De-Sovietisation and the Political Economy of Tajikistan's Urban Reconstruction MECACS Seminar Series with Guest Speaker Dr Karolina Kluczewska

De-Sovietisation and the Political Economy of Tajikistan's Urban Reconstruction
In contrast to several other states that gained independence after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Tajikistan has never actively engaged in reimagining its Soviet past, neither glorifying nor denouncing it. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, in this presentation I discuss what the ongoing mass-scale reconstruction of Dushanbe, Tajikistan's capital city, tells us about two interrelated processes: the policymakers' approach to the Soviet past, and the country's unfinished capitalist transformation.

Bio:
Dr Karolina Kluczewska is an assistant professor at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She remains affiliated with the University of Warsaw, and the University of St Andrews where she obtained her PhD in International Relations. Her research focuses on critical geopolitics, development politics and welfare in post-socialist contexts, particularly in Central Asia (Tajikistan) and Eastern Europe (Poland).