foir_3880

FOI-R--3880--SE
5 Why Islamists are not the most
important regional security challenge
for Central Asian states
Rustam Burnashev
In Central Asia the regimes link Islamists with terrorism and violence, thus
framing them as a security challenge (securitisation of Islamism), often with
(wrongly) alleged roots in Afghanistan. To these regimes, state security actually
denotes security for the regime rather than for the people. This exacerbates the
already low identification between society and state, a key feature of weak
statehood in Central Asia. The lack of agreed codes and rules for competition
and coexistence in the public debate result in a fragmented public discourse with
little continuity. Instead, multiple centres of power seek to improve own security
and influence at others’ expense. Doctrinal documents reveal big differences in
how the regimes see the Islamist challenge. Is it primarily a political or a
military threat Is this threat primarily external or internal In sum, Islamism is
primarily a challenge to the regimes in the region and is unlikely to abate. Little
underpins regional action and regimes’ mainly individual responses will not
change.
The 2014 transformation of NATO’s presence in Afghanistan is raising questions
about the involvement of the Central Asian states in Afghanistan’s development
and a possible reformatting of the wider Central Asian region. Simultaneously,
several security challenges in Central Asia are coming to the fore such as drugs
trafficking, weak governance, porous borders – and Islamism, that is, using Islam
as a means for social and political mobilisation and ‘the belief that Islam should
guide social and political as well as personal life’ (Berman, 2003: 258). This
chapter shows that securitisation – ‘the discursive process through which an
intersubjective understanding is constructed … to treat something as an
existential threat’ (Buzan and Wæver, 2003: 491) – of challenges from Islamist
structures, for example the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), is a
structural characteristic of the dominant security discourses in Central Asia. The
basis of this characteristic seems to be an insecurity dilemma. Accordingly, the
challenges posed by Islamism are not so much external as internal and focus on
its potential effect on the regimes in the Central Asian countries. This chapter
aims to discuss Islamism as a security challenge for Central Asia.
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