(2021). Musique contemporaine en Ouzbékistan: Politique, identités et globalisation. Central Asian Survey. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT In post-Soviet Central Asia, Jewish educational frameworks were shaped by unique forces introduced by various Jewish organizations. This article describes and explains the unique formation of Jewish education in post-Soviet Central Asian republics, how it was revived and which organizations shaped it. The article presents and analyses various educational initiatives introduced by Jewish organizations

ABSTRACT What impact has the ‘Arab Spring’ had upon Kazakhstan's approach to regime security? Short of the possibility of a ‘Central Asian Spring’, if and how the Arab Spring reshaped this authoritarian regime has not been addressed. A longitudinal narrative analysis of Kazakhstan's presidential rhetoric from 2005 to 2015 and fieldwork interviews indicated that the Arab Spring uprisings brought about

ABSTRACT Researchers working in Central Asia often report difficulty obtaining Western-style signed informed consent statements. The principles underlying informed consent were developed in cultures characterized by low-power distance and individualism, low context communication and a rules basis, whereas many Central Asian cultures emphasize high-power distance, collectivism, high-context communication

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of outer space technopolitics in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. It explores how outer space, the technological artefact of global relevance, works as a postcolonial fetish of modernity that is called upon to produce what it represents, that is, the reality of a technologically advanced Kazakh nation. The article shows that in its project of becoming a spacefaring nation

(2021). The lawful empire: Legal change and cultural diversity in late Tsarist Russia. Central Asian Survey. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT Central Asian art and culture have been gaining increased attention both within the region and on the international scene. This special issue brings together scholars and participants in the Central Asian cultural scene who specialize in different, often isolated, spheres. This multidisciplinary approach will enhance understanding of the current trends of display, presentation, accessibility

ABSTRACT This article examines artistic intervention into local conventions as a means of eliciting social awareness within the current cultural space of Dushanbe, Tajikistan, in which self-censorship is commonplace. As is to be expected, the art receiving the greatest support is sponsored by the authoritarian regime, who use it as a soft tool to construct a desired or prescribed form of national identity

ABSTRACT This article explores contemporary artistic practices in Kazakhstan that challenge narratives on national belonging and identity through the notion of queerness. It discusses artworks created by artists Saule Dyussenbina, Natalya Dyu and Kuanish Bazargaliyev, the artistic duo Kreolex Center, and the advertising agency Havas Worldwide Kazakhstan, which were created as a reaction to global discussions

(2021). Central Asia and the Silk Road: economic rise and decline over several millennia. Central Asian Survey: Vol. 40, The social role of art and culture in Central Asia, pp. 134-136.

(2021). Books received. Central Asian Survey: Vol. 40, The social role of art and culture in Central Asia, pp. 141-141.

(2021). The Bukharan crisis: A connected history of 18th century Central Asia. Central Asian Survey. Ahead of Print.

(2021). The Hungry Steppe: Famine, violence, and the making of Soviet Kazakhstan. Central Asian Survey. Ahead of Print.

(2021). Visions of development in Central Asia: Revitalizing the culture concept. Central Asian Survey. Ahead of Print.

(2021). Toward nationalizing regimes: conceptualizing power and identity in the post-Soviet realm, Central Asian Survey: Vol. 40, The social role of art and culture in Central Asia, pp. 132-134.

(2020). The steppe and the sea: pearls in the Mongol Empire. Central Asian Survey. Ahead of Print.

(2020). Medieval monuments of Central Asia: Qarakhanid architecture of the 11th and 12th centuries. Central Asian Survey. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT This article aims to provide a more complete and dynamic account of the legal framework that underpins religious regulation in Central Asia from independence in 1991 through 2018, focusing on Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. In contrast to existing approaches that rely on a few key laws, high-profile events or secondary sources, our analysis includes the entire body of legal documents

ABSTRACT The familial position and social status of daughters-in-law (kelins) in ‘traditional’ Central Asian families can be characterized as low, subservient and marginalized. By adopting normative human rights discourse, this paper argues that it is an example of the relativist challenge of cultural authenticity towards the universality of human rights, specifically women’s human rights. By using

(2021). Pipe dreams: Water and empire in Central Asia’s Aral Sea basin. Central Asian Survey: Vol. 40, The social role of art and culture in Central Asia, pp. 136-138.

