at these bazaars. While the core power dynamics have not changed over the last quarter-century of independence, this book argues that traders have been able to create and work through organizational forms that make for bazaar workplaces that have grown and thrived throughout this period.

    Instead of attributing the dynamism and order at the country’s bazaars solely to the adoption of neoliberal economic reforms, the strengthening of formal rule-of-law institutions, or the persistence of age-old cultural norms, I argue that we must recognize how those with stakes in the bazaar economy engaged in intensely political processes, often adapting preexisting ideas and organizational forms to new contexts as part of their efforts. Trade unions, presumed to be weak, corrupt, or coopted in post-Soviet and other developing-world contexts, have been founded and reconstituted with new meanings and practices in a society undergoing radical socioeconomic change. Rural elders, presumed to flourish in rural, village pastoral life, have become intertwined with the urban market economy.

    The book’s findings suggest that we look beneath national-level analyses and engage in comparisons of islands of order in places we would least expect. Doing so uncovers local understandings and practices as situated in particular historical contexts that change over time. Order at the Bazaar thus serves as a corrective to teleological perspectives on the primacy and effectiveness of formal rule-of-law institutions that predominate in the development literature. In the aftermath of the failures of market reform and structural adjustment, one strand of the development literature has touted the importance of improving governance by strengthening formal institutions as a prerequisite to market reform and development. Instead, I offer a view of institutions that constitute market economies as being created and mobilized, adapted, and imbued with authority and morality by people on the ground, not moving from weaker to stronger, or from informal to formal, with the aid of international donors.

    1

    VARIETIES OF ORDER IN A NEW MARKET CONTEXT

    Kyrgyzstan is a country in which we would least expect to find thriving businesses and economic dynamism according to institutionalist development paradigms. This small country of roughly five million people in Central Asia has been widely regarded as poor, politically unstable, and corrupt.¹ My first research trip to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, in summer 2005 coincided with the ouster of the country’s first president, Askar Akaev, earlier that year. In the aftermath of his departure, scandals surrounding ownership of cell phone companies, grocery stores, hotels, resorts, and mining companies captured newspaper headlines and analyst reports at the time.² Many of these assets had been either directly or indirectly held by President Akaev’s family members and were up for grabs after he was overthrown.

    These ownership conflicts only confirmed what observers of politics and the economy in Kyrgyzstan had pointed to over the previous decade: constant property redistributions resulting from weak formal rule-of-law institutions and continued political instability. An analyst cogently summarized the common perception as of 2008: Not only do we live in an unlawful state, we live in a state in which the law has died.… There are no normal mechanisms of protection.³ Kyrgyzstan’s apparent reality mirrored a broader conventional wisdom in post-Soviet political economy, which has characterized property as undergoing permanent redistribution since the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991.⁴ Against this backdrop, about a million citizens of Kyrgyzstan sought work overseas depending on the season, and upwards of 40 percent of the population lived in poverty.

    This national-level view of Kyrgyzstan’s economy confirms Hernando de Soto’s worst nightmare. For this Peruvian economist and his new-institutional economist followers, the absence of private property rights defined, administered, and enforced by states inhibits growth and development.⁵ According to this logic, without deeds to property that are widely recognized and protected, individuals are unable to use their property for collateral and thus grow and expand their businesses. De Soto would not be surprised to find that Kyrgyzstan’s weak legal, administrative, and enforcement capacity, combined with continued political instability, have relegated this post-Soviet country to the bottom of major global property rights and investment rankings.

    Yet the hype at the time surrounding property redistributions and general economic chaos masked an alternative empirical reality: the country had become a regional trading hub, a dynamic entrepôt state for the re-export of foreign-made consumer goods throughout Central Asia and the post-Soviet region more broadly. Sprawling wholesale bazaars received customers from Kazakh-stan, Russia, and other Central Asian countries throughout the 1990s and 2000s, while smaller bazaars in cities served clientele from other regions of Kyrgyzstan and from neighboring villages. Take, for example, Dordoi bazaar. By 2011, this bazaar had become renowned as a city within a city, a physical space not linked to bribery, corruption, and organized crime, at least as understood by traders at the bazaar. Such governance maladies had become associated with the first two authoritarian presidents of the country after independence in 1991: Askar Akaev (1991–2005) and Kurmanbek Bakiev (2005–2010). Professor Emil Nasritdinov at the American University of Central Asia confirmed this exceptional situation in an exposé on Dordoi bazaar: There are a few independent economic sectors in Kyrgyzstan. Dordoi is one of them and an escape from any predators.… The large number of bazaaris and the ownership structure made it somehow untouchable.

