Deciphering dictators’ discourse on Indigenous democracy: a case of Karimov’s Uzbekistan

Why do dictators ‘indigenize’ democracy? This article analyses discourses on democracy in a consolidated authoritarian regime to show how it assists in authoritarian regime-building. The article shows that in the case of Uzbekistan, Karimov’s rhetoric selected and essentialised features of an Uzbek nation, such as community, solidarity and fairness. The regime imposed such features on the Indigenous self-governing institutions, known as mahalla, to foster authoritarian control by turning community to guarantee ideological coherence, by imposing state hierarchy in the name of solidarity and by establishing local networks of patron-client relations in the name of fairness. Through quantitative content and critical discourse analyses of Karimov’s speeches from 1995 to 2015 published by the official press in Russian, the authors operationalise Karimov’s rhetoric on Indigenous democracy and through the analysis of legal acts that governed mahalla, they illustrate how such interpretations strengthened the authoritarian regime.