Uzbekistan new indd

The consequences of coercive rent-Seeking
Over time the center became increasingly depen-
dent upon the state’s coercive apparatus— ultimate-
ly fusing coercion and rent-seeking by empowering 
state security organs that were already enmeshed in 
rent-seeking relationships with local and regional 
elites. One political commentator went so far as to 
state that “Uzbekistan’s political system is best de-
scribed as feudal ... The center only rarely, very rarely, 
countermands regional elites.”
17
 Within the central 
leadership itself, there are indications of a concern 
about the “growing power of governors” and frus-
tration over the failures of the center to undermine 
that power.
18
 In the personal opinion of a senior staff 
member within the president’s apparatus, district and 
regional governors constituted the foremost problem 
for the central leadership in the country.
19
 It was the 
rural poor in particular who bore the brunt of co-
ercive rent-seeking; especially populations of women 
and children who are transformed into mobilized la-
bor forces during the late summer and fall when the 
crops are harvested.
20
While coercion and rent-seeking had come to 
predominate within the state apparatus, it varied 
in important ways across provinces. Thus, while 
Uzbekistan’s agricultural sector remains part of a 
largely untransformed command economy in which 
cotton and grain are part of a state monopoly, meth-
13 Local prokurator’s manuscript on the history of the Prokuratura in Uzbekistan (author’s name withheld); E. S. Ibragimov, Prokuratura suverennogo 
Uzbekistana (Taskent: Akademiya Ministerstva vnutrennikh del Respubliki Uzbekistan, 2000), 70.
14 Pravo database.
15 For example, prokurators’ protests in defense of small entrepreneurs and private farmers rose only slightly after the introduction of the 2001 law 
“On the prokurator”—from 193 protests (1.8 percent of total protests) in 2000 to 256 protests (2.4 percent) in 2001 to 593 protests (5 percent) 
in 2002. Office of the Prokurator General of the Republic of Uzbekistan, “Mahlumotnoma. O’zbekiston Respublikasi prokuratura organlari to-
monidan tadbirdorlar huquqlarini himoya qilish borasida kiritilgan protestlar tahlili yuzasidan,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of 
Uzbekistan Diplomatic Note, No. 20/13024 to U.S. Embassy in Uzbekistan, August 30, 2003 (facsimile).
16 S. Yezhkov, “Faktor ustrasheniya,” Pravda Vostoka, October 2, 2002, 2. Before 2008, police could detain individuals up to three days without rea-
son, up to six days if declared a “suspect,” and it was only through an order from a prokurator that an arrest warrant can be issued (American Bar 
Association and Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative 2003:14). Consequently, prokurators are in a position to use an arrest warrant as 
an instrument of extortion once someone has been detained. Interview, Journalist, Tashkent, March 2003. Although Uzbekistan adopted habeas 
corpus in 2008, it is rarely properly implemented. “No One Left to Witness: Torture, the Failure of Habeas Corpus, and the Silencing of Lawyers in 
Uzbekistan,” Human Rights Watch, 2011, http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/uzbekistanl211-webwcover.pdf.
17 Interview, Sergei Yezhkov, Tashkent, March 2003.
18 Interview, Head, Political and Economic Section, U.S. Embassy, Tashkent, August 2003.
19 Interview, Department Head, Apparatus of the President, Tashkent city, May 2003.
20 For an overview of the social impacts of Uzbekistan’s (and Tajikistan’s) labor-repressive system, see What has changed? Progress in eliminating 
the use of forced child labour in the cotton harvests of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan (London: The School of Oriental and African Studies, 2010); D. 
Kandiyoti, “Rural livelihoods and social networks in Uzbekistan: Perspectives from Andijan,” Central Asian Survey 17, no. 4 (1998), 561-78.

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Labor Migrant Households in Uzbekistan: Remittances as a Challenge or Blessing
75
ods employed in rent-seeking at the regional and lo-
cal levels differ in important and substantive ways. 
In Uzbekistan, prokurators in some localities engage 
in rent-seeking, in which only a portion of income is 
extracted from the population so that residents retain 
sufficient financial resources to reinvest in the local 
economy and generate more revenue that will be 
taxable in the future. In other localities, rent-seeking 
resembles a model, in which the population is taxed 
to the fullest extent possible, leaving little capital and 
little incentive for residents to produce or accumulate 
anything of value.
Moreover, the long-term consequences of co-
ercive rent-seeking carry potential pitfalls. For ex-
ample, coercive rent-seeking played a central role in 
the 2005 Andijon Uprising. Rent-seeking was prev-
alent in Andijon Province, where the regional lead-
ership under Governor Kobiljon Obidov remained 
unchanged for 11 years—the longest tenure of any 
governor in Uzbekistan at the time of his dismissal 
in 2004. Obidov’s longevity in office allowed him to 
construct a long-term, sustainable system of coer-
cion, extraction, and rent-seeking that was unrivaled 
in any region. As a result, Obidov and his supporters 
were able to operate without much interference from 
the center for over a decade. Having allowed Obidov 
to stay in office—largely because he maintained so-
cial order and generated consistently high cotton 
yields—the center had enabled his patronage base to 
become too extensive.
While the regime dismissed Obidov without in-
cident, it faced a series of small but well-organized 
protests when it attempted to remove the region’s 
well-entrenched elites. Protests that followed the ar-
rest and trial of some of the elite’s most prominent 
members suddenly opened the way for mass demon-
strations that harnessed the discontent among the 
population. Because coercive rent-seeking created 
cohorts of powerful and predatory regional elites 
in Andijon, it created conditions for local elites to 
drift outside the center’s control while simultane-
ously fostering economic inequalities and social in-
justices that provided fuel for mass protest. As long 
as these conditions are perpetuated in other regions 
of Uzbekistan, this mix of coercion and rent-seeking 
will continue to generate challenges to the regime in 
the future.