    This book investigates the sociopolitical work at the level of both traders and bazaar owners that made this somehow possible at Dordoi bazaar and compares processes and forms of order with another major bazaar in central Bishkek, Osh bazaar. Shifting the spotlight to the question of order at the bazaar through the lens of those experiencing and creating it unsettles the predominant literature that views Kyrgyzstan through memes of chaos and conflict, or predation and patronage. It reveals that the empirical reality on the ground is simultaneously more varied and orderly than national-level narratives indicate.

    Rethinking Post-Soviet Bazaars

    Bazaars represent a crucial pillar of the economy in Kyrgyzstan, and this book shifts the focus of existing scholarship on the country’s economy to these entities. To date, the literature details the ways in which the ruling families in the 1990s and 2000s coopted and controlled the country’s gold resources and military contracts. Regarding the latter, Kyrgyzstan grew in geostrategic importance over the course of the 2000s because of the role of the Manas transit center supporting the NATO campaign in Afghanistan.⁷ In many ways, Kyrgyzstan came to resemble the small African country of Djibouti, which is cursed by not only natural resources but also its strategic location and the significant amounts of military-based foreign aid.⁸

    These capital flows favored primarily individuals, their families, and their associates in the country’s leadership. Everyday people have earned their income through other means, including at the bazaar. While sectors such as manufacturing, agriculture, banking, and natural resources have garnered significant scholarly attention in the post-Soviet political economy literature—particularly focusing on Russia and Ukraine—the trade sector has provided the basis for survival and capital accumulation for many and has received less systematic attention from a sociopolitical perspective.⁹ Indeed, in a subset of the post-Soviet world, the decline of wages for those in manufacturing and state-based employment coincided with the relative growth in importance of commerce, including bazaar trade.

    A comparison of major capital flows demonstrates the importance of bazaars to Kyrgyzstan’s economy. In 2008, the World Bank estimated the value of annual bazaar imports in Kyrgyzstan to be close to $4 billion. To put this in perspective, the country’s 2008 GDP in current dollars totaled about $5 billion. Other major capital flows in Kyrgyzstan in 2008 include foreign aid ($360 million), gold exports ($464 million), and remittances from Kyrgyzstani laborers working primarily in Russia and Kazakhstan ($1.2 billion).¹⁰ Simply put, we cannot understand politics, economics, and development in this country without considering bazaars.

    Existing literature on bazaars in the region falls into three groups, each of which provides a different perspective on how we might understand the emergence of order at bazaars. The first conceptualizes bazaars in Central Asia as cultural forms in the region, existing along the multiple Silk Roads connecting Europe and Asia long before the Soviet reign that dominated much of the twentieth century. According to these perspectives, bazaars are governed by culturally inscribed routines and patterns of exchange. Economic reformers have adopted this strand of thinking, proclaiming that traders in the region resemble natural entrepreneurs who had been stifled by the Soviet command economy.¹¹

    One World Bank analysis, for example, conveys an air of inevitably that bazaars would again thrive in Central Asia after the Soviet Union’s collapse, given people’s cultural predisposition to engage in trade and entrepreneurial activity: Bazaars in Central Asia date back hundreds of years, demonstrating a sophisticated logistics infrastructure, exemplifying the highly developed entrepreneurial skills of Central Asian people.¹² According to this view, the new governments’ liberalization of borders and tariffs provided the opportunity for a pent-up entrepreneurial spirit to be unleashed and for Central Asians to return to their culturally inscribed professions: as traders along the recomposing twenty-first-century Silk Road. Among the Central Asian countries, Kyrgyzstan adopted the most liberal economic policies under the first president, Askar Akaev, making its rise as an entrepôt state seemingly inevitable. From this reified Smithian perspective, bazaars thrive because the free market—open borders and liberal tariffs—facilitates the fulfillment of culturally imbued entrepreneurial potential.¹³

    Yet such broad generalizations defy historic reality. Ethnic Kyrgyz never dominated trade and merchant culture in Central Asia. The main cities associated with Silk Road trade are located in modern-day Uzbekistan (for example, Bukhara, Khiva, Samarkand)—and the groups historically associated with this trade are traditionally sedentary Uzbeks and Tajiks, not nomadic Kyrgyz and Kazakhs. Moreover, these perspectives trumpeting entrepreneurial spirit say nothing of the real challenges with state breakdown of the command economy, the evaporation of social safety nets, and the proliferation of laws, decrees, and border closures that characterized the 1990s. In other words, to categorize traders and others associated with this sector as natural businesspeople or willing entrepreneurs would be to mischaracterize the profound socioeconomic crises and dislocations that unleashed this trade.¹⁴ These perspectives further neglect the meanings of this trade in the region and the sociopolitical work new traders engaged in to build authority and institutions that govern markets, key foci of this book.

