Abstract
An éminence grise of human rights – the principle of accountability – has been continuously advancing its normative presence in international law and rights discourses in the last couple of decades. Its transformative promises, on the other side, are hindered by the conceptual dubiety rooted, inter alia, in the non-translatability of the concept to many world languages. The current article attempts to examine how universal aspirations about the principle are appropriated in local contexts of the Central Asian region. In the outset, the research scrutinizes theoretical perplexities around the term and argues for the (obscured) role of law in these discussions. Then, drawing on doctrinal and empirical research in Central Asia, it converses the ways accountability is translated, engaged, and valued as the idea. Findings reveal the heterogeneity of approaches to accountability, and the reiterative relations between the word and the concept, informed by the region’s historical past, political regimes, one’s language and education. The article exposes often omitted pitfalls of the existing multilingual setting of international law and its institutions, which undermine the communicative value of local languages in the region.
Between two worlds my brain is caught.
Your language grows inside my mind.
I have two words for every thought.
But sometimes yours is hard to find.
amy ludwig van derwater, children’s poetry “Two Worlds of Words” (2010)
1 Introduction1
Language is power.2 It allows for various forms of communication, embodies cultural and historical codes, and defines discursive narratives.3 The world, however, does not speak the same language, and the variety itself is remarkable: as of 2022, more than 7000 languages4 are spoken around the world validating the heterogeneity of this communication. International law has put linguistic variety to the test: both international legal practice and international legal scholarship have been scrutinized for language bias.5 Various academic events, research tools, and legal sources have been produced from certain dominant linguistic perspectives.6 English, specifically, has been positioned as hyper-central7 in this dominance, a lingua franca of the international legal plane, despite being outnumbered by native speakers of other languages as Spanish or Mandarin Chinese.8
The interpretation of a legal idea which sometimes precedes its articulation into text, draws on epistemic and semantic dynamics, in the pursuit of elucidating the meaning of law.9 Aspiration of universality in international law is tested to the impossible, “because we experience the world in contrasting ways, we project different meanings on the words we use to describe it”.10 Resulted linguistic predispositions are then routinely translated into the world’s distinct, divergent, unique languages with the underlying assumption that such a translation is possible from the beginning.
Translators who are often obscured in this knowledge production, are goaded into further interpretation of legal ideas when searching for “the deepest levels of meaning of the documents they translate”.11 This search is incoherent considering the absence of consensus on translation principles across different countries and within the discipline itself.12 It was not until recently that culture has been recognized in linguistic studies as inherently bound to translation;13 broadening the field to interpretation and localization studies. When the conceptualization of cultural untranslatability – non-substitutable elements in certain languages14 – gained prominence in linguistic scholarship, the reality of fundamental, however, absent in conversational or official styles ideas, has become more palpable. Nevertheless, the evidence of translation and implementation of non-translatable international legal terminology in different countries, across various political regimes, and amid (un)availability of necessary resources, remains anecdotal.
In this regard, the current article attempts to capture the engagement of practitioners and academics in Central Asia with one of the vital, however, non-translatable concepts in human rights – accountability. Despite the discourses on accountability being “omnipresent in contemporary law and politics”,15 the notion is understudied and often referred to be “a buzzword”,16 interchangeably used with other ideas, such as responsibility or control. Having Anglo-Norman roots, the concept does not have linguistic equivalents in many world languages. Nevertheless, it continues to advance as a human rights ideal through international instruments, thus, for instance, forming part of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 16 to “build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels”.17 While the current research does not intend to open the black box of a translation process per se – it rather demonstrates an account of how ambivalent, and semantically challenging, but still authoritative international normative agenda, is experienced and appropriated in one of the many world’s understudied regions. Whereas international law has been guilted for its imperial agenda as a “gentle civilizer of nations”18 with a specific role of the English language in this pursuit, the efforts of such regions as Central Asia in engaging with the decoloniality of its presence engrained in the Soviet past are often overlooked.
The article argues that the paradox of the term is in its indeterminacy, from one side, and the hegemonic potential, from the other, informed by the region’s linguistic specificities, historical past, and exposure of local interlocutors to the idea. These foster multidirectional, often dissimilar, interpretations of accountability that do not capture the empowering potential of the concept aspired by international law or English-speaking scholarship. The paper also highlights how the existing limited multilingualism in international law and international organizations such as the United Nations – a result of a tense compromise between selected participating states of the San Francisco Conference19 – contributes to undermining the appropriation of international agenda in local languages when explicitly favoring Russian.
In what follows, the article problematizes the concept of accountability and argues for its maturing value amid existing theoretical perplexity, rooted in (but not limited to) its non-translatability. Then, the paper discusses the doctrinal and empirical engagement with the concept across various countries in the Central Asian region. This part of the research is significantly informed by doctrinal and empirical research conducted in selected countries in February 2022 – April 2023;20 the findings are put in theoretical perspectives. Finally, the limitations and suggestions for future research are addressed in the conclusion.
