Noah Tucker
Associate for the Central Asia Program at the Elliot School of International Affairs, George Washington University. Consultant for academic, non-profit and government clients. For upcoming events and contact: www.noahtucker.net.
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These recent arrests follow a string of disrupted terror attacks linked to Central Asian migrants in alleged cells of the offshoot group, ISIS-Khorasan (ISIS-K), in Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands in just the past few years. These are a sober reminder that despite the urgency of the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, we cannot turn our backs on the desperate situation many migrants from Central Asia face by merely hoping that they will not spill over to our own lives.
Gulnaz Razdykova, Noah Tucker, Heidi Ellis, Robert Orell, Dina Birman, Stevan Weine
With Nargis Kassenova, Edward Lemon, Yann Matusevich, and Malika Bahovadinova
During the perestroika period in the 1980s the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic experienced a revival of national and Islamic identity; both became a core of pro-democracy resistance to Soviet rule. Despite publicly embracing democracy and Islam, Karimov saw
both movements as a threat to his continued power.
In the early 1990s Karimov's government arrested thousands of pro-democracy and human rights activists and journalists. Beginning in 1998, Uzbekistan arrested tens of thousands of practicing Muslims, imams, and citizens engaged in Islamic study groups. Thousands were tortured in custody until they signed pre-written confessions that led to decades in prison on terrorism and treason charges.
Following Karimov’s death in 2016, his successor, Shavkat Mirizoyev, acknowledged for the first time the existence of a blacklist against former prisoners, their social contacts and extended family. He announced that more than 18,000 people formerly designated as “extremists” would be removed from that list and released from prison or probation.
This film is one of the first attempts to tell their stories.
Violent extremism is growing globally. It doesn’t know religion or creed. Where once it was confined to specific ideology or identity groups, at least in public discourse and discussion, now it appears across societies, across cultures and across borders. Violent extremist ideologies and actions are becoming part of the global fabric.
Why do people get involved in this type of violence? How can they disengage? Can violent extremists be helped to reenter society integrated in healthy, socially positive, empowered ways to engage as productive and peaceful citizens?
In this episode of New Thinking for a New World, guest host Michael Niconchuk looks for answers. Mike, a Tällberg Foundation board member, serves on the Advisory Board of the Counter Extremism Project and is a program manager at the Wend Collective. His guests are Juncal Fernandez-Garayzabal, development and program manager at the Counter Extremism Project, and Noah Tucker, program associate at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs Central Asia Program.
Can violent extremists once again become productive citizens? Can you imagine someone with that history living next door to you? Let us know what you think by commenting below
Listen to the episode here or find the New Thinking for a New World podcast on a platform of your choice (Apple podcast, Spotify, Google podcast, Youtube, etc
that few analysts would have predicted at the turn of the twenty-first cen-
tury. Between roughly 1999 and 2001, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan
(IMU) successfully mobilized hundreds of recruits to fight alongside the
Taliban in northern Afghanistan. Based across the Amu Darya River from
its eponymous target, the IMU came to symbolize a worst-case scenario for
post-Soviet Uzbekistan and became the justification for the state’s notori-
ous crackdowns on religious expression, framed as counterterrorism policy.
Much has changed in the intervening years, including the focus of the global
Transnational Salafi Jihadist movement and its recruiting methods and tools.
The approaches of the Uzbekistani government have shifted very little since
the mid-1990s, however, adapting neither to new recruiting methods and
technologies nor to the reality that a large percentage of its young male citi-
zens no longer reside inside the country because of economic circumstances, nor the dramatic shift in focus of the Uzbek Islamist militants themselves that the state’s policies are designed to counteract.
are under observation by security services (and their home social networks into which they are attempting to re-integrate). This paper provides the perspectives of women formerly involved in armed groups telling their own stories of mobilization and demobilization while still living in a third
country. The respondents in this study were all given the opportunity to speak on the condition of anonymity, without the fear of potential retribution or repercussions for their families at home.
For movements, groups, and subcultures built on and around nationalism, the extreme-right has a somewhat paradoxical interest in developing cross national links. Historically extreme-right groups have sought to establish connections with ideological fellow travellers as well as cultivate support from sympathetic regimes. In the current environment the internet has collapsed geographical distances even further, cross national extreme-right groups have emerged, and right-wing terror attacks now have international profile and ramifications. Meanwhile, individual militants have been able to travel to experience foreign battlefields first-hand. The future holds the potential for the ever-further expansion of international ties, as well as the challenge of addressing hardening societal attitudes towards the extreme-right and a possible retreat to more localised (and harder to police) activism.