    A second, more critical, perspective locates the rise of bazaars and the mushrooming of trade as a violent form of dispossession resulting from rapid neo-liberal transformations. In this narrative, women and highly educated Soviet intellectuals, teachers, doctors, and other professionals were forced into petty trade of Chinese-made goods to survive. Rapid liberalization of the economy amid state breakdown unleashed poverty shocks for many.¹⁵ For example, an analysis of Uighur traders in Almaty’s barakholka bazaar invoked David Harvey’s conceptualization of late capitalism, specifically that the compression of time and space has produced a complex and dynamic world capitalist system which incorporates various modes of exploiting labor.¹⁶ Traders became the victims, pushed into this form of survival without alternative work opportunities in their trained professions. Order from this perspective is governed by the force of the unbridled market and the drive for profit in the absence of a social safety net.

    Feelings of shame, uncertainty, and lack of alternatives do characterize many traders’ perceptions of trade in the early years. Yet this story of dispossession in the 1990s presupposes a constant understanding of trade and bazaar work over time and discounts changes in the meaning and practices of those engaged in bazaar trade. It also misses the important role of bazaar landowners and government authorities as key actors shaping and responding to the trading environment. Narrating the story of bazaar growth in the region through this perspective strips traders of their agency and the complex negotiations of meanings, resistances, and capabilities they wrestled with over time.

    Third and finally, bazaars across the post-Soviet region quickly became associated with havens for mafias and protectors, who capitalized on their monopoly over the use of violence in the context of new countries with weak state capacity. Over the past century, many countries have embarked on the privatization of state-owned assets in the post-Soviet region, or the privatization of communally held property in other parts of the world. However, this twin birth of new states and market economies called into question the possibility that institutions of the state could protect private property and more broadly govern markets and shield people from social dislocations of market creation. Even in the most advanced industrialized states and economies, for example, privatization and the creation of markets entails politically fraught reregulation and the creation of new rules and regulatory agencies; freer markets demand more rules.¹⁷ Many governments have not possessed the authority or the capacity to provide the legal, regulatory, extractive, enforcement, and redistributive mechanisms that undergird modern markets.¹⁸

    In this anarchic, Hobbesian environment throughout the post-Soviet region, the state could not prevent expropriation of new businesses or predation of their profits, including those of kiosk-workers and traders.¹⁹ Bazaars and borders became associated with chaos and international traders denounced as smugglers, profiteers, speculators, racketeers, and ‘criminal-genic elements.’²⁰ Mafias and bandits filled the void left by the collapse of state enforcement organizations by offering protection and preventing other hungry predators from encroaching on property and profits.²¹ Order at the bazaar as seen through this lens is governed by the use or threat of force by private violence-wielders in the absence of a coherent state.

    This characterization holds elements of truth, especially in the 1990s. In the popular press in Central Asia, bazaars at this time were associated with such trends. For example, a newspaper article in 2000 from neighboring Kazakhstan, which experienced a similar boom in bazaars throughout the country, sums up the conventional wisdom: Together thousands of consumers, hundreds of swindlers, racketeers, pickpockets, and other conmen head for the bazaar.²² Another press article from 2000 refers to bandits in Kyrgyzstan’s bazaars in the title: One bazaar and forty bandits.²³ Yet over time, studies have demonstrated that state bureaucracies rooted out mafias and other such groups throughout the post-Soviet region, and chaotic institutional environments sowed the seeds for the mafias’ own demise.²⁴ In Russia, by the 2000s, businesses and traders reported a decline in threats and confrontations from these groups.²⁵

    While mafias dissipated over time, the presence of government bureaucrats remained an important concern for traders.²⁶ They fed off of the bazaar trade by demanding a host of fees and fines at almost every node in the system, whether at the bazaar itself or at the country’s border where goods enter. Formal legal codes in the country only contributed to the problem: laws governing inspections, licensing, taxes, and land ownership were developed in an ad hoc manner in the 1990s, leading to ambiguities that government officials and agencies often used to their own personal benefit. Because of this weak state capacity to implement coherent laws as well as to communicate and enforce them in Kyrgyzstan, those with stakes at the bazaar confronted continual challenges in doing business, and worked to remedy them.²⁷

