Edward E Schatz

Edward Schatz explores the politics of kin-based clan divisions in the post-Soviet state of Kazakhstan. Drawing from extensive ethnographic and archival research, interviews, and wide-ranging secondary sources, he highlights a politics that poses a two-tiered challenge to current thinking about mode...

Scholars of politics have sought in recent years to make the discipline more hospitable to qualitative methods of research. Lauding the results of this effort and highlighting its potential for the future, Political Ethnography makes a compelling case for one such method in particular. Ethnography, ...

"State weakness" is seen to be a widespread problem throughout Central Asia and other parts of the former Soviet Union, but also is often found more broadly in the developing/post-colonial world. It is typically characterized by widespread corruption, unrestrained power of oligarchs, ineffectual ser...