Filippo Costa Buranelli

While much of the English School has focused on liberal aspects of solidarism, forms of “illiberal solidarism” in contemporary international society remain underexplored. Drawing on archival material and elite interviews conducted in Central Asia in the period 2013–2019, this paper advances the claim that the Central Asian elites have developed the institution of authoritarianism in their region through the mechanisms of mimicry/emulation and praise/blame. By looking at specific discourses and practices over the last two decades, the paper discusses how the Central Asian governments have been using the new elements of the “democratic transition” in combination with the traditional legitimation offered by diplomatic recognition to secure authoritarian regimes in the democratic age, to create authoritarian state-centric solidarity in the region, and to make “avtoritet” and “stabil'nost'” fundamental pillars of the Central Asian regional order. The paper contributes to the English School literature by providing an initial account of illiberal solidarism and by showing how authoritarianism can potentially be an institution of specific regional international societies; to the authoritarian diffusion literature by demonstrating that authoritarianism can have a deontic component alongside considerations of domestic survival; and to the broader norm diffusion literature by focusing on the spread of illiberal values.

The Central Asian states face the challenge of containing Russia’s revisionism in the post-Soviet space while maintaining cooperative relations with it and integrating diplomatically and economically into the international system. This essay argues that the Central Asian states are managing this revisionism through a strategy we refer to as ‘balancing regionalism’: cooperating among themselves and with multiple actors to insulate themselves from great power revisionist power politics and from the establishment of an exclusive sphere of influence in their region. This balancing regionalism operates through the following three mechanisms: bridging, dovetailing, and branding.

In International Relations, “Central Asia” and “power” are often linked to either Great Power politics or authoritarianism. Yet, as “power” is a multifaceted component of social life, this paper suggests a
comprehensive framework to analyze its different understandings and operations in the region. By adopting the typology of Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall, the paper has three aims. First, to review the recent literature on power and Central Asia showing that “power” is a pervasive but undertheorized concept. Second, to broaden the understanding of “power” in the region. Third, to encourage reflexivity when it comes to power analysis.

Interaction between individuals and states is considered a distinctive character of domestic politics, while international politics is the ‘realm of states’. However, it is becoming more common to encounter loci where both states and individuals interact at the international level, such as in the cases of the Special Tribunals for Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Liberia and the Former Yugoslavia as well as the International Criminal Court (ICC). Within the International Relations (IR) theory panorama, one would expect the English School of International Relations (ES) to have the theoretical and analytical tools to conceptualize synergies between states and individuals, but this is not evident. This article asks, how does the interaction between individuals and states take place in the ES? We argue that this interaction takes place via ‘contact points’, defined as those international bodies that bring together states and non-state actors, be they individuals or groups, interacting on equal grounds in terms of rights and responsibilities towards each other. The notion of ‘contact point’ is developed inductively by focusing on the Office of the Ombudsperson to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL; Da’esh) and Al-Qaida Sanctions Committee. This research has theoretical implications. We aim to refine, sharpen and advance both the ES’s theoretical and analytical architecture. The contribution we seek to make is one that will better equip ES scholars to conceptualize and analyse those secondary institutions that allow states and individuals to enjoy rights and duties equally. By so doing, we will make possible for the ES to provide a more fine-grained account for these synergies than other IR theories. The notion of ‘contact point’ does set a new agenda for the ES, since interactions between individuals and states are likely to become a constitutive essence of world politics.

The idea that Central Asia is the nexus of a Great Game between the world’s superpowers is, in the 21st century, largely exaggerated. Undoubtedly, the Central Asian republics are actively engaging with the great powers by relying on their sovereign prerogatives and pursuing
their own strategic goals. But this should be seen rather as a strategy of the local players than a competitive game orchestrated from Washington, Moscow or Beijing.

In the nineteenth century, as well as during the Cold War, spheres of influence were created and legitimized to pursue and sustain order in world politics, as well as to avoid direct confrontation between the great powers. Nowadays, they are considered as belonging to a past characterized by confrontation, power politics, balance of power and coercion. Yet, spheres of influence still constitute part of the present-day
political vocabulary, and several regional dynamics are in fact framed and analysed by using this concept. Are spheres of influence returning, or have they simply evolved? How do spheres of influence look like in contemporary international relations? With a specific focus on Russia and Central Asia, this article adopts an English School approach to the study of spheres of influence and offers a conceptualization of contemporary spheres of influence as structures of negotiated hegemony between the ‘influencer’ and the ‘influenced’ where norms and rules of coexistence are debated, contested and compromised on. The implications of this are multiple. First, the approach allows for seeing spheres of influence as social structures where norms and rules of coexistence are in play. Second, it allows for an analysis of the implementation and the legitimacy of spheres of influence through history. Third, by stressing the evolutionary character of spheres of influence, it puts the notion of their ‘return’ into question.

After the demise of the Soviet Union, the five Central Asian republics
have struggled to maintain a degree of regional identity within the wider region of Eurasia by combining historical, religious and value-related discourses of commonality. In particular, ‘the Central Asian people’ has always been hailed as the ‘glue’ of this region, despite the fact that states in this area are following different political and economic orientations. Although ‘Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Tajiks, Turkmens and Uzbeks have lived for centuries together as brothers’, as is often heard in regional official statements, this ‘regional world society’ is being fractured by what
I call the hyper-institutionalization of pluralist institutions of international society. Using an English School approach, this paper explores the detachment of the Central Asian international society from the Central Asian world society and investigates the role played by the institutions of the former in weakening the substance of the latter.

Within the English School of International Relations the expansion of European International Society has always been regarded as an essentially European, western enterprise. However, the role that the Russian Empire played in expanding the institutions of international society into Central Asia remains quite neglected. By analysing primary sources and contemporary discourses about Russia’s civilisational status in the 19th century, this paper discusses the penetration of the
Russian Empire in Central Asia in a socio-historical perspective, and argues that in the process of the expansion Russia’s Asiatic past weakened its status as a European power, and the value of its colonial enterprise. Using English School categories, this paper considers Russia as ‘a periphery in the centre’, and as a ‘less civilised civiliser’ in European International Society. In doing so, this paper seeks to explore an alternative way for the diffusion of norms and institutions of international society different from those of European ‘expansion’ or ‘inclusion’: that of ‘mediated expansion’.

The English School has recently focussed on sub-global political developments, inaugurating a new research agenda on how regional international societies are formed and evolve. However, while regional international societies can adopt more or less institutions than those at the global level, they may take some institutions present at the global level to mean something different. In this paper, it is tentatively argued that the development of regional international societies is favouring the polysemy of institutions, a situation in which different international societies adopt the same institutions with different meanings and specific normative contents. If institutions exist at the global level, but then are framed, interpreted and adopted differently in several regional
international societies, then what are the prospects for the existence of a global international society? Does it still make sense to speak of a global international society?

Since the demise of the USSR in 1991, the five Central Asian republics have joined a number of international organisations, most notably the UN. However, while their membership in this organisation is often taken for granted and used by scholarship on Central Asia as an example of their “race to membership”, few studies if none have addressed not only how these state relate themselves to the organisation, but also how they behave in it and what norms they support in it. By using the theoretical lenses of the English School and by adopting a multi-method analysis based on qualitative and quantitative strategies, this paper seeks to shed light on the normative stands of these states as expressed within the General Assembly, on whether common positions and strategies exist and on what the degree of their normative convergence is. Findings reveal that all Central Asian states favour a Westphalian world order, that among them there is high convergence on pluralist norms of international society, and that while their record of regional cooperation is poor, they tend to agree on many issues at the international level.