    In sum, all three of these perspectives hold kernels of truth. Yet narratives that rest on reified and static conceptualizations of culture, market forces, dispossession, and violence fail to pay heed to the sociopolitical work of traders and other participants at the bazaar in founding, adapting, and working through institutions to achieve order. Any market, including a bazaar, must be governed by relative consensus surrounding an institutional framework specifying what to do and what not to do.²⁸ This includes beliefs, norms, rules, behaviors, practices, and discourses such that only when there is order can we talk of a market.²⁹

    Without such an institutional framework, we have its opposite—chaos, or the absence of predictability and stability. Bazaar actors worked to create and control such a predictability that served as the foundation for their ability to not only accumulate wealth but also achieve their goals of clothing, feeding, and educating their children, investing in homes and other items that improve their quality of life, and creating a meaningful work environment. This book, thus, investigates the different forms and processes leading to the creation of islands of order in a country we would least expect to have them.³⁰

    Understanding the Creation of Order at the Bazaar

    We can think of bazaars as both physical spaces as well as a complex set of institutions that govern a dizzying array of transactions and social interactions; they are not abstract spaces where goods, people, and information flow in a frictionless market setting. Regarding bazaars as physical pieces of land, they are composed of a variety of types of property, including pavilions, stalls, streets, sidewalks, and containers, thus requiring us to understand who owns this bazaar property. Unlike in other parts of the world, where marketplaces are often located in city squares and designated as municipal property, bazaars in Kyrgyzstan do not rest solely on public land. Instead, when the Soviet Union collapsed, they were enclosed, or privatized, just like factories and farms were across much of the post-Soviet space. They are similar to these other assets in that they were transferred to elite members of society and fell into opaque and complex ownership struggles, as has been well documented in Russia.³¹

    Most bazaars that existed during the Soviet period were collective farm markets governed by cooperative societies. Enclosures of bazaars in the 1990s after the Kyrgyz Republic became an independent country differ from enclosures of commons in past centuries. In his analysis of the parliamentary enclosures in eighteenth-century England, Polanyi describes government-led privatization of common pastureland that unleashed major social dislocations among people displaced from the land.³² Commoners fled agricultural subsistence and local production economies to begin working as wage laborers in privately owned factories in urban areas. Instead, the enclosure of bazaars in Kyrgyzstan took place as people flocked from collapsing state-supported industrial and government jobs into commercial trade at the bazaars. Specifically, the evaporation of state budgets and production networks compelled many factory workers and employees of the state (school teachers, doctors, and others) to the bazaar as former wage earners. Workers became responsible for their own incomes and survival as traders, and they did so in physical spaces—bazaars—that were simultaneously being privatized by newly minted owners. These emergent property-based inequalities between traders and owners form the foundation on which bazaars grew and thrived throughout the 1990s and 2000s.

    In addition to analyzing bazaars as privatized physical spaces populated by different types of actors, I also investigate how they articulated the challenges they faced and worked to create order in a rapidly changing environment. For example, some traders united and created a trade union at the bazaar, where one had never existed before, and became the senior leaders of the governance of the union, drawing on Soviet ideas and organizational structures in other spheres of life (chapter 3). Others acted more individually, over time translating the experience and respect they had acquired as long-time traders to become bazaar elders, drawing on their understandings pre-Soviet village authorities and embodying them in a new market context (chapter 6). We can learn about such processes by investigating who spearheaded or initiated these efforts, what prior ideas or understandings they drew on, and how they came to embody the practical authority to address problems and influence outcomes in these new contexts.³³

    These processes were not preordained after the collapse of the Soviet Union as spontaneous double movements that naturally emerged as people demanded state protection from market dislocation in a conventional Polanyian sense. Instead, traders worked individually, as families, and as groups in the midst of socioeconomic crisis, and created some semblance of order by reappropriating organizational forms in new contexts and becoming local authorities themselves at the bazaar.³⁴ Stated in Weberian terms, in the face of socioeconomic dislocation and the magnification of unequal power dynamics in society resulting from opaque privatization processes, we see very different mixes of pre-Soviet and Soviet ideas and institutions that operate to legitimate the domination of new property owners and the state.³⁵ That is, for example, instead of contesting the existence and authority of new private owners or state officials, traders sought to demand from them better infrastructure, more rights, favorable policies, and less predation, as well as carve out spaces within the bazaars where their own example and actions could serve as legitimate authority to help resolve conflicts and create the types of communities that traders valued in their work spaces.