ABSTRACT Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan have new leaders for the first time since 1989: Shavkat Mirziyoyev as Uzbek president and Kassym-Jomart Tokayev as Kazakh president. This article uses a theoretical framework based on the literatures of leadership change and political succession while overlaying this literature with the type of economic policies followed by each former leader to analyse the political

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the place-renaming policies in the recent two decades in Armenia. By elaborating on the legal and administrative framework for place-renaming in the country and through the analysis of more than 27,000 geographical names and their renaming practices, the paper focuses on the politics of space/place in Armenia in the context of a nation-state-building. By considering discourses

ABSTRACT This article advances a straightforward argument: a complete analysis of land reform processes in Central Asia needs to account for gender dynamics. More explicitly, it argues that alongside the feminization of agriculture, customary gender norms restricting female economic opportunities and property acquisition represent a structural advantage for local elites interested in hindering or delaying

ABSTRACT In recent years, many have said that democracy globally is being rolled back and that it is the source of much dissatisfaction. This article presents the findings from a survey of Kazakhstani university students on how they view democracy. The vast majority of participants view democracy as consisting of civil and political rights (i.e., the Western concept of democracy). However, also based

ABSTRACT In 2013, international news headlines started referencing Georgian Tarkhan Batirashvili, or Omar al-Shishani, as a rising star among foreign fighters in the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). At the time, it was puzzling why a Georgian Kist would fight for ISIS. However, following al-Shishani, around 200 other residents of Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge travelled to Syria and Iraq. The trend

(2020). Afghanistan: a history from 1260 to the present. Central Asian Survey: Vol. 39, No. 4, pp. 596-599.

ABSTRACT Using insights from classical functionalism, this article analyses the complex relationship between the Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea and the Caspian Environment Programme (CEP). The article pursues three objectives. First, it shows how shared ecological issues challenged individual littoral states and brought their respective governments under the CEP umbrella in 1998

ABSTRACT Most of Kazakhstan’s wealth hinges on oil rents, and the overall performance of the economy is closely linked to petroleum’s price fluctuations. This study asks (1) why the institution of private ownership of oil proceeds has not led to a positive transformation of patron–client relations embedded in the country’s energy sector, thus challenging the relevance of the ‘private ownership’ narrative

ABSTRACT This article aims to examine the relationship between women’s household bargaining power and their adoption of modern contraception in post-Soviet Tajikistan using the 2012 Demographic and Health Survey. The study uses direct measures of bargaining weights: a woman’s ability to make decisions about her own health care; visits to her family or relatives; and contraceptive use. An additional

ABSTRACT In 1997 a monument dedicated to Heroes of the Soviet Union Aliya Moldagulova and Manshuk Mametova was unveiled on the former site of the monument to Lenin in central Almaty. This case study investigates the valorization of these Soviet-era World War II heroes in independent Kazakhstan, and argues that the Kazakhstani state has recast these heroes as significant figures in the official centuries-long

(2021). The Central Asian revolt of 1916: a collapsing empire in the age of war and revolution. Central Asian Survey: Vol. 40, The social role of art and culture in Central Asia, pp. 138-140.

ABSTRACT In this article, we empirically examine how the Central Asian states apply external regime legitimation strategies to legitimize their regimes domestically. We used the Central Asia Watch Project’s data from five Central Asian state-run media outlets to examine spatial and temporal changes in regime legitimation strategies. All the Central Asian countries employed external regime legitimation

ABSTRACT This forum brings together five different angles on the question as to whether and how political regimes and forms of order-making can and should be researched through the concept of ‘illiberalism’. The discussion engages critically with this and associated concepts, such as ‘illiberal peace’ and ‘authoritarian conflict management’, which have been developed out of the Central Asian / Eurasian

(2020). Kazakhstan and the Soviet legacy: between continuity and rupture. Central Asian Survey: Vol. 39, No. 4, pp. 599-601.

