Capital, Class, and Crisis in Resource-Rich Countries: Rethinking the Transformation of the Post-Soviet Space in the Age of Climate Change

The effects of climate change around the globe are receiving increasing attention in the media, and the post-Soviet space is no exception, as news about Siberia's 'zombie fires' and Central Asia's 2021 summer drought confirm. However, while it is widely acknowledged that the post-Soviet space mostly contributes raw materials to the global economy, beyond the 'resource curse' (Luong and Weinthal, 2010) surprisingly little has been written on the link between this form of production and the region's transformation since 1991, particularly given the direct link between extractivism and climate change. This is especially true of Uzbekistan, one of the least studied and understood post-Soviet countries (Pomfret 2000), and the case study of this project.

The Fellowship would allow me to rework my PhD thesis into a monograph and a journal article, advancing a novel interdisciplinary and intersectional approach that contributes to a critical understanding of the linkages between economic change and the climate crisis in the post-Soviet space, specifically in Uzbekistan. This would bring the disciplines of political economy and development studies into dialogue with postsocialist area studies, as well as gender, migration, and environmental studies. Moreover, I would develop a new project that investigates the links between Russia's extractivist economy and its transformation in 1991-2021, looking at issues of labour, gender, and climate change. The resources and expertise available at The University of Manchester (Dr Charnock) and within the NWSS DTP (e.g. Dr Penati, Liverpool; Dr Wyman, Keele) would be crucial to achieve both goals. Through the project, I would expand my networks in and beyond anglophone academia and present my findings in video, audio, and written media formats in English and Russian for maximum reach and impact.

Since the 1990s, the debate on the post-Soviet space has largely failed to explain the intersecting dynamics of change and climate crisis in the region. As the literature focusses on the lack of, or incomplete, 'transition' from Soviet communism to Western capitalism in the post-Soviet countries, it ends up being stuck in a 'paradox' of no transition and transformation (Trevisani, 2009; Ahrens and Hoen, 2012; Pomfret, 2019). Put differently, how can one explain the collapse in living standards for the general population and its relation to the climate crisis across a region that, in essence, has changed little since Soviet times?

Moving beyond the literature's 'paradox', the project links the gendered precarisation of labour to the extraction of raw materials and, in turn, to dynamics of vulnerability and resistance to climate change. I start from the locus of primary commodity production: land. As access to land in the region was privatised to put it to use for primary commodity production for export, large peasant populations lost their main source of livelihood at a time when Soviet industry was disintegrating in the face of foreign competition. With the latter unable to absorb most of the people moving to the cities in search of employment, widespread precarisation ensued.

My argument is threefold. First, land decollectivisation in Uzbekistan gave rise to precarious forms of informal employment, including via mass (male) labour migration especially to Russia. Second, precarisation exhibited clear gendered characteristics, as 'left behind' women swelled the growing informal markets as daily and seasonal labourers, while tending to subsistence agriculture in small family plots to guarantee the reproduction of their households. Third, the continuation of land use for the production of raw materials for export increasingly depletes resources (soil fertility, water) vital to subsistence food production. As such, women have been more vulnerable to climate change and at the forefront of day-to-day resistance to it via e.g. work-sharing and agroecology for biodiversity conservation.