View of another world

Although I blog frequently about Bulgaria and Romania (between which countries I have been dividing my life in these last 5 years), I should say more about the other countries in which I have spent significant time – Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Kyrgzstan, for example. A New York Review of Books blogpost and a review in The Nation of a forgotten Azeri satirical magazine of a century ago gives me an opportunity to rectify this oversight. To give an easy introduction to the various actors, I borrow from the review in the Nation - adding in, where appropriate, links one of which is to a recent book on the magazine containing many of the caricatures with powerful line drawing and colours.

The backstreets of Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, have a certain, winding magic. They house former caravanserai, once flophouses offered to travellers throughout central Asia, that have today been polished up into candlelit restaurants. Tall, grey blocks mingle with flourishes of Persian architecture - a symbol of Baku's straddling geography between Russia and Iran. But there are dozens of bookshops tucked away in these streets, shelves stacked with first editions and Soviet periodicals from the city's communist era, which ended in 1991.
It was in one of these booksellers near Maiden Tower that Slavs and Tatars, a collective of artists and writers, discovered a true bibliophile's dream: editions of one of the region's most daring yet overlooked satirical publications - Molla Nasreddin. Stating their sphere of interest as everything east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China, Slavs and Tatars make this loosely defined area of Eurasia their patch. Starting as a reading group that shared translations of books from this region (what they call "an arcane version of the Oprah Winfrey book club"), they've since exhibited sculptures and installation work in museums internationally, and been part of group shows at The Third Line gallery in Dubai.

"The illustrations drew us to Molla Nasreddin," says Slavs and Tatars. "They're reminiscent of Honore Daumier or Toulouse Lautrec." Molla Nasreddin was founded in 1906 by editor-in-chief Jalil Mammadguluzadeh and satirist-poet Mirza Sabir, both proud Azeris yet champions of a "modern" and markedly western system of values. It espoused this worldview via beautifully wrought yet withering cartoons and editorials that remain biting today.
Few were spared the editorial wrath: suffocating and outmoded fanatics, meddling European and Russian imperial powers, the position of women in society at that time and the hypocritical elite. Education, equality and regional independence, through a lens of secularism, was Mammadguluzadeh and Sabir's vision for central Asia's future. It was penned in Azeri Turkish in three different scripts - Arabic, Cyrillic and Latin alphabets - showing the three forms that the language went through as Azerbaijan passed into Soviet hands. This made translation into English difficult when Slavs and Tatars set out to publish a reader in 2011, titled "Molla Nasreddin: The Magazine That Would've, Could've, Should've". Here's another good review which gives a sense of the treasures the book holds

The book features their selections from 3,000 illustrations, curated into the different avenues of critique that the magazine took - such as Education, Colonialism and Women.
One illustration, for instance, shows two Azeri women wrapped from head to toe in fabric, and pointing in envy at the barred windows of a prison. The caption alongside reads: "Sister, look how lucky they are: they have windows!"
In another, five beaten-down Azeri men carry bespectacled donkeys on their back; plumes of smoke rise from long cigarette holders in the mouths of these remarkably aristocratic looking beasts.

Despite moving offices to and from Georgia and Iran, intermittent bans, and 10 years of the Soviets increasingly shoving editorial directives down the throats of the magazine's staff, Molla Nasreddin survived until 1931. Simultaneously, a cloud of obscurity seemed to settle over a region that, says Slavs and Tatars, had been one of the most intellectually and politically important places in the past 2,000 years.

"If anybody even takes notice of this region, they think of it as obscure, especially the more west you go - you talk to people about Kyrgyzstan, and you might as well be talking about Star Wars," says Slavs and Tatars. "But Baku was producing half of the world's oil until the first half of the 20th century," noting as well that Azerbaijan was one of the first countries in which women could vote (well before the UK), and publications such as Molla Nasreddin demonstrate an intellectual, progressive rigour from this part of the world that has been so far overlooked.
"That's why we're called Slavs and Tatars and not by our real names: it's not the work of a group of artists but the work of a region that has many nationalities, and had a shared heritage at some point. "From the point of view of the West, with this nonsense that passes as conventional wisdom that the West and Islam are on a collision course; you have to look at a part of the world where they have long coexisted." Namely, Eurasia.
The collective say, however, that Molla Nasreddin is also their antithesis in that it took modernity to mean westernisation. "We don't believe that at all, in fact we believe in quite the opposite - more of an indigenous or hybridised form of modernity."  But they still acknowledge its historical significance: "It's a shame that it came down to us as artists and writers in the early 21st century to rediscover one of the most important publications of the Muslim world," they continue. "That's testament to how overlooked this part of the world is.
"Very few people would spend two years of their life working on something they disagree with, but we are living in an increasingly insular world intellectually - less and less are we embracing the things that we disagree with."

