Contents lists available at ScienceDirect World Development Perspectives journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/wdp Case report Impunity of international labor rights violators and beneficiaries: The case of Uzbekistan Matthew Fischer-Daly Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, 281 Ives Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA Empires and autocrats established Uzbekistan to produce cotton. The industry remains the current authoritarian state’s central method of financial and social control. Global efforts to end the systematic labor rights violation have not ended the practice. Persistent forced labor in Uzbekistan exposes weaknesses in the international human rights system, providing applicable lessons for labor. The Uzbek state’s fragility and obsession with control reflect the history of Uzbekistan’s cotton sector. The Russian empire converted the Central Asian steppe into a cotton factory and its diverse nomadic re- sidents into its workers, despite their resistance, in the name of in- dustrialization in the 19th Century. After drawing the boundaries of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) accelerated the industrial agribusiness. The USSR diverted the Aral Sea to irrigate nearly one million hectares of land for cotton pro- duction and forced more people to become cotton growers and pickers. Soviet officials governing Uzbekistan established a chain of command to fulfill cotton orders from Moscow in exchange for financial transfers (Kandiyoti, 2002). By the 1980s, Uzbekistan supplied 70% of the USSR’s cotton, and 40% of the Uzbek workforce labored in cotton production. Imperial colonization followed by industrial occupation set the foundation for the creation of the authoritarian state of Uzbekistan. The first Republic of Uzbekistan president used the cotton industry to maintain political control, recognizing arbitrary national borders, diverse population, and absent Soviet support. At the central level, Islom Karimov authorized would-be rivals to oversee the cotton sector, e.g. Ismail Dzhurabekova and later Shavkat Mirziyoyev. From its capital Tashkent, the central government retained state monopoly over land ownership and the cotton industry, establishing its command economy with hierarchical authority. Tashkent granted regional and local offi- cials control over input suppliers and land allocations in exchange for loyalty and fulfillment of their jurisdiction’s target for cotton produc- tion. Following Karimov’s death in September 2016, Mirziyoyev as- sumed leadership, arranged a non-democratic election, and is now president. Denial of freedom is central to the state’s cotton industry. Uzbekistan is the world’s fifth-largest cotton exporter, and the Uzbek government uses a state-orchestrated system of forced labor to produce it. Annually the government imposes production quotas on all cotton farmers, imposes harvesting quotas on more than a million citizens, and enforces them with penalties. The central cotton management agency Uzpahtasanoateksport, President, Prime Minister, and Cabinet of Ministers set the national production target. The Prime Minister assigns quotas to regional governors, who allocate them among farmers. The Finance Ministry controls expenditures and income for cotton through a cashless system of credit managed by the Selkhozfond, a non-transparent fund that is not included in national budgets (Ilkhamov and Muradov, 2014). Through monopolies for agricultural inputs and purchasing, low procurement pricing, and its Selkhozfond, the government subjects farmers to forced labor. Farmers must sell to state-controlled gins, at the state procurement price set below the government’s own production costs. The government denies farmers the asset of land ownership, the ability to bargain with input suppliers, liquidity, and a price adequate to afford investments in the farms and hiring of labor in decent working conditions. Officials enforce production quotas assigned to farmers by confiscating farmers’ land and other property, bringing criminal charges, and using physical and verbal abuse against farmers (UGF, 2018). In this system, the farmers are forced laborers of the state, obliged to fulfill production quotas under menace of penalty. To harvest cotton, the Uzbek government forces students, teachers, doctors, nurses, and employees of government agencies and private businesses to the cotton fields, against their will and under threat of penalty. Citizens endure long hours, insufficient safe drinking water, and for those assigned to faraway fields, abysmal accommodations, often lacking hygiene facilities. Officials pressure managers of private businesses and state agencies to mobilize people and money to support the national harvest, and the managers in turn send their employees. People mobilized to pick cotton are forced laborers of the state, coerced to fulfill harvest quotas under threats of expulsion from school, job loss, docked pay, fines, verbal and physical harassment. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wdp.2019.02.008 Received 9 January 2018; Accepted 2 February 2019 E-mail address: mmf242@cornell.edu. World Development Perspectives xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx 2452-2929/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Please cite this article as: Matthew Fischer-Daly, World Development Perspectives, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wdp.2019.02.008