2 Theorizing Accountability: “In the Eye of the Beholder”?21
The concept of accountability, despite its theoretical and semantic ambiguity, continues to mount its presence in national and international debates as a high currency ideal.22 Some described the concept as “golden”23 or a “hurrah-word”,24 essentially constituent to modern governance. The pursuing importance of accountability has been emphasized across various countries, regimes, and institutions; featured in public services provisions, global governance, and development interventions. In human rights, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has proclaimed accountability to be “a cornerstone” of rights-based frameworks;25 various international human rights instruments have been incorporating the idea as central within the last couple of decades.26
… [T]hey [legati] brought into English law the new legal doctrine that every acre of English and held by the king himself as demesne or held directly from him by named tenants-in-chief.28
The word, in this regard, had originated in French comptes a render, embracing both the list of items in question and the obligation to answer for them.29 Although the links between “counting, accounting, story-telling, and social power relations” have older roots than Middle Ages England,30 and an establishment of power and supremacy (specifically, during conquests) through an oath can be traced to ancient civilizations,31 the conceptualization of accountability nevertheless has arisen from a very specific Norman approach to and purpose of governance, and its application to other societies can render short of nuances of various existed forms of social, economic and political relations.32
a relationship between an actor and a forum, in which the actor must explain and justify his or her conduct, the forum can pose questions and pass judgment, and the actor may face consequences.38
Several critical configurations of the above-described relationship of power that can be distilled from this rather broad definition – responsibility, answerability, and enforceability (or in other words information, debate, and judgment phases) – are further reiterated by international organizations and scholarship, as essential markers of accountability relations.39 The consensus, however, does not necessarily ease or alleviate the conceptual struggles of various scholars around types of accountabilities (legal, political, social, etc.), relations inherent for it (horizontal, vertical, diagonal), or modes of operation (ex-ante, ex-post), and as argued by Willems and Van Dooren, the need for a coherent conceptual framework remains valid.40 Accountability, presently, is considered an all-encompassing flexible framework to be filled with actors and mechanisms defining their relationships.
While the term has been accumulating its presence in international discourses, its place in the vocabulary of lawyers was still rather insecure, with the notable exception of transnational accountability, where its ambiguous meaning underwrote struggles over legitimacy when bringing equal sovereigns to an answer for a violation of the international legal order. Indeed, in his opening address at the International Criminal Court Review Conference in 2010, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon proclaimed for the international community to usher “in the new Age of Accountability”.41 Amid a potentially growing interest among law students to scrutinize the idea at the international level,42 most conceptualizations usually uphold the judgment phase of the concept only, in a technocratic pursuit of determining ways to punish the perpetrators of human rights violations through international legal instruments.
When scrutinized further, existing taxonomies of accountability rarely suffice the role of law in connection to “political and extra-political instantiations” of the concept;43 it is relatively often lawyers if at all engaging with accountability, borrow its definition from political science or public governance scholarship which is logical and appropriate considering the inherently political nature of the concept. Nevertheless, while accountability “thrives best when there are direct hierarchical lines of command”,44 it is not immediately clear, how, for instance, courts (do not) fit traditional principle-agent theories of power settings the concept reigns on. Indeed, “the relationship between courts and government is seldom formulated in terms of accountability”,45 and the existing theoretical void prevents from exploring the modes and capacities of legal accountability. Constitutional lawyers acknowledge the idea behind the concept to comprise the rationale for the discipline, however, admit neglecting the word itself, referring rather to the established legal terminology of the rule of law, separation of powers doctrine, judicial independence, or constitutionalism.46 Similarly, being the raison d’etre in human rights, accountability, if reflected, is usually discussed through the remediating potential it delivers. This rationale, according to Mulgan, can conflate accountability with control: two concepts overlap, but should, nevertheless, be analytically addressed on separate terms.47 Finally, there is also legal scholarship, that does not provide any definition of accountability,48 albeit attempting to assess its designs, but presumes its inherent value (mostly, judicial), meaning and the place of law in it to be recognizable and comprehensible to the reader.
The meaning of the concept has gone through a significant evolution – from being an instrument of subjugation between monarchs and lieges to a power-constraining toolbox of modern governance. This evolution has correspondingly taken place predominantly within English-speaking realms, in which, according to Harlow, “it is sometimes hard to remember that in several European languages, no exact equivalent or translation [of accountability] is available”.49 This non-translatability is not limited to European languages only; researchers of accountability from various countries, often inexplicitly, come across semantic differences in the concept once it’s translated, and consequent challenges such translations bring to the legal analysis. Thus, for instance, in her comparative legal analysis of accountability relations in housing programs in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries, Mariana Vilmondes notices how the corresponding translations of accountability in two languages – as, for instance, responsabilidade and rendición de cuentas – capture only partial theoretical configuration of accountability, namely, responsibility.50 The inability of translation to embody the meaning of the word, according to her, has forced courts in Brazil to either refer to the original English word or craft case-specific terms they wished to engage with. Similarly, when scrutinizing the accountability in the right to health, Zhang points to a difficult search of linguistic equivalents of the word in the Chinese language, with wen ze being the closest and translated as to question or blame someone.51 Other studies reveal a variety of translation approaches in different languages: from transliteration of the word to employing a multitude of terms to capturing the nuances of different relational obligations.52
Language is essential to the production of discourse as a social practice. Antje Wiener, for instance, argues that “the language used in discursive interventions not only functions to describe facts, it also constitutes new meaning”.53 The supporters of linguistic relativity claim an impact on the language on people’s perception and understanding of the world. Known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,54 the theory builds on the assumption of interconnectedness between one’s language and thought, informed by the semantic structure of the former one. Recent studies55 have contributed to the hypothesis by demonstrating some of the fundamental differences in normative comprehension of various domains of experience connected to their verbal and grammatical structures. Although the degree of the impact is still debated, the fact that language is important “in shaping our thoughts, in modifying our perception and in creating reality” is undeniable.56
While the scholarship engaging with the issue of translation constitute an exception among accountability research, even these explorations rarely center translation within the conceptual paradox of the term, but rather confine it to ‘clarification of terminology’ sections. Dubnick even argues that the research elucidating the meaning of accountability can be mostly attributed to critical studies, and considering the growing attractiveness of the term and its porousness to political agenda, such research is often politicized, and, thus, overlooked or belittled.57 Reflecting the underrepresentation of various communities, countries, and regions in English-speaking academia, it might be possible to presume the lack of knowledge on the status of accountability both as a word and as a concept in many different parts of the world and the way it is appropriated by local interlocutors.
