foir_3880

FOI-R--3880--SE
Russian policymakers are concerned about such radical militant Islamist
movements since their activities with radicalisation and recruitment take place
not only in Central Asia, but also in Russia. They recruit for example among
Russia’s millions of Muslim labour migrants from Central Asia, who are already
increasingly religious because of their poor living conditions and the harsh
treatment they often receive in Russia. They also recruit among Russia’s
indigenous Muslims, e.g. the Bashkirs and Tatars, and among Russian converts
to Islam (Lang, 2013: 34–35).
ISLAMISM’S POTENTIAL AS A WIDER POLITICAL FORCE
In addition to its militant dimension, Rustam Burnashev points out in his chapter
that Islamism also has a wider political dimension. Central Asian regimes and
their media outlets have long portrayed Islamism as a threat in the political
discourse. After 1991, newly independent former communist elites pushed
nationalist movements to the margins of politics. But it was more difficult to
handle religious opponents. Islamist ideology questions both secular power and
nationalism. Both ruling elites and nationalists therefore wanted Islamism out of
politics. This securitisation of Islamism, the systematic portraying and perception
of something as a security threat, was furthered by the civil war in Tajikistan.
Today, the challenges of Islamism for the Central Asian states are more domestic
than external. Burnashev dismisses the link between Islamists in Central Asia
and Afghanistan as secondary, but notes that a perception of such a link is often
used by the Central Asian regimes to justify repression. For them, Islamism is
both a possible violent destabilisation multiplier in the short term and a political
challenge as a unifying factor for opposition movements in the longer term. But
the regimes disagree fundamentally about the exact way in which these two
factors affect their respective countries (see Burnashev’s model, p. 58).
Combined with a low level of trust between the political leaderships in these
countries, this makes regionally coordinated responses hard to agree on, let alone
carry out.
The Central Asian regimes mainly portray Islamist movements as militants bent
on terror. These regimes largely fail to provide public goods such as security and
justice and seek rather to ensure their own survival. According to an Uzbek who
wished to remain anonymous, there are cases in Uzbekistan of Sharia courts
already filling a vacuum and handling some conflicts that the corrupt official
judicial system fails to deal with. This indicates that Islamism could be a
competing social and political model for Central Asian regimes. The view that a
call for an Islamic state based on Sharia is actually a call for the rule of law, for a
legal state justified by law and governed through it (Feldman, 2012: 9), can
hardly be reassuring for rulers who are used to being above the law. Tajikistan
seems to be most exposed to the influence of Islamism, both as a wider political
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