The Padishah's technocrats: the social network of Tajikistan's senior bureaucracy

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Abstract
A certain theoretical perplexity has emerged in studies of post-Soviet polities. The concept of neopatrimonialism has proved, on the one hand, too capacious, and, on the other, insufficiently flexible to account for the variety of political orders that have emerged across the former Soviet space. The informality paradigm has yielded a number of fruitful observations, yet it has not produced a persuasive body of theoretical generalizations. Both approaches took shape in polemics with the theory of democratic transition; nevertheless, both retained from it a pronounced normative inclination, whereby the polity underexamination is assessed according to its distance from an assumed liberal-democratic “norm”. One possible way to overcome this theoretical uncertainty lies in the relatively recently coined concept of “limited” or “incomplete” statehood. This concept denotes a polity in which the state is only capable of fulfilling its functions to a limited extent. Unlike the theory of neopatrimonialism, the category of limited statehood does not impose a rigid and normative categorization, and unlike the informality paradigm, it does not neglect the study of formal institutions. Rather, it directs attention to the interaction of the formal and the informal within a given political order. The present study of social ties within the higher bureaucracy of Tajikistan demonstrates the analytical fruitfulness of the “limited statehood” approach. Social ties are operationalized as the experience of joint service among officials over the course of their careers and are represented as a network graph comprising 252 nodes and 1,180 edges. The analysis shows that cliques - isolated groups organized around a clearly dominant leader and commonly associated with patron-client relations - are virtually absent from the network. By contrast, professional communities are clearly discernable, with their members linked to particular branches of public administration. The patterns of career advancement among officials in the most influential state agencies point less to appointments based on personal loyalty or kinship than to the existence of a career bureaucracy. The persistence of such a technocratic state apparatus may, in turn, be explained by the specific character of the rent extracted by Tajikistan's ruling elite.

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