The discussions circle around the definition, forms and roles of Islamic Civil Society, and their emergence in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in the post-Soviet era, within the context of different value systems including state secularism, local authorities and Western-backed civil society, by taking the period of Covid-19 pandemic and it’s results into consideration.
No overwhelming single factor accounts for such a huge number of people going to fight with the Islamic State. “For every 10 people who join, there are 10 different life stories, and often 10 different reasons”, Noah explains.
But the deep inequalities found in Central Asian countries can help explain. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Central Asia underwent rapid modernisation and radical economic changes. While not unique to the region, the additional challenge of constructing a political system from scratch produced clear winners and losers while whole sections of society were left behind with no mechanism for changing the balance. The Islamic State offered a different path to addressing these injustices, an alternative theory on how to construct a government and distribute resources more fairly.
Noah, Olga and Hugh go on to examine the gendered element, the role of ethno-nationalism as state ideology and much more on this week’s episode. Tune in now!"
The teaching of Islam, its institutions (governmental or private establishments, secular or religious ones), its actors (teachers and students, believers or non-believers), and its content (the choice of subject matters taught and the integration of Islamic concepts, tawhib, in them) in Uzbekistan remains still an understudied phenomenon. Globalization has added to the difficulty of managing religion, which is undergoing hybridization and a kind of collision between global, standardized cultural features and local, so-called 'traditional' aspects. For over ten years, both Western and local debates on teaching Islam have received an increasingly security-oriented inflection linked to the so-called war on terror. Madrasas and their teachings commonly came to be presented either as instruments for promoting radicalization, or as ways to avoid it. The Uzbek government has been securitizing religious education, resulting in a series of strict controls over Islamic institutions and their actors. This presentation examines how the Uzbek government manages and supervises the teaching of Islam in its theological, cultural, and historical dimensions through officially recognized institutions: secular and religious schools, and institutes of higher education. It presents how, in reply to the population's expectations, the government conceptualized the teaching of Islam. It then analyzes the implementation of this policy; first, by looking at the institutional aspect: what institutions are authorized to teach Islam and how are they and their actors—teachers and students—supervised in a way that matches the security aims of the authorities? Then it delves into the pedagogical aspect: how does the government supervise the subjects taught in the religious schools, and what place does Islam and its
Only a very few people in Central Asia are given to joining Islamic extremist groups. But were one to judge from the actions of the region's governments and security forces, it would easy at times to get the impression there was an imminent threat to the state.
The era of the Internet and social networks has ushered in a new era of paranoia, not only in Central Asia, and the authorities in Central Asia are broadening their definitions of what an extremist group is and taking preemptive measures to cut off the perceived threats these often ill-defined groups allegedly represent.
To discuss religion and the Central Asian governments' increasingly restrictive attitude toward various groups, RFE/RL assembled a Majlis, a panel to discuss the campaign against suspect believers in the region.
Moderating the discussion was RFE/RL Media Relations Manager Muhammad Tahir. From London, Felix Corley, the editor of Forum 18 News Service, an agency monitoring religious freedom in the former Soviet republics and Eastern Europe, joined the talk. Participating from Washington, D.C., was Dillorom Abdullaeva of Tashabbus, a group formed by young lawyers in Uzbekistan to help protect the rights of people there. And in case you didn't notice, we have Noah Tucker from Registan.net working with us at RFE/RL now, so he was in the studio in Prague with me for the discussion.
Mirziyaev’s December 14 inauguration officially marked the start of a new era for Uzbekistan, one without late President Islam Karimov, who died in office at the start of September after leading Uzbekistan for all its years as an independent country.
There are all sorts of predictions, and renewed hopes, for Uzbekistan’s future now that there is a new leader.
What should Mirziyaev change? What must he change to keep the country together or to move it forward? What changes has he already initiated and why?
These are some of the topics that were addressed in the latest Majlis podcast (listen below). But this one differed a bit. This Majlis podcast was an in-house talk for RFE/RL colleagues at our Prague headquarters.
These recent arrests follow a string of disrupted terror attacks linked to Central Asian migrants in alleged cells of the offshoot group, ISIS-Khorasan (ISIS-K), in Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands in just the past few years. These are a sober reminder that despite the urgency of the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, we cannot turn our backs on the desperate situation many migrants from Central Asia face by merely hoping that they will not spill over to our own lives.