3 Accountability in Central Asia: “Go I Know Not Whither and Fetch I Know Not What”58
3.1 Background
Central Asia comprising five countries – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan – embodies a diverse region entrenched in rich history and culture. While all countries were indexed as authoritarian in 2021, political regimes have been neither equivalent nor necessarily stagnant, rather representing a spectrum of autocracies: from the totalitarian dictatorship of lower middle-income Turkmenistan to consolidated authoritarianism in upper middle-income Kazakhstan.59 Kyrgyzstan which has been, presumably, one of the most vibrant in its political developments facing several revolutions and coup d’etat, is continuously ranked the highest according to various democracy indicators although these are now also in decline. Furthermore, regimes in the region have been characterized as neo-patrimonial – based on clientelism and personality cult – defining the persistent nature of the established structures.60
The states’ political, economic, legal, social, and cultural realms are often examined through the region’s colonial past: initially, by Tzarist Russia and later, under the Soviet rule. The colonial experiences have been rather obscured amid the independence of the countries in the 1990s;61 however, the growing civil and academic scrutiny of the countries’ histories ascertains its continuing consequences on the post-Soviet being.62 Thus, for instance, whereas all countries are parties to the major international human rights instruments, their substantive and procedural implementation becomes subject to “a Soviet legislative spirit”63 favoring state interests over individual freedoms. The interpretation of different rights, such as the right to privacy, is often intricated by the former communist surveillance policies;64 and international law, in general, is seen as a continuation of power politics following the Soviet engagements with it during the Cold War.65 These influences and impacts continue to be exposed, resisted, and reengaged under cultural, political, and economic realities of independence (and before it); however, critical historiography of Soviet experiences in Central Asia is in further need of development.
The Soviet legacy has been specifically visible in language politics, according to which starting from 1938, Russian became mandatory at schools across the ussr, often at the expense of local languages through the “asymmetrical bilinguism”.66 Russia as its imperial successor, continues to endorse its eminence as the soft power and has been negotiating the formation of an international organization to support and promote the Russian language in Central Asia and a broader region.67 The transition from Cyrillic scripts to Latin-based alphabets in the early days of independence in Uzbekistan was labeled as a “betrayal” by Russian media and has been continuously criticized since then;68 recent attempts to advance the provision of services in the local language in Kazakhstan led to the state-staged protest in Russia calling out the alleged russophobia.69 The language was instrumentalized by Russia when invoking The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine in its attempts to justify the 2022 invasion of Ukraine and prevent the atrocities against Russian-speaking populations.70 Despite the fact that the presence of the Russian language continues to decline,71 it often retains to be a lingua franca for both intra- and interstate communication in the region, and this status quo is highly politicized.
The research on nuanced vernacularization72 of international legal ideas in Central Asia remains limited partially due to long-established academic preferences studying the region through geopolitical prisms of Russia or China, and partially through the disciplinary challenges of international law itself, rooted, for instance, in its exclusivity. Emtseva summarizes her experience as an international legal scholar from Kyrgyzstan as “running a never-ending race to catch up with the Western international lawyers,”73 with the language being one of the factors in it. The region’s vast experiences in coping with a complicated web of multilingual realities, informed both by its historical past and transnationalization of international legal ideas, can reveal some of the challenges to the universality and failed expectations of its empowering potential. It can also point to the multipolarity of knowledge production in international law, in which its various ideas coexist, complement, or compete with each other. While the author’s positionality (an international lawyer from Kyrgyzstan) and lived experience (education, practice) were some of the decisive factors in choosing the case study of the region, the criticality and uniqueness of Central Asia in studying the hegemony of international legal ideas should not be overlooked.
3.2 Accountability in the Soviet Doctrine
One of the most frequently used translations of accountability in the Russian language is podotchetnost’, with the etymological meaning of being under report. There are minor conceptual differences between report (otchet) and account (uchet), in which the former does not necessarily embrace the financial aspect of the term; both, however, suggest a rather technical procedural trait often resulting in documentation, comparing to the English counterpart’s storytelling constituent. While scholars point to the historical rise of accountability spiking in the second half of the 20th century (Table 1),74 it is useful to be vigilant of nuances of these developments unfolding in other languages. Whereas in some instances, the word has been, indeed, transplanted into the language as part of ‘good governance’ agendas throughout the 1990s, accountability as can be traced, existed, and fluctuated in the history of the Russian language decades before its world acclaim, but on a different scale (Table 2).
As Table 2 suggests the rise of the usage of the term can be observed in the Russian language in the 1920s with the formation and institutionalization of the ussr. Whereas the first Constitution (Lenin Constitution) of 1924 did not make any references to the word, the 1936 version (Stalin Constitution) included the principle of accountability in several of its articles,75 expectedly, with an intended consolidation of power within the state and its organs rather as an empowering democratic principle. Thus, for instance, Article 31 in line with other articles engraining accountability, defined the hierarchy of relationships of such accountable state organs as the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the Council of People’s Commissars, and the People’s Commissariats as subordinated to the Supreme Soviet.
