Category: Central Asia

Based on a synthesis of the extensive research of Middle Eastern and Western scholars, this lively anthropological introduction to the Middle East and Central Asia explores the socio-political complexities of those regions and introduces students to the questions that have been, and are being, developed by scholars and writers concerned with the two regions. The […]

In a new, revised edition of his acclaimed book, Olivier Roy examines the political development of central Asia, from Russian conquests to the “War on Terror” and beyond. During the anti-Gorbachev coup in August 1991, most communist leaders from Soviet central Asia backed the plotters. Within weeks of the coup’s collapse, those same leaders—now transformed […]

The Western reader is not well acquainted with Central Asia. This vast region in the great depths of Asia is confined between two giants, Russia and China, while also sharing its boundaries with two worrisome neighbors, Iran and Afghanistan. Central Asia is the region of ancient, sui generis civilization, where two major ethnic groups, of […]

The concluding volume–following Mao’s Great Famine and The Tragedy of Liberation–in Frank Dikötter’s award-winning trilogy chronicling the Communist revolution in China. After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives from 1958–1962, an aging Mao Zedong launched an ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate those […]

Few works dealing with Chinese Turkestan and the Pamirs have been published of late years, although the Heart of A sia, where the empires of Great Britain, Kussiatand China meet, can never fail to excite our interest. Furthermore, the great trade route which ran from China to the Roman Empire lay across Chinese Turkestan, from […]

The economic, political, and international profile of Central Asia has been the subject of much speculation since the region emerged from under the Soviet banner. This book offers systematic, informed analysis of developments in the newest of emerging market regions by a team of international experts, including leading in-country specialists. After an astute survey of […]

Drawing on extensive research in the archives of Russia and Uzbekistan, Douglas Northrop here reconstructs the turbulent history of a Soviet campaign that sought to end the seclusion of Muslim women. In Uzbekistan it focused above all on a massive effort to eliminate the heavy horsehair-and-cotton veils worn by many women and girls. This campaign […]

Adeeb Khalid offers the first extended examination of cultural debates in Central Asia during Russian rule. With the Russian conquest in the 1860s and 1870s the region came into contact with modernity. The Jadids, influential Muslim intellectuals, sought to safeguard the indigenous Islamic culture by adapting it to the modern state. Through education, literacy, use […]

In this global era, Central Asia must be understood in both geo-economic and geopolitical terms. The region’s natural resources compel the attention of rivalrous great powers and ambitious internal factions. The local regimes are caught between the need for international collaborations to valorize these riches and the need to maintain control over them in the […]