Gulnaz Razdykova, Noah Tucker, Heidi Ellis, Robert Orell, Dina Birman, Stevan Weine
With Nargis Kassenova, Edward Lemon, Yann Matusevich, and Malika Bahovadinova
During the perestroika period in the 1980s the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic experienced a revival of national and Islamic identity; both became a core of pro-democracy resistance to Soviet rule. Despite publicly embracing democracy and Islam, Karimov saw
both movements as a threat to his continued power.
In the early 1990s Karimov's government arrested thousands of pro-democracy and human rights activists and journalists. Beginning in 1998, Uzbekistan arrested tens of thousands of practicing Muslims, imams, and citizens engaged in Islamic study groups. Thousands were tortured in custody until they signed pre-written confessions that led to decades in prison on terrorism and treason charges.
Following Karimov’s death in 2016, his successor, Shavkat Mirizoyev, acknowledged for the first time the existence of a blacklist against former prisoners, their social contacts and extended family. He announced that more than 18,000 people formerly designated as “extremists” would be removed from that list and released from prison or probation.
This film is one of the first attempts to tell their stories.
Violent extremism is growing globally. It doesn’t know religion or creed. Where once it was confined to specific ideology or identity groups, at least in public discourse and discussion, now it appears across societies, across cultures and across borders. Violent extremist ideologies and actions are becoming part of the global fabric.
Why do people get involved in this type of violence? How can they disengage? Can violent extremists be helped to reenter society integrated in healthy, socially positive, empowered ways to engage as productive and peaceful citizens?
In this episode of New Thinking for a New World, guest host Michael Niconchuk looks for answers. Mike, a Tällberg Foundation board member, serves on the Advisory Board of the Counter Extremism Project and is a program manager at the Wend Collective. His guests are Juncal Fernandez-Garayzabal, development and program manager at the Counter Extremism Project, and Noah Tucker, program associate at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs Central Asia Program.
Can violent extremists once again become productive citizens? Can you imagine someone with that history living next door to you? Let us know what you think by commenting below
Listen to the episode here or find the New Thinking for a New World podcast on a platform of your choice (Apple podcast, Spotify, Google podcast, Youtube, etc
that few analysts would have predicted at the turn of the twenty-first cen-
tury. Between roughly 1999 and 2001, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan
(IMU) successfully mobilized hundreds of recruits to fight alongside the
Taliban in northern Afghanistan. Based across the Amu Darya River from
its eponymous target, the IMU came to symbolize a worst-case scenario for
post-Soviet Uzbekistan and became the justification for the state’s notori-
ous crackdowns on religious expression, framed as counterterrorism policy.
Much has changed in the intervening years, including the focus of the global
Transnational Salafi Jihadist movement and its recruiting methods and tools.
The approaches of the Uzbekistani government have shifted very little since
the mid-1990s, however, adapting neither to new recruiting methods and
technologies nor to the reality that a large percentage of its young male citi-
zens no longer reside inside the country because of economic circumstances, nor the dramatic shift in focus of the Uzbek Islamist militants themselves that the state’s policies are designed to counteract.
are under observation by security services (and their home social networks into which they are attempting to re-integrate). This paper provides the perspectives of women formerly involved in armed groups telling their own stories of mobilization and demobilization while still living in a third
country. The respondents in this study were all given the opportunity to speak on the condition of anonymity, without the fear of potential retribution or repercussions for their families at home.
For movements, groups, and subcultures built on and around nationalism, the extreme-right has a somewhat paradoxical interest in developing cross national links. Historically extreme-right groups have sought to establish connections with ideological fellow travellers as well as cultivate support from sympathetic regimes. In the current environment the internet has collapsed geographical distances even further, cross national extreme-right groups have emerged, and right-wing terror attacks now have international profile and ramifications. Meanwhile, individual militants have been able to travel to experience foreign battlefields first-hand. The future holds the potential for the ever-further expansion of international ties, as well as the challenge of addressing hardening societal attitudes towards the extreme-right and a possible retreat to more localised (and harder to police) activism.
The discussions circle around the definition, forms and roles of Islamic Civil Society, and their emergence in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in the post-Soviet era, within the context of different value systems including state secularism, local authorities and Western-backed civil society, by taking the period of Covid-19 pandemic and it’s results into consideration.
No overwhelming single factor accounts for such a huge number of people going to fight with the Islamic State. “For every 10 people who join, there are 10 different life stories, and often 10 different reasons”, Noah explains.
But the deep inequalities found in Central Asian countries can help explain. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Central Asia underwent rapid modernisation and radical economic changes. While not unique to the region, the additional challenge of constructing a political system from scratch produced clear winners and losers while whole sections of society were left behind with no mechanism for changing the balance. The Islamic State offered a different path to addressing these injustices, an alternative theory on how to construct a government and distribute resources more fairly.
