Youth in the Former Soviet South

Everyday Lives between Experimentation and Regulation

Stefan Kirmse

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317979241
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book offers the first comprehensive analysis of youth, in all its diversity, in Muslim Central Asia and the Caucasus. It brings together a range of academic perspectives, including media studies, Islamic studies, the sociology of youth, and social anthropology.

While most discussions of youth in the former Soviet South frame the younger generation as victims of crisis, as targets of state policy, or as holy warriors, this book maps out the complexity and variance of everyday lives under post-Soviet conditions. Youth is not a clear-cut, predictable life stage. Yet, across the region, young people's lives show forms of experimentation and regulation. Male and female youth explore new opportunities not only in the buzzing space of the city, but also in the more closely monitored neighbourhood of their family homes. At the same time, they are constrained by communal expectations, ethnic affiliation, urban or rural background and by gender and sexuality. While young people are more dependent and monitored than many others, they are also more eager to explore and challenge. In many ways, they stand at the cutting edge of globalization and post-Soviet change, and thus they offer innovative perspectives on these processes.

This book was published as a special issue of Central Asian Survey.

Introduction

Bridging the gap: The concept of ‘youth’ and the study of Central Asia and the Caucasus

Stefan B. Kirmse

Philosophische Fakultät I, Institut für Geschichtswissenschaften, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Germany

The study of social and cultural transformation in Central Asia and the Caucasus is usually placed within one of a number of established frameworks, such as ‘transition’, post-colonialism, state and nation-building or ‘Islamic revival’. Young people are admittedly addressed by some of these discussions. Yet, the idea of ‘youth’ as a social group and a point of entry for the analysis of post-Soviet change and everyday life is largely absent from existing literature.

The limited interest in the concept of ‘youth’ in the predominantly Muslim parts of the former Soviet Union (FSU) is striking insofar as the study of youth has become a cottage industry in northern regions.¹ There are various reasons for this imbalance. For much of the Soviet period, Western ‘Sovietologists’ stressed the cultural difference of Muslim regions from the rest of the Soviet Union and their ‘exploitation’ by Soviet ‘imperialists’ (for an overview, see Myer 2002). While an extensive literature on Soviet youth emerged, few of these publications paid any attention to the Soviet South.²

With few exceptions, this trend has continued into the post-Soviet period. In some measure, it is part of an implicit division of labour among scholars of the post-Soviet space. Russia, Ukraine and other Slav-dominated regions have been ‘appropriated’ by sociology and cultural studies, among many other mainstream disciplines. With its traditional focus on young people in ‘core’ societies, however, the field of cultural studies has been hesitant to extend its analysis to the southern ‘periphery’ of the FSU. Thus, the study of society in Central Asia and the Caucasus has largely been left either to scholars of international relations and geopolitics working at the macro-level or social anthropologists, who have tended to ignore the concept of ‘youth’ as a Eurocentric construct.

Indeed, for many years, this concept represented a white, male, Western middle-class ideal that did not reflect young people’s lived realities in many parts of the world (Ariès 1962). Yet the use of the concept of youth has changed in recent years. The realization that youth is constructed in specific ways in specific contexts has increased the appeal of the concept, along with its offshoots such as ‘youth culture’, among geographers and social anthropologists.³ Across the globe, scholars now engage in the cross-cultural analysis of youth (Amit-Talai and Wulff 1995, Fernea 1995, Skelton and Valentine 1998, Brown et al. 2002, Ansell 2005, Nilan and Feixa 2006, Hansen et al. 2008).

In Central Asia and the Caucasus, moreover, youth is also a particularly meaningful category because it has shaped and regulated local lives for many years. Known in different languages as molodyozh’, yosh, jash, javony or other, it was institutionalized and promoted by the Soviet system on various levels. The introduction of obligatory schooling increased the time that young people spent outside the home, particularly in cities. Large numbers of children, school and university-age boys and girls joined Communist youth organizations, such as the Octobrists, the Pioneers and the Komsomol [Communist Youth League].⁴ By the mid-1980s, the Komsomol covered 65% of the eligible age group in the USSR (Riordan 1989, p. 22). Similar percentages were reported in the Soviet South (on the Kyrgyz SSR, see Semenov and Abdykalykov 1986, p. 325). In short, through compulsory education, youth organizations and publications, the Soviet system created a new category of ‘youth’.