ABSTRACT Civilizations are as complex as the human relationships that engendered them, and outlining these relational qualities within open notions of mobility and interaction frames a reconceptualization of Central Asia’s past. Recent Eurasian archaeological research deconstructs deterministic political-economic or hierarchical typologies of civilization and the overly simplified narrative that roots

This book offers an insightful ethnography of Pamiri people experiencing modernity in different domains of everyday life. Mostowlansky takes the approach of Therborn in examining modernity, by cons...

ABSTRACT Mongolia's transition to a democratic, market economy has created widespread change, especially among pastoral herders. Pastoralists have been depicted as archaic and independent ‘nomads’ who exist outside the modern economy. Still, pastoral culture is a key asset in tourism products and advertising. Tourism could provide fair economic benefits, but inclusive growth depends on how shareholders

ABSTRACT This article focuses on engagement with identity documents among the rural Uzbek population in the borderlands of Kyrgyzstan. By exploring the materiality of the documents and people’s concern with these material artefacts of bureaucracy, this article illustrates how the state has been moving in, out and through the lives of the people living on the margins of the state. People’s engagement

In 2019, Uzbekistan’s government ordered the closure of a notorious prison camp whose innocuous name, Zhaslyk (‘Youth’), belied its evil role. Built two decades earlier to incarcerate political and religious dissidents under the long dictatorial rule of the late Islam Karimov, Zhaslyk became a byword for brutality. Karimov’s successor, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, is a reformer eager to turn the page on the

ABSTRACT This article studies an early-twentieth-century reform in local administration on the Kazakh Steppe. It was catalyzed by the massive in-migration of peasant settlers from European Russia, which required fundamentally new administrative forms and institutional decisions from the state. In 1902 the Russian Empire extended the Temporary Regulation on Peasant Nachalniks, which was previously law

ABSTRACT In this article we reflect on our efforts to study the prosecution of moral crimes in Afghanistan. In the process of collating information about men and women imprisoned for moral crimes such as adultery, we found evidence that pointed to large-scale incarceration of men for the uncodified crime of elopement. After establishing this fact through a careful review of official data, the article

ABSTRACT Cross-border trade is central to the socio-economic structure of the former Soviet republics and their integration in the world economy. In the Caucasus and Central Asia, bazaars have functioned as nodes that enable multi-directional, cross-border trade. While there have been studies on the bazaar trade in the Soviet successor states, few have used quantitative methods. Drawing from 600 structured

ABSTRACT Since 2013, there have been multiple fires in bazaars in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Most of these fires have occurred in Barakholka, the largest bazaar in Central Asia, known for wholesaling in apparel, shoes and low-quality household and office supplies. Ownership of Barakholka is opaque. Using recurrent Barakholka fires as my point of departure, this article contributes to scholarship by describing

ABSTRACT Along with other globalizing forces such as migration and proselytism, religious markets have played a key role in the transformation of religious practices in Armenia. This article focuses on the intersection of mobility and markets through mobile fairs, which are temporarily organized at shrines on pilgrimage days. Market vendors tend to travel from shrine to shrine across Armenia throughout

ABSTRACT Trading in Astana’s Central Bazaar rests on mutually beneficial people-to-people contacts, or personal networks. Twenty-five years after the Soviet collapse, personal networks are pivotal in whether one succeeds in an informal market economy. I argue that networks cannot be disassociated from trader motivation, which serves as a measure of how these networks evolve over time. I describe how

ABSTRACT This article demonstrates how social exclusion affects the strategies that migrants and their children experience vis-à-vis the preschool education system of the host society. We use the example of two private institutions established in Moscow by Kyrgyz migrants to explore their role in helping integrate migrant children into the host society. I examine the role the Kyrgyz community plays

ABSTRACT This study deals with the contemporary dynamics of urban life in Bishkek. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Central Asian societies have experienced widespread political, economic and socio-cultural transformations. In this context, Western or globalized cultural modes and trends influence Kyrgyzstan's social and cultural life. One of these trends is the increasingly popular coffee