The obligation of the State is towards society as a whole, whose remedy in case of default lies in parliament or a local council, instead of to individual citizens, whose remedy lies in a court of law, or at least in a quasi-judicial tribunal.76
These imaginaries of the social order were essentializing from collective expectations, rather than individual rights bound to juridical accountability.77
With the escalating moral and factual universalism of international law, which elevated the status and modes of human rights and democracy, the Soviets incorporated the alluring language of rights in the 1977 Constitution (Brezhnev Constitution), however, adapted or appealed to it with a pretense. Accountability made frequent appearance in the new fundamental law of the Soviet Union, and was, for the first time, used to capture duties of the state towards its people.78 Both the doctrinal and institutional setup of the concept, however, retained their meaning in sustaining the monopoly of one-party dictatorship, with no political, legal, or social mechanisms established to hold the power to the account. Thus, whereas accountability as a framework of the relationship between the state and people remained ruptured and limited to a single article manifestation in the aforementioned Constitution, it was nevertheless scrupulously woven into the centralism of control of state bodies throughout the ussr.79 This version of the “Soviet democracy”80 instrumentalized for the justification of the ideology domestically81 or as leverage in international negotiations,82 also appealed to accountability to maintain the very imperial project of the ussr when legally taming the sovereignty of its republics, both horizontally and vertically. While changes in the Brezhnev Constitution explored the plasticity of accountability as a relationship, the framework, nevertheless, remained relatively rigid – master/subaltern and center/periphery – with the Supreme Soviet being the main ‘beneficiary’ within these hierarchies, and people barely included in it, both formally and factually.
3.3 Accountability in the post-Soviet Doctrine
The collapse of the Soviet Union, a grim but craved breakdown, left former republics with testing alternatives for further transformations, exhibited initially in their new constitutions, which were to be numerously amended and changed in all five states throughout the years of independence.
Present versions of the supreme law of the countries adopt divergent approaches to the word. As can be seen from Table 3, while some incorporate the concept in many of the articles, others as in the case of Uzbekistan do not refer to the term at all. This does not imply that accountability as a concept has not been structured in a relationship between the state and the people, but rather points to the linguistic void between such a relationship and the non-appearance of the word in the country’s fundamental law. Some of the phases of the accountability relationship are captured by the responsibilities of different state bodies through reporting (for instance, Art. 103), and the corresponding word is used.
In other instances, when accountability is extensively elaborated in the country’s constitution, the framework of the relationship is usually limited to horizontal or vertical hierarchies between different state bodies. Thus, accountability is particularized with regard to the relationship between legislative, executive, and judiciary branches in Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan; the tradition of the word in these cases is instrumentalized to consolidate the power of the presidency in the countries, leading to the establishment of authoritarian “Khanstitutions”.83
The formulation and execution of the local budgets shall be performed in compliance with the principles of transparency, public involvement, and accountability of local self-governance bodies towards the local community.85
In spite of the existing divergences in accountability designs in five states, a general reasoning behind the operationalization of the term follows the patterns of administration of power and state bodies, although adapted to accommodate specific needs and hierarchies of different political regimes. The idea of accountable relations is marketed as a silver bullet in international law in solving democracy deficits; however, its interpretation in Central Asian doctrines can be more rigid, specific, and less flexible, being impacted by the Soviet past; used as a structure of legalized control within the power, rather than of the power itself. In this regard, as least as a term, accountability in the Central Asian doctrine manifests itself predominantly as administrative.
Although these conclusions are mostly drawn from constitutional settings of the discussed countries – which are nevertheless foundational and critical in defining the functioning of the state and rights of people – further studies on accountability mechanisms in Central Asia confirm the conceptual shortcomings (or non-existence) of accountability in legislations. Thus, for instance, according to the report of the Development Policy Institute on accountability in Kyrgyzstan from 2016, accountability exists and is functioning in the country, however, legally embedded in the relationship between local self-government bodies, Parliaments, and political parties only. Citizens are remaining the worst off as principles in accountability relations.86 Most of the scholarship on accountability in the region, however, constitutes grey literature reports commissioned by international organizations, with the preliminary objective to popularize the concept, and not define, question, or deconstruct it.87
While some of the essential attributes of democratic accountability can be found in selected national constitutions and legislations, such as the freedom of access to information, they are not deemed to be bound discursively or conceptually to accountability and exist as separate terminologies. As language is used to create and maintain power and has a fundamental importance for law and the legal profession when expressing clarity, precision, persuasion, and precedent, the use or abyss of the term “accountability” is imperative to engage with local interpretations. The presumed transformative promises of accountability are not self-evident across languages, cultures, and regimes, but require value-laden elaborations about who should be accountable to whom according to what standards, processes, and under which circumstances.
3.4 Heterogeneity of Readings
The previous section demonstrated how the interpretation of accountability in the Russian language in Central Asia doctrines resonated with the Soviet past vis-a-vis the internationally acclaimed aspirations about the concept. Its appropriation in local languages, however, is even more complicated: as the fieldwork revealed, accountability can be considered a culturally non-translatable idea in the regional languages, often read through the prism of Russian or English counterparts, and these readings vary and fluctuate.
