Decentring narratives of (de)globalization and crisis: Uzbekistan’s ‘everyday’ political economy amidst Russia’s war in Ukraine

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is commonly considered a global crisis, reinforcing deglobalization. However, Uzbekistan’s experience challenges this conventional wisdom, as Uzbekistani actors have renounced both economic decoupling and geopolitical alignment. I employ a critical and constructivist ‘everyday’ International Political Economy (IPE) approach, drawing on 54 fieldwork interviews in Uzbekistan, statistics, and public opinion surveys. I argue that Uzbekistani actors challenge Eurocentric narratives of deglobalization through normative agency at three levels: state, business, and ‘everyday’. I also explore the normative conflict between these three levels in interaction with global (post)colonial capitalism, which I describe as ‘conflictual hybridity’, with a specific focus on the normative power of micro-actors, including labourers and migrants. In a context of ‘double coloniality’ between material/geographical and normative/political Russo-Uzbekistani postcolonial hybridity and Western normative power, I aim to debunk elite-centric geopolitical imaginaries of non-Western agency during crises, or lack thereof, by foregrounding the ‘everyday’ of the Global Majority.