Book Reviews

Great Games, Local Rules: The New Great Power Contest in Central Asia. NewYork: Oxford University Press. 252 pages. ISBN 978-0-19-992982-5. $29.95.Alexander Cooley. 2012.

Popularized by the British novelist Rudyard Kipling, the term “The Great Game”used to denote the 19th century rivalry between the Russian Empire and theBritish Empire for supremacy in Central Asia. In the early 21st century the “GreatGame 2.0” is in full swing. The location of the new game is almost the same, butthe participants, and the rules, are vastly different this time.

Columbia University professor Alexander Cooley authored a book exploringthe dynamics and nuances of the new strategic competition in Central Asia. Morespecifically, Cooley examines the interaction between the United States, Russia,and China as they attempt to exert influence in Central Asia, the area comprisingthe post-Soviet states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, andUzbekistan. The book covers developments in the time frame from 2001 to 2011,the decade when Central Asia rose from obscurity to become one of the keyregions in contemporary world politics.

The book’s most important thesis is that in the new great power contest, incontrast to the original Great Game, Central Asian states are not passive pawns,but important players in their own right who to a large extent set the rules ofthe game. In other words, the five Central Asian republics demonstrate a veryconsiderable amount of agency. This can be, to a large degree, attributed to the“multiple principals” phenomenon, a situation described by organization theoryas when the presence of several authority figures enables subordinates to shirktheir individual commitments to any one patron, weakening the overall control ofthese objectively more powerful actors. Central Asian governments have deftlyexploited the interest of great powers in their region, playing one external poweroff the other.

The Central Asian states have also skillfully used the norms and justificationspromoted by foreign powers to back and reinforce their own “patrimonialregimes,” thus becoming experts in “norm localization.” External engagementwith Russia, China, and the United States in the name of combating terrorismprovided local elites with new opportunities to consolidate their power andquash opposition.

Cooley argues that strategic goals of the three great power contestants withregard to Central Asia have mostly differed, thus allowing Russia, China, and theUnited States to simultaneously pursue their interests in the region.

Washington’s policy toward Central Asia in the 2000s essentially becamea function of supporting its war effort in neighboring Afghanistan. Securing

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Asian Politics & Policy—Volume 6, Number 2—Pages 319–331© 2014 Policy Studies Organization. Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

basing, as well as military access and transit, rights was considered America’stop priority in the area. This made the U.S. authorities refrain from pressuring theregion’s largely authoritarian governments on domestic reforms and humanrights agenda. Another remarkable feature of Washington’s Central Asian policywas a high-profile role of the regional military command, CENTCOM, whichacted as an autonomous foreign policy actor, oftentimes overpowering the StateDepartment.

In contrast to Washington and Beijing, who have chiefly engaged Central Asiain pursuit of stabilizing an adjacent region (Afghanistan in case of the UnitedStates and Xinjiang in case of China), Moscow has a range of various objectivestoward its former imperial periphery. Cooley asserts that, above all, “Moscow hassought regional primacy in Central Asia as a marker of the great power statusthat it considers central to its foreign policy identity” (p. 51). As one tool topromote its leadership, Moscow has deployed regional institutions emulatingWestern bodies, such as the Collective Security Treaty Organization (fashionedafter the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and the Eurasian Economic Com-munity and Customs Union (modeled on the European Union). Russia continuesto wield impressive soft power and hard power leverage over the Central Asiancountries and arguably remains the most influential player in the region, but theKremlin has clearly failed to monopolize external relations of the Central Asianstates and, particularly, to check the penetration of the region by China.

While there have so far been no clear losers in the new great game, the booksingles out China as a clear winner by points. The author characterizes Beijing as“the most nuanced and skilled of the great three powers in its regional diplomacy”(p. 74). China has engaged with the region with the primary aim of stabilizing itsown Western province of Xinjiang populated with Uyghurs closely related toTurkic ethnic groups of Central Asia. Moreover, China has seen the area as anincreasingly vital source of hydrocarbons, leading Beijing to strike major energydeals there and rapidly complete an oil pipeline from Kazakhstan and a gaspipeline from Turkmenistan.Although Chinese officials have gone out of their wayto publicly acknowledge Russia’s regional primacy, Beijing’s economic initiativeshave undercut Moscow’s monopolies over a number of important Central Asiansectors. China’s main institutional vehicle for achieving its goals in Central Asiahas been the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, although Cooley seems tosomewhat overrate Beijing’s role in this multilateral body and underrate Russia’s.

Some chapters of Cooley’s book read like high-quality investigative journal-ism. One of the most thrilling stories documents an audacious gambit by Kyr-gyzstan’s Bakiyev regime to initiate a bidding war between Washington andMoscow over the future of the Manas air base, which ultimately precipitated theBakiyev family’s fall from power in 2010. Cooley also describes in ample detailhow the external powers’ drive for access to military bases and hydrocarbonresources has bred large-scale corruption, manifested in transnational networkslinking, often via offshore financial vehicles, Central Asian elites, deal brokers,foreign government actors, and private companies.

Cooley concludes his analyses of the Central Asian great game by highlightingthe three trends that may be relevant not just to the region in question but also toAfrica and the Middle East (one can probably add Southeast Asia to the list).These trends are engagement with non-Western security partners, the entry of

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non-Western public goods providers (particularly China), and a new environ-ment that permits backsliding on democratic commitments. The end result is thegradual, region-by-region erosion of the U.S.-led “liberal order.”

It is difficult to find any serious faults with the book under review—perhapsexcept for the author’s claim that the Central Asian local rulers all have their rootsin the legacies of Soviet times. In making this assertion, Cooley definitely under-estimates deeper historical sources of the Central Asian elites’ behavior. Evenbefore the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire, the five Central Asian republicshad predecessors in the form of various state-like entities—some of themrelatively well-established polities. Thus the modern Central Asian states’ “multi-directional” foreign policies may keep substantial elements from the ancientlegacy of Turkic and Iranian peoples who lived along the Great Silk Road andwere skilled at maneuvering between external forces, easily switching allegiancefrom one mighty power to another or even, at times, holding multiple loyalties.

Combining superb analyses at both international system and domestic levels,Great Games, Local Rules is a must-read for everyone interested in Central Asiangeopolitics as well as those looking for indicators of what the emerging worldorder is going to look like.

Reviewed by Artyom LukinFar Eastern Federal University, Russia

Informal Labor, Formal Politics, and Dignified Discontent in India. New York:Cambridge University Press. 250 pages. ISBN 9781107663084. $29.99. RinaAgarwala. 2013.

In the 20th century, unions flourished, facilitated by the acceptance by govern-ments of the right of workers to form unions and the accompanying right ofunions to conduct collective bargaining agreements with their respectiveemployers. After World War II, Western Europe, North America, and Japan evenembraced welfare capitalism, which recognizes union representation in industryand institutionalized unemployment insurance. These developments were partlya response to the Communist challenge from Eastern Europe and the peasant-worker revolts in Asia (e.g., China, Korea, Malaya, Philippines, and Vietnam) andLatin America.

Unionism also developed—on a limited scale—in the newly-independentcountries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Many of these countries joined theInternational Labor Organization (ILO) after World War II. They adopted theprotective labor laws developed in the West. However, these laws were enforcedmainly in the narrow formal economy composed of the public sector and thesmall emerging private corporate sector. This was unavoidable because the appli-cation of the protective labor laws requires proof of the existence of formalemployer-employee relations such as a written employment contract. The systemof economic protection (mostly undertaken through the import substitutionindustrialization strategy) helped sustain the modern industrial relations systemin the relatively small formal sector of the developing world.

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Book Reviews 321