Despite these antecedents, the importance of youth as a category for social analysis is only beginning to be recognized in the former Soviet South. A small number of ethnographic studies have focused on young people in the region (Kuehnast 1998, Rigi 2003, Harris 2006). At the same time, some of the sociologists and political scientists working on youth in the FSU have extended their work to its southern regions (see Blum 2007, Flynn 2007, Roberts 2008 and numerous recent articles in disciplinary journals such as the Journal of Youth Studies or the Journal of Education and Work). Taken in their entirety, however, these studies still offer only a fragmentary picture. More importantly, they are largely disparate and lack a coherent focus. Few social anthropologists working in the region (still the majority of analysts of local society) show much interest in cultural studies or the sociology of youth.

In order to bridge the gap between the disciplines, this issue of the journal draws on a range of academic perspectives, including media studies, Islamic studies, the sociology of youth and schooling, and social anthropology. In so doing, it also offers a way of moving beyond the existing double standards in the analysis of post-Soviet youth. While young Slavs are discussed as multifaceted social actors, young Muslims in southern regions are all too often studied through narrow lenses: as victims of crisis (Nazpary 2002, ICG 2003, Falkingham and Ibragimova 2004, Moser 2007), as targets of state and elite policy (Handrahan 2004, Blum 2007, McGlinchey 2009), or as young ‘deviants’ (not least, the relationship of young Muslims with Islamic groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir has produced numerous publications).

Offering an alternative to such approaches, the mosaic of perspectives in this issue aims to map out the complexity of young people’s lives in the region. While elite constructions of ‘youth’ and the local peculiarities of ‘youth’ as a life stage are addressed by different articles, the focus of the issue is primarily on everyday life. It charts some of the ways in which young people’s experiences differ by location, gender, social-economic context and sexuality. These differences highlight that ‘youth’ is not a clear-cut, predictable life stage. As scholars of youth in the Global South have emphasized, there are many trajectories towards the future, and young people’s experiences can be remarkably different (Nilan and Feixa 2006, p. 7, Hansen et al. 2008, p. 210). While this issue acknowledges that young people share some common features across the post-Soviet space (see Roberts, this issue, in particular), it is mainly concerned with what Hansen calls ‘the here-and-now of young people’s experience’ (2008, p. 8). It is the analysis of everyday life, of multiple opportunities and constraints that is often missing from studies of youth.

Thus, the articles concentrate, for example, on university students (Kirmse, Ibold and DeYoung), urban neighbourhood groups (Schroeder), Islamic youth (Stephan and Roche) and youth from sexual minorities (Wilkinson and Kirey). The narrow geographical scope of the issue was not intentional. The focus on Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan is largely due to the fact that these countries have attracted a disproportionately high number of scholars working on youth (partly for reasons of accessibility). In any case, far from aiming to be exhaustive, this issue sees itself as setting an agenda rather than answering all the questions. It is an invitation to others to join the debates on youth in the region.

What are these debates, then, and how does this special issue advance our knowledge? First, the contested nature and malleability of the concept of ‘youth’ itself is discussed. Youth as a category can be appropriated and manipulated for different purposes. It is often defined by ‘official’ age brackets, but more importantly, it is a cultural construct to which certain patterns of behaviour and dependence are attributed. As a life stage, it can also expand and contract. Thus, several articles suggest that ‘youth’ has been lengthened under conditions of post-Soviet transformation: Roberts and DeYoung point to the expansion and prolongation of education in parts of the region: in countries like Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, ‘being a student’ has become a common life phase. Other reasons for the slowing down of young people’s transition into adulthood, as both Lepisto and Roberts suggest, include their increasing dependence on their families and the tightening of parental control. At the same time, Roche indicates that individual avenues for speeding up adulthood have emerged: among young Tajik men, participation in armed fighting units during the civil war offered ‘adulthood’ as a reward. Labour migration serves as another ‘shortcut’ to maturity and respect in the community.

Several contributions to this issue, then, contribute to discussions on the idea of ‘youth’ as a life stage. This idea has a long history in Western sociology, but it is also entrenched in the former Soviet Union. The characteristics associated with this life stage, however, are disputed. For the Tajik case, Stephan argues that Western notions of freedom do not capture local understandings of youth which see this phase as a period of guided learning, a period in which young people are introduced to specific hierarchies and gendered patterns of behaviour. It is a time when sexual maturity has been reached while social and religious maturity are still being learnt. Yet, while this concept of youth undoubtedly shapes local expectations and actions in Tajikistan (and probably elsewhere in the region), it is also part of a normative discourse. While it is important not to impose Western ideas of youth as independence, consumerism and rebellion on the Central Asian context, it is equally crucial to be cautious of claims that local youth have a collectivist outlook and submit to parental and communal authority without question. These claims do not always correspond to lived reality (Kirmse 2009a, pp. 52–95). Moreover, local ideas of youth are actually not all that removed from Western notions. As the so-called ‘New Social Studies of Childhood’ point out critically, Western youth have long been seen as ‘human becomings’ rather than ‘human beings’ (James et al. 1998, p. 207, James and James 2004, p. 27, Ansell 2005, p. 21). For decades if not centuries, children and youth have been viewed as passive semi-adults rather than competent social agents. In this sense, the difference in the cultural construction of youth is in degree, not in kind.

