Between the Re-interpretation of the Past and a Problematic Relationship to Modernity: The Legitimation Strategies of Power in Uzbekistan

In power since independence in 1991, the Uzbek regime has heavily invested in the repertoire of its past and tradition so as to re-interpret it. The context at the time—that of creating a new state—can have explained this practice, but the temporal distance from this founding event makes the discrepancy between a national imagination almost exclusively based on a re-invented memory, and the reality of daily life for Uzbeks, painfully obvious. The regime, however, finds it difficult to reconcile its public action and discourse with a modernity that would open tangible prospects of the promised future. The urban redevelopment program aims to reconcile modernity with the past, but this relationship remains problematic in that the regime depends on a social status quo in which inequalities are widening. The past is thus summoned up once again to justify the program, while any idea of social progress is shrugged off.