Noah, Olga and Hugh go on to examine the gendered element, the role of ethno-nationalism as state ideology and much more on this week’s episode. Tune in now!"
The teaching of Islam, its institutions (governmental or private establishments, secular or religious ones), its actors (teachers and students, believers or non-believers), and its content (the choice of subject matters taught and the integration of Islamic concepts, tawhib, in them) in Uzbekistan remains still an understudied phenomenon. Globalization has added to the difficulty of managing religion, which is undergoing hybridization and a kind of collision between global, standardized cultural features and local, so-called 'traditional' aspects. For over ten years, both Western and local debates on teaching Islam have received an increasingly security-oriented inflection linked to the so-called war on terror. Madrasas and their teachings commonly came to be presented either as instruments for promoting radicalization, or as ways to avoid it. The Uzbek government has been securitizing religious education, resulting in a series of strict controls over Islamic institutions and their actors. This presentation examines how the Uzbek government manages and supervises the teaching of Islam in its theological, cultural, and historical dimensions through officially recognized institutions: secular and religious schools, and institutes of higher education. It presents how, in reply to the population's expectations, the government conceptualized the teaching of Islam. It then analyzes the implementation of this policy; first, by looking at the institutional aspect: what institutions are authorized to teach Islam and how are they and their actors—teachers and students—supervised in a way that matches the security aims of the authorities? Then it delves into the pedagogical aspect: how does the government supervise the subjects taught in the religious schools, and what place does Islam and its
Only a very few people in Central Asia are given to joining Islamic extremist groups. But were one to judge from the actions of the region's governments and security forces, it would easy at times to get the impression there was an imminent threat to the state.
The era of the Internet and social networks has ushered in a new era of paranoia, not only in Central Asia, and the authorities in Central Asia are broadening their definitions of what an extremist group is and taking preemptive measures to cut off the perceived threats these often ill-defined groups allegedly represent.
To discuss religion and the Central Asian governments' increasingly restrictive attitude toward various groups, RFE/RL assembled a Majlis, a panel to discuss the campaign against suspect believers in the region.
Moderating the discussion was RFE/RL Media Relations Manager Muhammad Tahir. From London, Felix Corley, the editor of Forum 18 News Service, an agency monitoring religious freedom in the former Soviet republics and Eastern Europe, joined the talk. Participating from Washington, D.C., was Dillorom Abdullaeva of Tashabbus, a group formed by young lawyers in Uzbekistan to help protect the rights of people there. And in case you didn't notice, we have Noah Tucker from Registan.net working with us at RFE/RL now, so he was in the studio in Prague with me for the discussion.
Mirziyaev’s December 14 inauguration officially marked the start of a new era for Uzbekistan, one without late President Islam Karimov, who died in office at the start of September after leading Uzbekistan for all its years as an independent country.
There are all sorts of predictions, and renewed hopes, for Uzbekistan’s future now that there is a new leader.
What should Mirziyaev change? What must he change to keep the country together or to move it forward? What changes has he already initiated and why?
These are some of the topics that were addressed in the latest Majlis podcast (listen below). But this one differed a bit. This Majlis podcast was an in-house talk for RFE/RL colleagues at our Prague headquarters.
The series finds that as in the past, the threat of an external Islamist extremist group is largely being instrumentalized by multiple actors in order to tighten control over society and politics, often creating ripple effects that have much more immediate consequences for the everyday lives of citizens than the threat represented by a foreign group largely embroiled in a far-off conflict. Although this is a familiar dynamic, the strategies embraced by Central Asian governments are not identical (Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan each have unique responses) and are also evolving in response at times to public demand and in what appears to be a genuine attempt in some cases to adopt more successful approaches to countering the influence of extremist recruiters on their citizens.
Finally, the series attempts to identify policy responses to the real threat of extremist social media recruiting and examines the ways in which social media in the region has increasingly become a tool for organized actors to either mobilize violence or reinforce authoritarian social controls instead of producing the democratizing effects for which many had hoped.
Noah Tucker is a CAP associate and Managing Editor at Registan.net. He has worked as a researcher and consultant for non-government, academic, and government clients on Central Asian society and culture for the past ten years. Noah received an MA from Harvard, where he studied Central Asian religious issues, and has lived and worked in Uzbekistan, Russia and Kyrgyzstan and extensively traveled throughout Central Asia and the former Soviet Union.
This event was held at the George Washington University on February 18, 2016 and is part of the Central Eurasia-Religion in International Affairs (CERIA) initiative, generously funded by the Henry Luce Foundation.