Despite Soviet (and post-Soviet) institutional animosity towards genuine political participation, power politics never ceased to have a local expression in Uzbekistan, manifest in local struggles around the distribution of resources and in the shaping of community life. In this respect coping and appropriation strategies adopted by local communities vis-à-vis the centrally set political frame should be considered as a surrogate, albeit opaque and indirect, form of participation. Thereabout, the ambiguous conditions of public dissimulation invite to rethink the functional dimensions of discourses from individuals who preserve the form and the face but do altogether something different, within the realm of the locally achievable. Hence, everyday forms of non compliance, although they may not be transformative, are meaningful in an environment where people have largely internalised control. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, study cases uncovering that key locus of transformation will reflect on what I call the fundamental ambivalence underlying the relationship between the Uzbeks and their government. This ambivalence in relation to state power touches upon issues of legitimacy and of practiced vs. governmentally propagated models of citizenship in Uzbek society, but also, on deeper changes of society. This takes me to consider the sources of legitimacy of the regime, the role played therein by coercion and consent, and the type of modernisation path adopted. Also, I am looking at the ‘ownership’ of the envisaged modernisation trajectory, at the citizens’ attitudes and ‘feelings’ towards the state, and more generally, at changes in the everyday practices and perceptions of citizens’ rights and duties - or, to use Humphrey’s phrasing, at the emerging ‘citizenship regimes’.
