The 1990s were a time of great uncertainty for the Atlantic allies.  As the apparent hegemon, the United States came to question the necessity of jeopardizing US policy preferences to please its traditional European allies.  On the other side, Europe was becoming increasingly bold on the global stage, going so far as to declare the Bosnian War a European problem to be dealt with by Europe.  By 1999, it was apparent that Europe did not have the military capabilities to prevent mass murder and war even at its doorstep in the Balkans; Europe was humiliated to have required US assistance in stopping the conflicts.¹ From this experience, the US became increasingly skeptical about working with its European allies, who seemed incapable of pulling their own weight, and Europe came to recognize its need to boost European capabilities if European countries truly wanted to play an increased role in the global arena.

The Uzbekistan state, caught between the need to be a secular nation and the need to ground its governing mandate in a depiction of a unified nation based on Turkic and Muslim values and tradition, is forced to take a contradictory stance vis-à-vis women.  To legitimize its own rigid hierarchy and create a homogenous nationalism, the state employs body politics, identity politics, Islamic norms (that have not necessarily any basis in Islamic jurisprudence), patriarchy, tokenism, and above all it uses women as a symbol of Uzbek values, tradition, history, and the future of the country as a modern nation-state.  The primary mode through which the state pursues these objectives is the cooptation of neighborhood comities.  By infiltrating the semi-private sphere, and through it restricting women’s constitutionally guaranteed freedoms, problematizing Islam, and lessening the population’s opportunities for resistance, the Uzbekistan state consolidates and legitimizes its rule.