Epistemologies of independence: Technology and empire in the post -Soviet borderlands

مرکز و کتابخانه مطالعات اسلامی به زبان های اروپایی

منو

" Epistemologies of independence: Technology and empire in the post -Soviet borderlands "
Chad D. Thompson

Document Type	:	Latin Dissertation
Language of Document	:	English
Record Number	:	55165
Doc. No	:	TL25119
Call number	:	‭NR39055‬
Main Entry	:	Chad D. Thompson
Title & Author	:	Epistemologies of independence: Technology and empire in the post -Soviet borderlands\ Chad D. Thompson
College	:	York University (Canada)
Date	:	2008
Degree	:	Ph.D.
student score	:	2008
Page No	:	358
Abstract	:	This dissertation explores the construction of the post-communist political imaginary as an attempt to translate the vagaries of liberal democracy in to the certainties of post-Soviet epistemology. The ambiguities of the political are refracted through the "independent Republic of Uzbekistan," attempting to fix conceptions of state and society in accordance with a nineteenth century imperial understanding of science. A series of metamorphoses are effected upon Uzbekistan, as the imperial imaginary bequeathed by the Soviet past confronted the uncertainties of the democratic imaginary. An indeterminate nation was reconstituted through the body of the president, calling upon a series of exact social sciences to provide the epistemological confidence demanded by independence; science, materialised through a technocratic intelligentsia would govern this independence, providing the means and the ends of the transformation of Uzbekistan and the Uzbek nation. The desire for such engineering fell afoul of the exigencies of post-Soviet life, wherein the inspirational visions of transformation were juxtaposed with an everyday that was increasingly detached from the promised past and future. The Uzbekistani regime's attempt to preserve the unity of state and society, an effort in which international development programmes were complicit, could not succeed, generating an unruly civil society operating beyond the bounds of politics and political science. This culminates in a form or "neurotic citizenship" wherein civil society confronts its own imaginary impossibility. The state as society was recast as society against the state, denying the legitimacy not of the regime, but of any regime. This dissertation is an interdisciplinary engagement with the West's continuing longing for a science of transformation as put into action in the aftermath of communism. As such, this work turns upon the theoretical implications of Western disciplinary premises concerning democracy, progress, and governance as they are revealed in the theoretical arena of development that is post-communism.
Subject	:	Philosophy, religion and theology; Social sciences; Borderlands; Empire; Epistemologies; Independence; Post-Soviet; Technology; Uzbekistan; Philosophy; Political science; 0615:Political science; 0422:Philosophy
Added Entry	:	York University (Canada)