I’ve been wanting for some time to do a post (if not a booklet!) about beautiful publications - which bring together layout; font; illustrations; paper quality; binding; and writing. It's a challenging combination which some cookery books almost manage (with the exception of font and writing) 

systems again

Even thicker snow apparently struck Britain yesterday – so this was a wide front! Noises were heard in the attic during the night! Bats or rats? We did hear an ominous gnawing sound under the terrace a week or so back! I’m only worried about the risk to the electricity cables?? Nothing evident in the cold light of day – although there are gaps between the old wooden beams through which light can be seen via the schitza roof tiles. These are the issues which threaten relationships – with one meekly accepting nature’s way and the other waiting to pounce and dreaming up various scientific interventions.
I need to return to the systems issue – but on another occasion. Margaret Wheatleyis another writer who has tried to use chaos theory in a rethink of management and Chris Hood’s The Art of the State has the fatalistic school as one of his four basic schools of thinking about government and society. What I’m trying to square is the rationalistic spirit of things such as impact assessment and the logframe in project planning (which are gods for the consultancy world) – and the reality of change. Robert Quinn’s Change the world is perhaps the book which most easily expresses what the approach might mean for managers. But government consultants and policy advisers who work in EU candidate or "neighbourhood' countries have a moral dilemma. The EU expects us to push this rationalistic crap. What do we do?

And here’s a useful case-study just issued by International Crisis Group – on Azerbaijan. It may not be in crisis at the moment - but the report argues that such is the depth of the corruption and repression which the younger Aliyev continues to practice (to the disregard of the rural population) that we can anticipate storms ahead. Coincidentally I am reading Tom Reiss's The Orientalist - about the life of Lev Nussimbaum alias Kurban Said who wrote the marvellous Ali and Nino novel which depicts the tension in Baku in the early part of the 20th century caught as many of its residents were between West and East.
The picture is of the lane at the bottom of our garden - not far from the Transylvanian border

new approaches to government

The richness of the web is sometimes too much. This morning I wanted to write something about complexity, social interventions and policy tools – on the basis of Matthew Taylor’s blog today (you can get the website in links on the right hand side). He had been reading a couple of draft pamphlets which will appear shortly on the Royal Society of Arts website about different approaches to government interventions.

 Between the 1970s and 1990s I had the opportunity to experiment with different approaches to policy-making – at both the local and regional levels. The Tavistock Institute invited me to join a project in the 1970s which was beginning to think about the network approach to policy-making. And I felt that one of the best things I ever did was to bring together and support over a 2 year period something we called a network of urban change agents officials, councillors from both Districts and the Region, academics and NGO reps who were invited to attend on the basis of their commitment to deal with the conditions of social injustice.

Since then I have read various key authors such as Mary Douglas, Margeret Wheatley, James Scott and Paul Ormerod who recognise the limitations of crude managerialism. In a way the argument goes back to the writings of such 20th century anarchists as Ivan Illich and Paulo Freiere.

Taylor says simply that Traditional policy interventions – particularly in relation to social problems – have these characteristics:
• They are large scale and expensive.
• They aim for relatively marginal improvement in outcomes e.g. a few percent lower unemployment or higher pupil attainment.
• They seek to minimise risk through systems of regulation, audit, and accountability.
But these design features do not fit the characteristics of social networks interventions, which are:
• They will usually fail.
• Occasionally small interventions will have major impact through contagion effects.
• Sometimes interventions will have an impact very different to those planned (sometimes good, sometimes not).
An emphasis on social networks changes not just the focus and design of public policy, but the whole way we think about success and failure.

From this blog, I was led on to the various papers on this theme on the RSA website and suddenly found myself on the Scribd. Site – which allows me not only to download a whole variety of material but also to upload my own papers! Needeless to say I spent half an hour exploring, inserting a profile and uploading a paper - Searching for the Holy Grail in which I try to set out what I feel I have learned from my 40 years' experience of trying to help different government systems operate more in the public interest. All very interesting - but basically it diverted me from the writing which is the only way to make sense of the stuff founf on the internet!

Let me, at any rate, share a couple of the papers I came across on subjects close to my heart - one a book which had just appeared on Reforming the worst government in the world -
The other is a useful paper on the Azerbaijan government system -