Dictators Without Borders

February 6, 2017
In this timely analysis of the unexpected global dimensions of Central Asian politics, Cooley and Heathershaw, Central Asia experts at Columbia University and the University of Exeter, respectively, pull back the curtain on a region too often dismissed by Westerners as isolated and slumbering. The key to understanding the region, the authors argue, is not examining the internal dynamics of the authoritarian Central Asian states, but exploring the embedding of Central Asian elites in a vast transnational network of financial and legal creations—including offshore bank accounts, foreign arbitration, and tax havens—that are upheld by complicit Western institutions and mobilized toward ensuring the continued survival of those authoritarian regimes. “At the heart of this story is a failure in the international financial system to effectively identify money laundering when it occurs,” the authors note. But the story they tell is about much more than corruption. They adroitly tie together topics as far-flung as the effects of piecemeal economic liberalization in the former Soviet Union, the rise of a cosmopolitan Central Asian elite, and the sordid underbelly of Western-style globalization. This is a lucid, iconoclastic primer on the region that demolishes the artificial distinction between domestic and international politics in Central Asia once and for all.