Central Asia and the Rise of Normative Powers: Contextualizing the Security Governance of the European Union, China, and India.

• Author: McKinnon, Alexander
• Position: Book review

CENTRAL ASIA AND THE RISE OF NORMATIVE POWERS: Contextualizing the Security Governance of the European

Union, China, and India

Author: Emilian Kavalski

Published by: Bloomsbury Academic, New York, 2012, 240pp, 19.99 [pounds sterling]

Emilian Kavalski is a British educated Bulgarian working as a senior lecturer in politics and international relations at the University of Western Sydney and has published previously on European external relations and also on those of India, China and on contemporary Central Asia.

His book Central Asia and the Rise of the Normative Powers is his third published monograph and if the main title does not make it dear, then the sub-title, 'Contextualizing the Security Governance of the European Union, China and India' probably gives the game away that this is a work more for the academic specialist or foreign policy theoretician than for those with a general interest in Central Asia.

That focus is reinforced by a dense literary style richly laced, as is characteristic of specialist academic monographs, with quotes from similarly specialised works in support of Kavalski's various positions.

Central Asia--defined here as the five former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan--remains a poorly understood or reported region and is proving a theatre of competition for normative and other forms of foreign policy influence. Nationalism since the Soviet collapse; the West's implicit choice of short-term stability not democratic development in the face of perceived Islamist threats; energy politics; geo-politics in the wake of the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan; the rise of China and the relative decline of Russia--all make for a fascinating and explosive region.

In this context, however, Kavalksi's analytical framework is idiosyncratic, driven as it is by selection, or definition, of the normative powers in relation to Central Asia which leaves out two major players, Russia and the United States. This approach suits Kavalski's specialties and gives this work its uniqueness, but potentially at the cost of practical foreign policy relevance.

Most readers will understand normative power to mean, as Kavalski writes in one of his crisper lines, 'influencing conceptualizations of the normal'; hence this exclusion of both the United States and Russia from the study seems counter-intuitive. These exclusions are dealt with in a few short paragraphs with the explanation being that no...