What type of state has emerged in post‐Soviet Eurasia, and what kind of theoretical framework can help us understand its behavior and performance? This article argues that we can usefully understand the logic of political and administrative organization in terms of a kind of “investment market.” Access to the state is frequently determined by actual financial payment. Would‐be officials invest in offices to obtain access to a stream of income associated with an office. This framework represents a novel perspective on the post‐Soviet state, which has hitherto either been premised on modernization theory or emphasized a robustly personalistic logic of political organization.

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This article explores the impact of the drug trade on security and stability in Tajikistan. In order to capture the multifaceted nature of this relationship, the effects on territory, population, state institutions, and the idea of the state are examined. The types of threats affecting these components of the state are discussed. These include societal security in the form of addiction and drug-related diseases; the military threat, most notably manifested by the merger of crime and terror; economic and political threats resulting from a criminalised economic and political system; and the relationship between the drug trade and the legitimacy of the state.

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Engvall Kyrgyzstan 33JOHAN ENGVALL is a researcher with the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute-Silk Road Studies Program, a joint transatlantic research and policy center affiliated with SAIS-Johns Hopkins University and the Department of Eurasian Studies of Uppsala University. He thanks Svante Cornell, Stefan Hedlund, and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.Stealing economic assets and political offices has become a permanent feature of the Kyrgyz political system.