The Constitution of the Kyrgyz Republic utilizes otchettuuluk (reporting) and otchet beruu (to give a report) interchangeably in relation to accountability, both being transliterations of the Russian otchet (report). Loanwords are common phenomena in local languages89 and Kyrgyz specifically considering the histories of the country’s colonial contact with Russia and the Soviet Union; otchet, as argued by local sociolinguists, is among such borrowed words.90 As has been mentioned above, while reporting is arguably essential to accountability, it cannot be equated to the concept and provides only a minimized approach to implementing mechanisms, rather than a relationship of obligation. A similar perplexity is unfolding in Kazakh and Turkmen languages (esep (account), hasabat (account, report)), whereas Tajik and Uzbek root accountability in responsibility (mas’ul (responsible) and javobgarlik (responsibility) correspondingly). Despite grounding the concept in local languages and not necessarily transliterating as in Kyrgyz, the appeal to the words even in constitutions of these countries was not consistent, nor did it consolidate as a separate, value-laden concept, rather overlapping with other notions.
The conversations with ten interviewees working in the field of human rights in Central Asia revealed heterogeneous approaches to the word and the concept of accountability. Lawyers and rights specialists engaged with the term for different purposes (legitimacy, advocacy, communication), for different audiences (international organizations, state officials, ngo s) describing different relations (state-international community, state-citizens, interstate bodies) and in different languages (English, Russian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Tajik). The dominance of the Russian and English versions of accountability prevailed in experts’ work and narratives despite their attempts to ground the concept in local languages. There was an acknowledgment among the participants that they rarely referred to the word in Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and Tajik in their everyday discourses, and some of the interviewees had difficulties translating it despite being native speakers. The tension is also reiterated by the linguistic setting of international organizations and institutions such as the United Nations which mostly deliver international agenda either in English or (if translated) in Russian, leaving people not speaking both languages in a double jeopardy.
There was also the heterogeneity of sources of information on what accountability is – from the training of international human rights ngo s to the Constitution of the Soviet Union – but not a single participant attempted to root the concept in the local vision of the organization of the society, acknowledging it to be “new” or even “foreign”, nevertheless with many appreciating its empowering value.
There was a spectrum in the participants’ rankings of the potential of the concept in advancing their work. This divergence was conditioned by the awareness of the concept and its configurations, and the relations that participants put in the center of accountability dynamics. A remarkable disparity was observed among specialists who were working on different generations of rights, where experts in the field of socio-economic justice were better equipped, both epistemologically and normatively, to engage with the concept. Considering the political nature of socio-economic rights and decades of arguments against their justiciability, the idea of accountability allows local practitioners to discover other sites and strategies of struggle beyond courts and legal institutions, often through political dialogue.
When reading the concept of accountability, the participants instrumentalized the ambiguity of the word in achieving their desired means; this created layers of interpretations, capturing both the hegemonic and counterhegemonic potential of the term. Thus, from one side, the intrinsic indeterminacy, and the political nature of accountability alleviated a potential hostility to the principle as a threat to authoritarian regimes, simultaneously broadening advocacy strategies for human rights lawyers. From another side, the normative perplexity required specified training and education of local interlocutors, as the permeation of international legal agenda in domestic contexts was neither a linear nor explicit process. In other words, depleting the concept which is both foreign, but legitimate, and mystifying, but implemental, presumes both opportunities and pitfalls, depending on the configurations of the instruments, capacities of human rights specialists, and affordances of specific political regimes.
4 Conclusion
If one is ever to compile a dictionary of the most demanding concepts in law, which would most likely be extensive, accountability should occupy a proud place in it. While the challenges in conceptualizing the term range across disciplines, institutions, and places in time and space, it persistently grows in value and significance, both in international law and in legal scholarship. Making frequent appearances in international soft instruments, appreciated as a principle by international law students, appealing as a desired deliverable by practitioners, and, at the same time, being rarely put under critical scrutiny, accountability will most likely continue to prosper, promising convenient commitments.
Grounding the concept in theory and operationalizing it is a subject to various challenges, and, as the current paper has demonstrated, language can be one of them. International agenda and its promising multilingualism do not only limit the engagement of the ‘periphery’ with various concepts when assigning the burden of translation and interpretation to non-English-speaking countries; it also reinforces linguistic asymmetries (and possibly, postcolonial realities) in the post-Soviet space when delivering the agenda in Russian. If the ambiguity and indeterminacy of the term, as well as its political nature, embrace both hegemonic and counterhegemonic potential, the transformative promises in giving “teeth”91 to human rights can be false positives and are confronted with different modernities of accountabilities, or lack of those, for people speaking different languages, having experienced different histories, and living in different political regimes.
Considering the limited number of participants in this study and the fact that all of them were English speakers, the divergence of interpretations of the term, or, the scope of its void can be grander. While the literature on accountability argues for the significant evolution of the concept, the fieldwork exposed that the usage of the term in the Russian language in Central Asian doctrines did not necessarily go through a similar evolution and continues to prioritize a certain type of administrative relations and the system of control of power. The role of the Soviet Union in interpreting the word and incorporating it in the legal systems of the fifteen former Soviet Republics is absent in scholarly discourses on accountability, but persists, for example, across the discussed region. The level of embeddedness of the Soviet term in local realities can be even greater, considering institutional path dependencies, the legacy of Soviet education, and limited English language proficiency in the region.92
While the article does not intend to nihilistically question the concept of accountability or the dominant role of English in international law, it rather attempts to demonstrate the obvious assumptions about the problematic universality of international agenda and the presumed common understanding of highly ordered principles, specifically, across various generations of rights. The process of translation and interpretation of international legal agenda should be more iterative, based on various languages, cultures, and histories which countries embody and experience; the realization of their configurations can be multi-vectorial and should probably not be assigned to a single, semantically complex and normatively promising concept. The current research presents an exploration of various tensions and prospects of international legal agenda in various regions around the world, and further research is required to include other stakeholders, methods, and data, to assess the role and effectiveness of accountability in its empowering democratic potential.
