Alexander Cooley and John Heathershaw

Central Asia has a reputation among those unfamiliar with the region: it is disconnected from the world, its countries isolated, smushed between and pushed around by great powers. However, as Alexander Cooley, director of Columbia University’s Harriman Institute, and John Heathershaw, associate professor of international relations at the University of Exeter, demonstrate in their upcoming book Dictators Without Borders, the region is intimately tied into a vast array of global networks. Abetted by tax havens and Western willingness to take in rich asylum seekers from the post-Soviet space, Central Asia is far from disconnected. Still, Western policymakers persist with efforts to “connect” the region to the wider world, missing their own countries’ role in the at-times illicit processes at play. Cooley and Heathershaw spoke to The Diplomat recently about just how “isolated” Central Asia is, why the region matters, and how policymakers need to reframe how they think about the region.

Your new book, titled Dictators Without Borders, aims to bring to light the ways in which autocratic Central Asian regimes are tied into global economics and politics. What do you make of the conventional wisdom that the region is isolated? 

The “Central Asia as isolated” meme has a long history and has once again become commonplace in policymaking circles – not only in the U.S. and Europe, but also China, Japan, and India. On one level, defining a region as “isolated" naturally invites the solution of building more “connections,” whether in the form of physical infrastructure (such as China’s Belt and Road initiative) or attempts to promote regional commercial ties (the United States’ “New Silk Road” initiative).  But at a deeper level, framing Central Asia policy as a matter of promoting “connectivity” actually prevents a more open discussion about the complex political implications of Central Asia’s existing multitude of legal, financial, and personal connections to the West and outside world. Central Asians strategically use Western courts, purchase luxury real estate, structure deals through complex webs of offshore shell companies, and target exiled political opponents residing overseas. In this sense, it is no less connected than any other world region. Moreover, Central Asia’s purported “isolation” has become a scapegoat for avoiding a serious discussion of the severe developmental and political challenges that the region actually faces – namely kleptocracy and capital flight. 

Central Asia, in contrast to other global regions, is relatively neglected in the international press, almost to the point of seeming irrelevant to wider world affairs. Why does it matter – to the West, to Asia – what happens in Central Asia?

The matter of Central Asia’s relevance is tricky. Time and again, policymakers ask us a “Why does Central Asia matter“ or “What are compelling strategic interests does the U.S. or U.K. have there?" -type question. Central Asia’s geography does place it at the center of the Eurasian landmass and proximate to so many major states and regions. For these reasons it matters.

But our understanding of its place in the world is often distorted by the emphasis on security and outmoded ideas about the importance of physical geography. The region's importance as a logistics hub during the Afghanistan campaign was often exaggerated, while analysts often exaggerate the security threats emanating from the region, such as the putative proliferation of Islamic extremist networks, to justify continued Western engagement and military assistance. Central Asian leaders themselves encourage this “securitization” given their constant need to maintain power and control over real and imagined challenges.

At a more basic level, Central Asia “matters” because it remains a region that is surrounded by diverse and important states and is influenced by a range of different normative, political, legal, and cultural frameworks. As we have both explored before in our individual work, the Central Asian states retain considerable agency in engaging with these outside influences and actors. But trends in Central Asia also function as a “barometer" for trends of greater global reach, such as China’s rising influence, the credibility of Western discourse on human rights and democracy promotion, and/or Russia’s attempts to promote itself as a great power in a multi-polar world.

In the past few years, Uzbekistan has been the epicenter of several interlacing telecom corruption scandals, a prime example of the kind of hidden connections you explore between regional regimes and the outside world. Does exposing such scandals motivate change in regional governments or put pressure on their international partners? Is that enough?

Uzbekistan is a stark example of these [hidden connections]. On the one hand it is an extraordinarily closed polity, both politically and economically, but with an elite that operates in global spaces and cosmopolitan networks. The telecommunications corruptions scandal revealed the wide scope of these transnational networks, showing how offshore companies were employed by the president’s relatives and their associates to funnel corrupt payments and structure deals.