ABSTRACT The study focuses on the institution of boarding schools (Russian: internat) in Soviet Tajikistan in the 1950s and 1960s and its role in the education and training of the new national generations of skilled professionals in the fields of industry, science, culture, art and healthcare, which in turn contributed to the development of their country. Along with the de-Stalinization of education

ABSTRACT The Abdālī Afghans-Pashtuns played a leading role in the creation of the Durrānī polity (est. 1747) – the precursor of present-day Afghanistan. Given their lasting contributions to the process of state formation in Central Asia, it is somewhat surprising that the early history of the Abdālī remains obscure. Nevertheless, authors of recent generations have not been deterred from speculating

ABSTRACT This study investigates the emergence and development of business partnerships established by the Mongols and their merchant partners, ortoqs, in the Middle Ages. Ortoqs are known to have conducted trade and money-lending with the capital invested by their partners. This study shows that the contractual arrangements of Mongol–ortoq partnerships closely resembled medieval partnership contracts

ABSTRACT Rather than studying young men's career- and/or economic-based aspirations, this article explores the obstacles that hinder youths of both sexes in gerontocratic southern Tajikistan and North India from developing the capacity to make their own life choices. Focusing mainly on the selection of marital partner and largely on women, I explore the narratives of those who have never even dreamed

ABSTRACT This study investigates oasis expansion in the precolonial period and agricultural evolution in the colonial period using village-level statistics from the early twentieth century. This survey illustrates that the Kokand oasis in the Ferghana Valley initially appeared in the central part, where the Sart population settled by the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

ABSTRACT Based on an ethnographic case study of an Islamic university in Russia, I examine how the state-implemented and bureaucratized traditionalization of Islam in Russia affects the everyday life of Central Asian students and how this project ‘from above’ is entangled with their coping strategies. I show how religious education has become a resource for the state as well as for young students and

ABSTRACT What is the power of social media in defining and policing sexual identities and bodily expressions, and what are their connections to understanding nation, power and self in authoritarian contexts? Through the study of popular Instagram accounts in Kazakhstan and Russia, I argue that these sites serve as spaces of visualization and re-creation of new forms of ‘acceptable’ behaviour and lifestyles

ABSTRACT Tradition has come to play an important role throughout Central Asia in a number of new ways since independence, but has been predominantly investigated regarding nation building. In this article, we show how tradition is being used operationally in the context of activism and political conflict. We expose the various motivations and tactics pursued by aksakals (lit., whitebeards) and by a

ABSTRACT This article aims to show how traditionalization is enforced by women in Tajikistan in the realm of marriage, focusing on the economic dimension of life cycle rituals: ritual expenditure and gift-giving. It shows that from women’s points of view, performing ceremonial competition may itself be a resource to recover their reputation, for example when a matrimonial rupture has harmed it. Focusing

ABSTRACT Since its privatization in 1995, Kazakhstan’s largest steel mill has been in a restructuring process characterized by workforce reduction, augmented pressure on remaining jobs and labour conflict over wages, work conditions and corporate social responsibility. In 2013, in an attempt to re-establish harmonious relationships with workers, management invited the mill’s former labour aristocracy

ABSTRACT In the last two decades, mobile phones and new technologies have transformed migration. Some scholars argue that they help empower migrants, who are otherwise often marginalized in their host country. We discuss the extent to which this is true for Kyrgyz labour migrants in Russia, a relatively large diaspora that suffers from multiple levels of disempowerment, ranging from precarious living

ABSTRACT Though Central Asia is often studied through the prism of its relationships with external powers, research on local public perceptions of these different actors has largely been overlooked. The literature on Kazakhstanis’ perceptions of their neighbours, for instance, is scarce, and mostly focused on analysis of official discourse on Kazakhstan’s multi-vector policy, with little exploration

ABSTRACT Research into post-independence identity shifts among Kazakhstan’s Russian-speaking minorities has outlined a number of possible pathways, such as diasporization, integrated national minority status and ethnic separatism. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with young people in Almaty and Karaganda, I examine how Russian-speaking minorities identify with the state and imagine their place