The author would like to thank her supervisor, Prof. Dr. Kaltenborn, for all his thorough supervision and support. Also, an appreciation is to the participants of the Doctoral Forum on Legal Theory at Melbourne Law School, Central Asian Mentoring Kurultai and her mentor, Prof. Sergey Sayapin, for his inspirational guidance during the process.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 956909.
For instance, in Michel Foucault, “The Order of Discourse,” in Young R. (Ed.), Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader (Routledge, 1981).
Ethnologue, an online database that collects data on world languages, lists 7151 languages as of 2022. Ethnologue (21 February 2023), available at https://www.ethnologue.com.
See, for instance, the discussion in Odile Ammann, “Language Bias in International Legal Scholarship: Symptoms, Explanations, Implications and Remedies,” 33(3) European Journal of International Law (2022), 821–850.
Ammann, op.cit. note 3.
Abram de Swaan, Words of World: The Global Language System (Polity Press and Blackwell, Cambridge, 2001).
Ethnologue (n.d.), “Summary by Language Size,” available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20190312060544/https://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size.
Gleider Ignacio Hernandez, “On Multilingualism and the International Legal Process,” in Hélène Ruiz Fabri, Jana Gogolin, Rüdiger Wolfrum (eds.), Select Proceedings of the European Society of International Law (Hart Publishing, Oxford, 2010), 441–460.
Martti Koskenniemi, “What is Critical Research in International Law? Celebrating Structuralism,” 29(3) Leiden Journal of International Law (2016), 727–735, 733.
United Nations, Department for General Assembly and Conference Management, “Translation” (n.d), available at https://www.un.org/dgacm/en/content/translation.
Ugo Chuks Okolie, and Eseohe Glory Okoedion, “Untranslatability of Texts: Equivalence and Cultural Perspectives,” 165 World Scientific News (2022), 66–79.
Christiane Nord, Translating as a Purposeful Activity: Functionalist Approaches Explained (St. Jerome, Manchester, 1997).
Jingjing Cui, “Untranslatability and the Method of Compensation,” 2(4) Theory and Practice in Language Studies (2012), 826–830.
Danielle Hanna Rached, “The Concept(s) of Accountability: Form in Search of Substance,” 29(2) Leiden Journal of International Law (2016), 317–342, 318.
See, for instance, in Mark Bovens, Robert Edward Goodin, and Thomas Schillemans (eds), The Oxford Handbook Public Accountability (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014), 1; Richard Mulgan, “‘Accountability’: An Ever-Expanding Concept?”, 78 Public Administration (2000), 555–573, 555, 2000; Jennifer Rubenstein, “Accountability in an Unequal World,” 69(3) Journal of Politics (2007), 616–632, 620.
United Nations General Assembly, “Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” a/res/70/1 (21 October 2015), available at https://www.refworld.org/docid/57b6e3e44.html.
Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations. The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010).
Hernandez, op.cit. note 7.
The author considered the doctrinal appropriation of accountability in different languages in five countries in Central Asia manifested in their constitutions and how it was interwoven in each country’s operationalization of the term. Additionally, the doctrinal scrutiny of three Soviet Constitutions was added to the analysis. Furthermore, ten interviews were conducted with human rights experts in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan in February 2022 – August 2023 (both in-person and on Zoom). The selection was done through the researcher’s personal network and supplemented with snowball recommendations during interviews. Turkmenistan has been purposefully omitted in the empirical methodology of the research due to the country’s political regime and safety consideration of the (limited) human rights community. The study was supported by the extensive literature review on accountability in international discourse and academia, conducted by the researcher for her PhD dissertation.
The description coined in Carolyn Moser, “Conceptualising Accountability in The Legal and Institutional Framework of the osce,” 17 Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law & International Law Research Paper (2018), 1–18, 2.
Rached, op.cit. note 13.
Renée Speijcken, and Wieger Bakker, “The Elusive Quest for the Golden Standard: Concepts, Policies and Practices of Accountability in Development Cooperation,” 018 unu-MERIT Working Paper Series (2011), 1–26, 1.
Speijcken and Bakker, op.cit. note 21, 2.
United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, “Who Will be Accountable? Human Rights and the Post-2015 Development Agenda,” hr/pub/13/1 (2013), ix, available at https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/Publications/WhoWillBeAccountable.pdf.
The overview of major human rights soft and hard international legal documents reveals that the word ‘accountability’ has been largely absent in human rights discourses before the end of the 20th century.
Andy Godfrey, and Keith Hooper, “Accountability and Decision-Making in Feudal England: Domesday Book Revisited,” 1(1) Accounting History (1996), 35–54.
Vivian Hunter Galbraith, Domesday Book: Its Place in Administrative History (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1974), 32.
Bovens, Goodin, and Schillemans, op.cit. note 14.
Bovens, Goodin, and Schillemans, op.cit. note 14, 3.
Melvin J. Dubnick, “Accountability as a Cultural Keyword,” in Bovens, Goodin, and Schillemans, op.cit. note 14, 23–38.
Dubnick, op.cit. note 29.
Dubnick, op.cit. note 29.
Bovens, Goodin, and Schillemans, op.cit. note 14; Dubnick, op.cit. note 29.