The scandal, and ensuing fines and freezing of illicit funds, has dragged in regulators and courts in the United States, Sweden, France, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. As to its impact on the region, this remains an open question. On the one hand, high-profile anti-corruption investigations and enforcement can function as a regional deterrent, but it may just drive Central Asian elites to be more careful in how they conceal illicit dealings or reroute them to more opaque settings like Singapore or the Gulf. Also, although the Uzbek telecom scandals have been covered by global media, much of their longer term impact will depend on what type of settlement U.S. authorities reach with Uzbek counterparts regarding the return of frozen funds.  

Central Asian regimes, as you've both demonstrated in numerous publications, don’t manage these hidden networks alone. How much culpability is on the international financial and political systems that regional governments exploit?

What our research shows is that many of these extraterritorial political maneuvers and financial transactions are facilitated by Western actors, institutions and procedures. OECD countries – especially the U.S. and U.K. – provide the anonymous shell companies that are the key to structuring corrupt deals and side-payments, ranging from the award of security-related fuel contracts, to telecommunications standards to aluminium tolling schemes, to structuring the acquisition of luxury real estate holdings in cities like New York and Paris. Professionals who offer routine services such as real estate brokers, wealth management, and second citizenship provision also are key. What they do is not illegal, but, in practice, allows for the co-mingling of legal and illicit funds and offers the privacy that enables kleptocracy.

Finally, and perhaps most ironically, the protections of the West’s own political asylum laws allows for former autocrats and political insiders, once they have left the region, to secure residence in exile. It is exactly because the Central Asian states have such poor human rights records that the requests among Central Asian exiles to remain in the West for fear of politically motivated prosecution and possible torture are credible when heard by Western courts. The U.K. is particularly hypocritical in this regard.  Britain provides asylum to former regime insiders who arrive in private jets (in the case of Maxim Bakiyev) and offers increasing numbers of tier 1 investor visas to exiles from Central Asia and other kleptocracies, while at the same time it puts up all possible barriers to poor and even unaccompanied child refugees. It is clear that the poor victims of kleptocracies are not wanted while the kleptocrats themselves are often welcomed.  The U.S. under Donald Trump shows some signs of following a similar pattern. Given that both countries claim a proud history of providing asylum to those in need this injustice is all the more glaring.

What are the security implications of Central Asia’s tangled web of corruption and politics?

The security implications are complex and far-reaching. One thing we have learned is that security and strategic cooperation between outside powers and the Central Asian states inevitably seem to become entangled with issues of allowing access and providing private payments, whether it is a Chinese energy company looking to build a pipeline or the U.S. military looking to secure basing access for the war in Afghanistan.  But the competition over domestic assets and global arrangements – such as TALCO in Tajikistan – can also affect the stability of domestic coalitions and even the very essence of the post-civil war political settlement, which now appears to be unravelling.

Finally, the increasing targeting of political exiles abroad by Central Asian governments also implicates other countries in potentially illegal and destabilizing actions, such as the clandestine activities of Central Asian security services. In sum, perhaps the greatest threat is of authoritarian elites and corrupt money undermining the rule of law in Western societies, often in quite subtle and hidden ways.

What would be your advice to policymakers with regard to navigating the Central Asian political and financial landscape?

If we accept that Central Asia’s autocrats operate in global and transnational spaces, then we must also change the way about how we research and promote democracy and governance in the region. For example, Central Asian civil society advocates should also be trained in issues like international anti-money laundering agreements, the use and abuse of Interpol, and the dynamics of extraterritorial litigations and influence campaigns that host countries conduct against political exiles. We also believe that the West’s basic corporate model of compliance is severely flawed, as it allows transactions to proceed in obviously graft-prone industries and countries. So, publishing due diligence reports conducted by publicly traded companies is another of our recommendations.

But, ultimately, many of the problems of governance and corruption in Central Asia are functions of our own regulatory challenges and the service sectors that enable them.  With the rise of populist movements and illiberalism in the West, preventing the regulatory rollback in the West of anti-corruption and anti-money laundering positions is as important for Western governance as it is regions like Central Asia that are impacted by their extraterritorial reach.