This lecture is co-sponsored by the UW–Madison Department of Political Science.
About the Lecture: Authoritarian regimes use various strategies to entrench their power. Among informal strategies is the instrumentalization of tradition through moral panics and the manipulation of cultural institutions to bolster moral authority: an essential component of regime maintenance. In Central Asia, Kazakhstan shows high, Kyrgyzstan moderate, and Uzbekistan low levels of such instrumentalization, patterns that persist beyond resource, diffusion, or bottom-up explanations. What explains this variation? This talk argues that how regimes instrumentalize tradition today stems from choices at regime inception when autocrats faced non-state religious actors. Elites who repressed these figures prevented network formation and now rarely exploit tradition. Elites who extensively co-opted them reduced incentives for anti-regime mobilization and use tradition only moderately. By contrast, elites who only partially co-opted religious actors enabled the growth of more sophisticated networks that, over time, threatened the regime’s moral authority. This talk advances that elites respond to these threats with co-optation. However, by doing so, the regime legitimizes the traditionalists’ popularity, necessitating their own investment in traditionalist policy to counter their claim to moral authority. Using text analysis, field interviews, and statistical measures of co-optation, Olijar shows that elite efforts to co-opt religious actors coincide with spikes in traditionalist state programs and elite rhetoric.
About the Speaker: Marika Olijar is a fifth-year PhD candidate in political science at UW-Madison. She specializes in comparative politics, post-Soviet Central Asia, and Eastern Europe. She studies religion and politics, informal institutions, and identity. She earned BAs in Slavic Studies and Political Science and a REEES Certificate from the University of Pittsburgh. She attended the Institute for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research (Syracuse) and the LAPOP Summer School in International Survey Methods (Vanderbilt). She was an American Councils Title VIII research scholar in Kazakhstan (2024-25). She speaks Ukrainian, Russian, and Kazakh. She has been published in Central Asian Survey.