Youth between experimentation and regulation

Most of the articles in this issue suggest that the everyday lives of youth in Central Asia and the Caucasus are complex mixtures of experimentation and regulation. Experimentation can take different forms. Several articles on Kyrgyzstan examine this process against the background of cultural globalization. My own article considers the ways in which male Uzbek and Kyrgyz students in Osh play with different styles and identities made available by media, international donors or transnational religious movements, often without experiencing these as contradictory. Ibold analyses the exploration of alternative identities through the Internet. He argues that this exploration leads young Kyrgyz to question more ‘traditional’ loyalties and hierarchies. DeYoung ties the discussion of experimentation to the university, a ‘protected’ but increasingly popular space among youth. As students use this space for interacting with foreigners and exploring international exchange links, they also experience it as a ‘site’ of globalization. Many of DeYoung’s observations in Bishkek match my own findings in Osh (2009a).

Experimentation, however, does not just concern young people’s interaction with new ‘global’ images and options. It is also a response to the post-Soviet breakdown of networks, which, as Lepisto argues, has led young people in Azerbaijan to loosen older ties and friendships and explore new ones. Stephan draws attention to the fact that youthful exploration is not limited to the buzzing, globalizing space of the city, an ‘outside’ [darun] space that is often perceived as dangerous and meaningless. In the neighbourhood, which is understood as belonging to the ‘inside’ [berun], male and female Tajik youth take religious classes, which are often attached to mosques. This form of private Islamic education is generally approved by families as it is considered safe and is expected to instil decent ‘moral’ behaviour. However, these Islamic classes are also experimental spaces: not only do they offer some of the only avenues for formal learning and escaping household chores (particularly for girls), but they also allow young people to challenge the older generation, for example, by choosing to follow the beliefs and practices of younger mullahs (often considered ‘deviants’ in the community). Moreover, as Islamic dress may lead to stigmatization in the neighbourhood, this dress code may also express, in part, a form of youthful defiance.

Thus, there are numerous spaces in the lives of youth in the former Soviet South that offer a combination of experimentation with identities, on the one hand, and defiance against existing social norms, on the other. Other examples discussed in this issue include the armed Islamist groups analysed by Roche; and the donor-funded youth groups for non-heterosexuals explored by Wilkinson and Kirey. As I have argued elsewhere, international donors have created an array of ‘youth spaces’, particularly in Kyrgyzstan (Kirmse 2009b, see also Lepisto in this issue on the case of Azerbaijan).

At the same time, while local youth now inhabit spaces in which they can be relatively free from parental control, such as the university, Internet cafés, donor-funded clubs and religious circles, their everyday lives are subject to numerous constraints and regulations. Local and Soviet views largely coincide in the notion that youth is seen as a period of irresponsible behaviour, and thus in need of control and protection. Furthermore, a number of post-Soviet developments have increased the perceived need for control and guidance.

First, the life paths of young people have become more individualized: the demise of the Komsomol as a mechanism for regulation led to the disappearance of a standard sequence of steps into a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• 1. Introduction: Bridging the gap: the concept of ‘youth’ and the study of Central Asia and the Caucasus
• 2. In the marketplace for styles and identities: globalization and youth culture in southern Kyrgyzstan
• 3. From youth bulge to conflict: the case of Tajikistan
• 4. Embracing globalization: university experiences among youth in contemporary Kyrgyzstan
• 5. Forging ahead: Azerbaijan’s new generation and social change
• 6. ‘Urbanizing’ Bishkek: interrelations of boundaries, migration, group size and opportunity structure
• 7. Education, youth and Islam: the growing popularity of private religious lessons in Dushanbe, Tajikistan
• 8. What’s in a name? The personal and political meanings of ‘LGBT’ for non-heterosexual and transgender youth in Kyrgyzstan
• 9. School, work and community-level differences in Afghanistan and Tajikistan: divergence in secondary school enrolment of youth
• 10. Disjuncture 2.0: youth, Internet use and cultural identity in Bishkek
• 11. Post-Communist youth: is there a Central Asian pattern?
• Index