Agency, State—Society Relations, and the Construction of National Identity: Case Studies from the Transcaspian Region

Abstract

The past two decades have seen an outpouring of scholarly attention on the problem of cultural globalization. Along the way, the focus of most scholarly effort has been on the causes of this process as well as its effects on local cultures: Westernization; backlash; hybridization; or perhaps something uniquely global.¹ Insofar as agency has figured in such analyses, it has been overwhelmingly located either in globalization’s primary origin, the developed exporting states, or in its ultimate destination, the mass publics of the developing world. This tendency has been redressed in recent years by a growing number of studies that have focused on the state’s role in determining the outcome of cultural globalization, especially through the contestation of its effects on national identity. And yet important as these works have been, they have tended to overlook the particularity and contingency of state agency, especially at the subnational level.