The nebulous notion of “weakness” in post-Soviet Central Asian states refers to their falling short in expected capacities to exercise stately prerogatives within their borders, following John Heathershaw and Ed Schatz in their recent Paradox of Power. Deficits in legitimacy, accountability, stability, legal compliance, justice, and even the defining monopoly on the use of deadly force certainly characterize, to various extents, the region’s states during their brief quarter-century history. However, does this framework tell the entire story about conditions on the ground in these republics? Is “weakness” in state order reflected in disorder across different domains of life?

Regine A. Spector answers not necessarily. She argues that political and economic order can actually be made locally through astute and persistent negotiation work by innovative entrepreneurs. To arrive at this possibly counter-intuitive finding, she needs to turn to specific sites and persons, local arrangements of power and money, fluid negotiations between multiple parties, articulations with formal political structures, and specific path-dependent micro-histories. She drills down to grounded case studies, using interviews, observations, national media, historical archives, organization reports, and data sets. But as with any quality close-up study, she also links the face-to-face level to larger scale phenomena and structures. The hybrid approach results in uncovering local domains of social trust, stable mutual expectations, and sustainable economic practices that are not perhaps predicted by mainstream social science under weak rule of law.

The Central Asian bazaar seems to be the last place to look for order. Many Central Asians themselves viewed bazaars as epitomizing lawlessness, crudeness, messiness, and exploitation as a picture of the general disappointment with post-Soviet society. Yet, these markets are a key economic and social institution in the region. From the collapse of the Soviet Union until 2005, Kyrgyzstan saw a four-fold increase in their numbers. Kyrgyzstan became the main transit hub for goods made in China and carried onward throughout Central Asia and Russia in the 1990s and 2000s. The Dordoi Bazaar outside of the capital, Bishkek, became the largest transit bazaar in Eurasia by the 2000s. Looking principally at how Dordoi and other bazaars operated in the 2000s, Spector rethinks how economic order is produced and articulated with political order. No scholarly monograph has, until now, focused on these literal marketplaces as a way to unlock broader socio-economic trends in Central Asia.

So how could “chaotic” marketplaces produce order when the state fails to consistently enforce law and contract? The key lies in novel initiatives that certain enterprising figures undertook to create islands of social trust and economic viability. First, the Dordoi Bazaar’s founder and owner, Askar Salymbekov, possessed the talent to forge working relationships with key government officials, spinning arrangements to protect and extend his trading businesses. Salymbekov provided the bazaar with the overall political cover, infrastructure, and a pipeline to the republic’s highest political levels. His political entrepreneurship is reminiscent of “Rahim,” a figure in Aksana Ismailbekova’s recent book on rural patronage in Kyrgyzstan (Blood Ties and the Native Son), who was also skilled in building powerful networks and inculcating loyalty among his clients. The research of both Spector and Ismailbekova call attention to grand patrons as generators of local order in post-Soviet Central Asia. Examples of powerful patrons in the region abound, including Akram Yuldashev in Andijan until 2005 and Kadyrjan Batirov in Jalalabat until 2010, and they each tend to involve creating stability, opportunity, jobs, wealth, and solidarity for a community. These cases suggest that if we are to understand politics in the region today, we need to stop privileging the state as the primary originator of political order and start including patrons as significant actors on the political landscape.

At the same time, order at the Dordoi Bazaar was organized from the bottom up as well. Bazaar traders faced predation from government inspectors, because tax law was contradictory and all but impossible to fully comply with. In 1997, Dordoi’s traders formed a union, a self-organized, bottom-up initiative of an informally elected director and elders who each looked after a selling row at the market. The elders were multi-ethnic: Russian, Ukrainian, Korean, Kyrgyz, Uyghur, Dungan (Chinese Muslim), and Tatar, each working for the interests of all the traders, not just of their ethnic group. Dordoi’s union, while not a mere reactivation of Soviet professional unions, evoked in miniature the Soviet ideal of “Friendship of Peoples” at a time of increasing state-promoted Kyrgyz nationalism. The union worked with police, tax and customs officials, and built ties with higher up officials to create a regularized system of taxation and inspection that all bureaucrats were to abide by: no more shake downs. The union also mediated disputes among the bazaar workers, formed a community of trust, respect, mutual help, and camaraderie. The elders trained the traders in good business practices, enacting a kind of civilizing mission to instill market-discipline and self-control. Rural Kyrgyz entering the bazaar profession in the 2000s, reputed to be lacking in business skills and ethics, were disciplined by the elders for proper compliance to market order. Flexible, improvised adaptions of Soviet-era institutions and Central Asian values, concerning respect for elders or the common good, for example, were creatively mobilized in changing post-Soviet circumstances to produce new configurations of surprising viability and durability.

A strong sense of personal pride and stakes clearly marked this endeavor. Bazaar sellers were cooperating to maintain their own idea of order, which involved more than the security of their bodies and assets, but also a climate of rights, equality, legality, responsibility, and cleanliness. In other words, order in the bazaar enabled not only profits, but also “cultural” qualities of honor, hard work, and independence—all within Bakiev’s Kyrgyzstan, notorious for its corruption. Dordoi formed a social ordering that was economic and political, creating conditions of possibility for human flourishing within a limited domain. Despite uncovering the moral universe of these small entrepreneurs, Spector does not discuss the possible religiosity of the bazaar sellers. Other scholars are studying the interesting conjuncture of Islamic values and capitalist ethics in the region’s surge of “halal businesses” since the 2000s. Putting these trends together, future research should look at how pious business practices, in their efforts to build ethical, standards-compliant communities of trust, are themselves producing socio-economic orderings.

Because this book evokes all of the productive issues discussed above, it makes a valuable contribution to interpretive political science and to Central Asian studies regarding the nature of the region’s politics. Although Spector is clear that the cases explored in the book may not be found elsewhere in their particulars, her provocative analysis of created order does raise the possibility that a broad range of human activity forging viable livelihoods may have order-producing effects on the society. This discussion has hinted at a wider landscape of political possibility in Central Asia today, where local formations of order may be more prevalent than many suppose.