This thesis tackles the wider theme of the process of construction of those political organizations we call states. The more specific problematique into which it delves, on the other hand, is the relation between state-building, political community, and security, our case study being the state- building process of the Uzbekistani state in post-soviet Central Asia. The fundamental argument in our research is that every time states carry out acts of securitization - that is, identify existential threats and act to counter them, whether these threats be mainly internal or external - they are demarcating the boundaries of their political community by excluding certain groups from the political tie to the state, what brings about a process of state-building, that is, of the construction of state political institutions. In the case study of the processes of securitization in the Republic of Uzbekistan, we explore the identification and actions to counter the threat of Russian neoimperialism, which produced certain patterns of international alignments and a certain denial of the Russian linguistic and cultural heritage internally, which resulted in a process, incipient as it may be, of ethnic nationalization of the state. Toward the end of the 90´s, however, such perception of threat was gradually superseded by the identification of the politicization of Islam (of political Islam) as the greatest single threat to the existence of the Uzbekistani state, an identification which has produced severe repression of any religious manifestation - particularly Islamic - in the country and the opposition of groups that were largely radicalized by such repression. The fundamental result of this process was the construction of a lay state, that is, of practices and institutions which do not permit the participation of religious ideas and representatives in politics.