Information Management in Porous Environments: Evidence from Authoritarian Central Asia

press release:

 A lecture by Edward Schatz, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Toronto

When: Thursday, September 29, 4:00 PM

(Refreshments starting at 3:45)

Where: Room 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive

About the talk:

Central Asia is often depicted as a region wherein little has changed—at least on the political plane—since the Soviet period. Are such depictions accurate? This presentation considers information management under authoritarianism. While Soviet legacies of propaganda continue to matter, today’s authoritarians face a fundamentally porous information environment. Under such conditions, information management revolves around three broad strategies that are novel for Central Asia: reputational strategies designed to augment the credibility of the regime, positional strategies designed to undercut the credibility of alternative providers of information, and communicative strategies designed to deliver specific messages. Using an original survey experiment conducted in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan in 2014, the presentation shows that both authoritarian regimes and citizens relate to information in ways that represent a signal departure from what we saw during the Soviet era.

About the speaker:

Edward Schatz is an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto. His Ph.D. dissertation from UW-Madison became his first book, Modern Clan Politics: the Power of “Blood” in Kazakhstan and Beyond (U. Washington Press 2004). Subsequent books include the edited Political Ethnography (U. Chicago Press 2009) and the co-edited (with John Heathershaw) Logics of State Weakness in Eurasia (in production with the University of Pittsburgh Press). He is completing a book manuscript on how shifts in the symbolic power of the United States affect social mobilization in post-Soviet Central Asia.