In her remarks to the joint hearing of the Inter-Parliamentary Union and the General Assembly, Deputy Secretary-General, Asha-Rose Migiro, claimed, “Political accountability is central to meeting the generational challenges of today’s world. Poverty, crime and violence thrive in States that are not accountable”. United Nations News, “Political accountability central to democracy, peace and prosperity – UN officials” (28 November 2011), available at: https://news.un.org/en/story/2011/11/396362.
Matthew Flinders, “The Future and Relevance of Accountability Studies,” in Bovens, Goodin, and Schillemans, op.cit. note 14, 661–672, 661.
Thomas Schillemans, “The Public Accountability Review: a Meta-Analysis of Public Accountability Research in Six Academic Disciplines,” Working Paper (2013), available at: https://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/275784.
Mark Bovens, “Analysing and Assessing Accountability: A Conceptual Framework,” 13(4) European Law Journal (2007), 447–468, 450.
For instance, United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, op.cit. note 23; Bovens, Goodin, and Schillemans, op.cit. note 14.
Tom Willems, and Wouter van Dooren, “Coming to Terms with Accountability,” 14(7) Public Management Review (2012), 1011–1036.
United Nations, “Secretary-General’s address to the Review Conference on the International Criminal Court,” (31 May 2010), available at www.un.org/sg/STATEMENTS/index.asp?nid¼4585.
Based on the author’s analysis of the Vrije University Amsterdam master theses database (Law Faculty) (10 October 2022), available at https://www.ubvu.vu.nl. Further research is required to capture trajectories and differences across different institutions.
Rached, op.cit. note 13, 317.
Schillemans, op.cit. note 35, 10.
Carol Harlow, Accountability in the European Union (Oxford Academic, online edition, 2012; first published in Oxford in 2002).
Carol Harlow, “Accountability and Constitutional Law,” in Bovens, Goodin, and Schillemans, op.cit. note 14, 195–210.
Richard Mulgan, “Accountability Deficits,” in Bovens, Goodin, and Schillemans, op.cit. note 14, 555.
For instance, Hannes Jöbstl, “Bridging the Accountability Gap: Armed Non-State Actors and the Investigation and Prosecution of War Crimes,” 18(3) Journal of International Criminal Justice (2020), 1–31.
Harlow, op.cit. note 44, 130.
This was observed with other Roman languages, as French or Italian, sabotaging the conceptual distinction between two words. In Mariana Vilmondes, Accountability Relations in Social Housing Programs: a Comparative Legal Analysis of Brazilian and Chilean Case Studies (ua Ruhr Studies on Development and Global Governance, Bochum, 2022).
Yi Zhang, Advancing the Right to Health Care in China: Towards Accountability (Intersentia, Cambridge, 2019).
Robin Ramsay, Maham Stanyon, and Noryiuki Takahashi, “Social Accountability Across Cultures, Does the Concept Translate? An Explorative Discussion with Primary Care Colleagues in Japan,” 31(2) Education for Primary Care (2020), 66–70; Dubnick, op. cit. note 29.
Antje Wiener, “Making Normative Meaning Accountable, ” sp iv 2007–305 Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (2007), 25.
Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought and Reality. Selected Writings. (J.Wilky/London. Chapinaon & Hall, 1956); Edward Sapir, Culture, Language and Personality. Selected Essays (University of California Press, 1961).
Lera Boroditsky et al., “Do English and Mandarin Speakers Think about Time Differently?” 118(1) Cognition (2011):123–129, doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2010.09.010.
Basel Al-Sheikh Hussein, “The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis Today,” 2(3) Theory and Practice in Language Studies (2012), 645, doi:10.4304/tpls.2.3.642-646.
Dubnick, op.cit. note 29.
In the Russian language, an idiom of a very difficult task.
The World Bank (2022), available at https://www.worldbank.org/en/region/eca/brief/central-asia.
Rico Isaacs, and Erica Marat (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Central Asia (Routledge, London, New York, 2021).
Specifically, the experiences of the Soviet colonization were not framed as such in states’ discourses. There are, however, some early academic works focused on the concept of ‘postcolonial’, such as, in David Chioni Moore, “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique.” 116(1) pmla (2001): 111–28. http://www.jstor.org/stable/463645.
Erica Marat, “Introduction: 30 years of Central Asian Studies – the Best is Yet to Come,” 40(4) Central Asian Survey (2021), 477–482; Lawrence P. Markowitz, and Scott Radnitz, “Studying States and Regimes in Central Asia: Contributions to Comparative Politics and Future Challenges,” 40(4) Central Asian Survey (2021), 576–591; William Partlett and Herbert Küpper, The Post-Soviet as Post-Colonial. A New Paradigm for Understanding Constitutional Dynamics in the Former Soviet Empire (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021).
Eugheniy Zhovtis, “Democratisation and Human Rights in Central Asia: Problems, Development Prospects and the Role of the International Community,” 134 ceps Policy Brief (2007), 1–11, 5.
Malika Toqmadi, and Natalia Zakharchenko, “I Agree to Terms and Conditions: Negotiating Privacy Online in Central Asia,” 13(1) JeDEM – EJournal of EDemocracy and Open Government (2021), 71–100.
Sergey Sayapin, “The Post-Soviet Central Asia and International Law: Practice, Research and Teaching,” Afronomicslaw (15 September 2020), available at https://www.afronomicslaw.org/2020/09/15/the-post-soviet-central-asia-and-international-law-practice-research-and-teaching.
William Fierman, “Identity, Symbolism, and the Politics of Language in Central Asia,” 61(7) Europe-Asia Studies (2009), 1207–1228, 1215.
