how #RussianColonialism copied european colonial tactics of “liberating indigenous women” to cement colonization of Central Asia in 1920-30s and hijack indigenous cultural codes. from brilliant “veiled empire” by douglas northrop:
“many european colonial regimes of late 19-mid-20 century attempted to govern vast numbers of subjects with a comparative handful of officials, soldiers, and settlers. since direct physical force and coercion alone could not guarantee imperial power.
these regimes needed other means to control indigenous populations. laws and legal norms often served this purpose, creating codes of behavior against which colonized individuals could be measured. If all went well, from the standpoint of colonial authorities, these norms
would be so fully internalized by colonial subjects that no massive police force would be needed. the defense of indigenous women against oppression was one common justification for using the law in this way
as when British authorities decided in 1829 to ban the practice of sati, or widow burning, in India. the postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak has argued that in this case, the protection of Indian women from Indian men helped justify colonial British rule.
such a law became "a signifier for a good society which must, at such inaugurative moments, transgress mere legality, or equity of legal policy. In this particular case, the process also allowed the redefinition as a crime of what had been tolerated, known, or adulated as ritual
by late 1920s Soviet Central Asian authorities had passed a series of laws to address the problems posed by such Uzbek "rituals." these laws established an important new category of criminal offenses: crimes of daily life, or byt crimes
they involved the definition of new norms for personal behavior and new legal templates to govern and shape patterns of everyday family life.”
by using law to define and enforce "proper" behavior, party activists hoped to change the terms of debate within Uzbek society, to accumulate what Pierre Bourdieu calls "symbolic capital" by creating a new "official version of the social world."
these activists made a series of choices to define the new laws, deeming certain customs -and simultaneously not others- subject to legal action and judicial penalties
the contingent aspects of their choices can be seen in the extensive debates on which "crimes" to include, how to define them, and how harshly they should be punished.
Zhenotdel activists (colonial gender police), in particular, fought to carry out a wide-ranging effort to protect indigenous Muslim women through law.
Once Soviet legislators arrived at a canonical list of byt crimes, Soviet authorities, many of them Europeans from outside Central Asia, then took up the cause, setting out to survey the population, enforce the new rules, and reshape Central Asian daily life”
colonial violence done to Muslim women by #RussianColonialism would always go hand-in-hand with the ‘civilizing’ excuse 
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