Description
Under what conditions do some small states change their foreign policy from balancing against to bandwagoning with great powers? The extant research on alliance strategies of small states offers various explanations. The conventional realist perspective suggests that alliance-building results from the structural effect of either the distribution of power or the balance of threat. Thus, they maintain that small states bandwagon with geographically close great powers rather than balancing against them. A group of scholars studying domestic sources of foreign
policy argues that, due to the distinctive characteristics of Third World countries, domestic threats and regime survival (at the expense of state security) motivate small states to seek alignment with stronger states. Given that these approaches are based on the premise that security is the state of being free from physical threats, they fail to explain the changes and continuities in Uzbekistan’s foreign policy towards Russia and the West. More specifically, the president of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov, who had conducted a multi-vector foreign policy, decided to align with Russia amid wide criticism by the international community for human rights violations during the Andijan massacre in 2005. Thus, building on the ontological security literature in International Relations, I argue that the stigmatisation of Uzbekistan by major democracies for autocratic practices posed a normative threat to Karimovs regime. This, in turn, put the regime in a state of ontological insecurity and caused Karimov to change a balanced foreign policy to siding with major autocracies to boost his political legitimacy. To test my hypothesis, Uzbekistan is selected as a crucial case, while Belarus and Kazakhstan are hard and negative cases, respectively. The analysis will be based on official statements and documents, as well as secondary literature, which will be used to trace the process of change and continuity in Uzbekistans foreign policy.