“Putin podderzhal ideyu Tokayeva o sozdanii mezhdunarodnoi organizatsii po podderzhke russkogo yazyka,” Radio Azattyk (14 October 2022), available at https://rus.azattyq.org/a/32083362.html.
“Uzbekistan: udastsya li polnost’u otkazat’sya ot kirillicy?” EurasiaNet (5 April 2017), available at https://inosmi.ru/20170405/239053069.html.
“Moskva vidit v Kazakhstane “russophobiyu”. Nur-Sultan pokazyvaet uyazvimost‘?” Radio Azattyk (3 September 2021), available at https://rus.azattyq.org/a/kazakhstan-evades-russia-amid-statements-about-russophobia/31441437.html.
Heather Ashby, “How the Kremlin Distorts the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ Principle,” United States Institute of Peace (7 April 2022), available at https://www.usip.org/publications/2022/04/how-kremlin-distorts-responsibility-protect-principle (accessed 10 June 2022).
Nurbek Bekmurzaev, “Russian Language Status in Central Asian Countries,” Central Asian Bureau for Analytical Reporting (28 February 2019), available at: https://cabar.asia/en/russian-language-status-in-central-asian-countries.
Sally Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2006).
Julia Emtseva, “Practicing Reflexivity in International Law: Running a Never-Ending Race to Catch Up with the Western International Lawyers,” 23(5) German Law Journal (2022), 756–768. doi:10.1017/glj.2022.46.
Helen Abadzi, “Accountability and its Educational Implications: Culture, Linguistics, and Psychological research,” United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (ed/gemr/mrt/2017/P1/15).
Constitution (Fundamental law) of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics with Amendments and Additions adopted by the First, Second, Third, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Sessions of the Supreme Soviet of the ussr (5 December 1936), Art. 31, 48, 65, 80, 101.
Thomas Humphrey Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (Pluto Press, London, 1992), 59.
Scott Newton, “The Soviet Social: Rights and Welfare Reimagined,” in Steven L.B. Jensen and Charles Walton (eds.), Social Rights and the Politics of Obligation in History (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2022), 141–163.
Constitution (Fundamental law) of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Adopted at the Seventh (Special) Session of the Supreme Soviet of the ussr, Ninth Convocation (7 October 1977), Art. 3.
Ibid., Art. 91, 108, 119, 126, 130, 137, 138, 139, 143, 150, 152, 165.
Mikhail Antonov, “Conservatism in Russia and Sovereignty in Human Rights,” 39(1) Review of Central and East European Law (2014), 1–40, 35.
John T. Evrard, “Human Rights in the Soviet Union: The Policy of Dissimulation,” 29(3) DePaul Law Review (1980), 819–868.
Antonov, op.cit. 78.
Chris Rickleton, “‘Khanstitutions’: In Central Asia, Constitutions Are Not for the Many, But for the Few,” RadioFreeEurope Radio Liberty (20 January 2023), available at https://www.rferl.org/a/central-asia-constitutions-turkmenistan-uzbekistan-kazakhstan-kyrgyzstan-tajikistan/32232880.html.
Maxim Ryabkov, “The North–South Cleavage and Political Support in Kyrgyzstan,” 27(3–4) Central Asian Survey (2008), 301–316.
Constitution of the Kyrgyz Republic, 5 May 2021, Art. 111(5). All translations from Russian into English are by the author of the present work unless otherwise noted.
“Accountability System in the Kyrgyz Republic,” Development Policy Institute (2016), available at http://dpi.kg/en/library/full/262.html.
For instance, “Building Effective, Accountable, and Inclusive Institutions in Europe and Central Asia: Lessons from the Region,” The World Bank (June 2020), available at https://www.pefa.org/sites/pefa/files/Building-Effective-Accountable-and-Inclusive-Institutions-in-Europe-and-Central-Asia-Lessons-from-the-Region.pdf; “Social Accountability in Tajikistan: Enhancing Trust Between Communities and Water Service Providers,” Oxfam (March 2017), available at https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/620224/cs-tajikistan-water-social-accountability-220317-en.pdf;jsessionid=6F6B03C45279F40F84240337A6B83EC3?sequence=1; Towards a More Effective, Strategic and Accountable State in Kazakhstan, (oecd Publishing, Paris, 2017), available at https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/governance/towards-a-more-effective-strategic-and-accountable-state-in-kazakhstan_9789264284005-en.
Constitution of the Republic of Kazakhstan adopted on 30 August 1995, last amendments and additions were made on 8 June 2022, September 17, 2022; Constitution of the Kyrgyz Republic, enacted by the Law of the Kyrgyz Republic on 5 May 2021; Constitution of the Republic of Tajikistan enacted by the Law of the Republic of Tajikistan on 6 November 1994, last amendments and additions were made on 22 May 2016; Constitution of Turkmenistan adopted on 18 May 1992, last amendments and additions were made on 21 January 2023; Constitution of the Republic of Uzbekistan adopted on 8 December 1992, last amendments and additions were made on 16 April 2014 (a referendum for the new version of Constitution of the Republic of Uzbekistan was scheduled to take place before the final draft of this article).
Fierman, op.cit. note 64.
Mainisa Kochueva, “Borrowed Words in the Kyrgyz Vocabulary,” 25 Epokha Nauki (2021), 206–2010, 208.
Zhang, op.cit. note 49,189.
In 2019, Kyrgyzstan, for example, was ranked 99th out of 100 countries in English Proficiency Index. Available at: https://www.ef.com/wwen/epi/ (accessed 5 October 2022).