    Political economy scholarship from the regions as varied as the United States, Europe, Africa, and Latin America illuminate such syncretic possibilities that people have created in the face of great challenges, involving reflective imagination to solve problems and think up new solutions using preexisting knowledge and ideas, often in the midst of seemingly immutable, hegemonic processes.³⁶ In rural Senegal, locals adapted to changes imposed from outside actors not by simply acquiescing to adopting a land market as colonial administrators had desired but rather by creating their own land pawning system based on cash while retaining customary inalienability of land. In this way, local actors fashioned discrete ingenious recombinations of institutional elements that offer a sense of continuity with the historic past, as well as a tool to address the practical demands of making a living in a liberal capitalist order.³⁷

    Such examples can be viewed as the purposeful recombination by actors of old and new, and the renarration of understandings and meanings in the process. This approach reveals that in addition to examining the response to capitalist domination by property owners through hidden transcripts,³⁸ quiescence,³⁹ and social protest demanding welfare and protection from the state,⁴⁰ we must also put the spotlight on how individuals use and reshape institutions to their purposes. Especially when confronted with rapid change and significant ambiguities, people seek to create in their work environments senses of normativity, regularity, and certainty to counter the perceived unruliness, uncertainty, and irregularity of people’s everyday realities.⁴¹

    This book, then, is framed both around a puzzle and a set of problems.⁴² The puzzle emerges from the presence of a booming and orderly bazaar trade in an environment that we would least expect, characterized by weak rule-oflaw institutions and significant corruption and political instability. To illuminate this puzzle, I pay close attention to the problems that people on the ground faced in the region as they articulated them and responded. How did traders come to terms with the stigmas and stereotypes associated with trade? How did they perceive state bureaucrats and bazaar owners, and solve problems related to the trading environment? How did directors of bazaar land legitimate holdings and battle others who sought to challenge them? How did municipal authorities address traffic and safety issues at the crowded central bazaars in the city center?

    By answering these questions, I demonstrate how different bazaar actors narrated their past and current situations, sought to solve problems and address challenges, and founded and became leaders in ways that would address the challenges they faced throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Institutions in these contexts are best understood as hybrid assemblages that reflect a combination of diverse logics and rationalities that responds to local perceptions of needs within this political economy.⁴³ Taking seriously people’s understandings and experiences, and their political work through institutions, allows us to see islands of order and the possibility for bazaar dynamism in an unexpected context.

    Studying Order at Bazaars: The Approach and Method

    The goal for this book is not to arrive at a universal, generalizable theory of the conditions under which islands of order emerge in weak rule-of-law contexts. I instead offer a causal story limited to a particular time, place, and context—a contribution to bottom-up understandings of situated knowledge.⁴⁴ Yet the broader approach and conceptual apparatus I use to investigate local manifestations of order is generalizable and portable to other contexts. For example, how people narrate their understandings of disorder and order, and mobilize ideas and resources through prior understandings and experiences within organizations to address challenges, thereby recombining and reconfiguring them, can be studied elsewhere, both within the post-Soviet region and beyond, as discussed in the chapter 7. In short, while causality is context-dependent, analytic generalization is possible.

    I adopt a strategy of paired comparison at the subnational level,⁴⁵ focusing on the two biggest bazaars in the capital city (Bishkek) in the north of the country: Dordoi bazaar and Osh bazaar. Both bazaars have thrived throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the former as the largest wholesale bazaar, and the latter as the largest retail bazaar in the country. They both demonstrate patterns of growth and dynamism that challenge conventional narratives of what we might expect in a country with weak rule-of-law institutions and a predatory state. By tacking back and forth between or among cases to leverage difference and similarity, I find different patterns of order based on the appropriation of different organizational forms.⁴⁶ The subnational comparison of two bazaars within the same country and city reveals the complex and spatially uneven nature of adaptations to common political and economic transformations.

    I arrive at this finding through analysis of texts (primarily newspaper articles), interviews research assistants and I conducted, and observations at bazaars and more generally in the country over time. I sought to understand how traders and others associated with bazaar life understood disorder and order in a market economy and addressed problems they associated with their work. I place

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