Nationalist leaders in the former Soviet states strive for national identity in both the political and cultural domains. Their language policies contend with Russian-speaking intelligentsias, numerous ethnic minorities and sizeable Russian communities backed by the Russian Federation - all presenting major challenges to facing the legacy of Soviet rule. Drawing on many years of research, interviews with educators and officials, and visits to the region, Barbara Kellner-Heinkele and Jacob M. Landau explore the politics of language and its intersection with identity in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. With special attention to language education in schools and universities within each state and debates over bilingualism versus multilingualism, their insights offer researchers of politics, linguistics and Central Asian studies a comprehensive account of a highly politicised debate.

The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Central Asia offers the first comprehensive, cross-disciplinary overview of key issues in Central Asian studies. The 30 chapters by leading and emerging scholars summarise major findings in the field and highlight long-term trends, recent observations and future developments in the region. The handbook features case studies of all five Central Asian republics and is organised thematically in seven sections: History Politics Geography International Relations Political Economy Society and Culture Religion An essential cross-disciplinary reference work, the handbook offers an accessible and easyto- understand guide to the core issues permeating the region to enable readers to grasp the fundamental challenges, transformations and themes in contemporary Central Asia. It will be of interest to researchers, academics and students of the region and those working in the field of Area Studies, History, Anthropology, Politics and International Relations. Chapter 23 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Central Asia often evokes images of imperial power rivalry dating back to the 19th century. Yet as the region’s international politics becomes more complex in the age of globalization, the need for new ways of looking at its many actors is more pressing than ever. Today even the traditional great powers rely increasingly on subtle forms of influence to augment their military might and economic clout in order to achieve their objectives in Central Asia. Bearing this in mind, Soft Power in Central Asia examines the patterns of attraction and persuasion that help shape the political choices of countries in the region. Starting with an investigation of soft power projection by the US, Russia and China, it sheds light on normative transfer and public diplomacy of the European Union, Turkey and Israel, and concludes with a discussion of the Central Asian republics’ active stance in the competition for the hearts and minds. Containing original chapters contributed by leading experts in the field, the volume will appeal to scholars and professionals with interest in international relations, political science and Central Asian studies.

The southernmost and poorest state of the Eurasian space, Tajikistan collapsed immediately upon the fall of the Soviet Union and plunged into a bloody five-year civil war (1992–1997) that left more than 50,000 people dead and more than half a million displaced. After the 1997 Peace Agreements, Tajikistan stood out for being the only post-Soviet country to recognize an Islamic party—the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (IRPT)—as a key actor in the civil war as well as in postwar reconstruction and democratization. Tajikistan’s linguistic and cultural proximity to Iran notwithstanding, the balance of external powers over the country remains fairly typical of Central Asia, with Russia as the major security provider and China as its principal investor. Another specificity of Tajikistan is its massive labor migration flows toward Russia. Out of a population of eight million, about one million work abroad seasonally—one of the highest rates of departure in the world. Migration trends have impacted Tajikistan’s economy and rent mechanisms: half of the country’s GDP comes from migrant remittances, a higher share than anywhere else in the world. However, it is in the societal and cultural realms that migration has had the most transformative effect. Migrants’ cultural and societal identities are on the move, with a growing role given to Islam as a normative tool for regulating the cultural shock of migration. Islam, and especially a globalized fundamentalist pietist movement, regulates both physical and moral security in workplace and other settings, and brings migrants together to make their interactions meaningful and socio-politically relevant. It offers a new social prestige to those who work in an environment seen as threatening to their Islamic identity. The first section of this volume investigates the critical question of the nature of the Tajik political regime, its stability, legitimacy mechanisms, and patterns of centralization. In the volume’s second part, we move away from studying the state to delve into the societal fabric of Tajikistan, shaped by local rural specificities and social vulnerabilities in the health sector and gender relationships. The third section of the volume is devoted to identity narratives and changes. While the Tajik regime works hard to control the national narrative and the interpretation of the civil war, society is literally and figuratively on the move, as migration profoundly reshapes societal structures and cultural values.

Modern Central Asia: A Primary Source Reader is an academic resource that discusses the basic political, social, and economic evolution of Central Asian civilization in its colonial (1731–1991) and post-colonial (1991–present) periods. Among other aspects of Central Asian history, this source reader discusses resistance and accommodation of native societies to the policies of the imperial center, the transformation of Central Asian societies under Tsarist and Soviet rule, and the history of Islam in Central Asia and its role in nation and state-building processes. This primary source book will be instrumental for familiarizing students with the nationality policies of imperial Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet governments as well as the effects produced by these policies on the natives of the region. The documents collected in this reader challenge the traditional approach, which has viewed Central Asians as passive recipients of the policies imposed on them by central authorities. Modern Central Asia: A Primary Source Reader demonstrates the active participation of the indigenous peoples in contact with other peoples by examining the natives’ ways of organizing societies, their pre-colonial experience of contact with outsiders, and the structure of their subsistence systems. The source book will also help students situate the major events and activities of Central Asia in a global context. In addition to the value of this collection to the Central Asian historical record, many of the included texts will be essential for comparative analyses and cross-disciplinary approaches in the study of world history.

With the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, Japan embarked on a policy of territorial expansion that would claim Taiwan and Korea, among others. Assimilation policies led to a significant body of literature written in Japanese by colonial writers by the 1930s. After its unconditional surrender in 1945, Japan abruptly receded to a nation-state, establishing its present-day borders. Following Korea’s liberation, Korean was labeled the national language of the Korean people, and Japanese-language texts were purged from the Korean literary canon. At the same time, these texts were also excluded from the Japanese literary canon, which was reconfigured along national, rather than imperial, borders. In Colonizing Language, Christina Yi investigates how linguistic nationalism and national identity intersect in the formation of modern literary canons through an examination of Japanese-language cultural production by Korean and Japanese writers from the 1930s through the 1950s, analyzing how key texts were produced, received, and circulated during the rise and fall of the Japanese empire. She considers a range of Japanese-language writings by Korean colonial subjects published in the 1930s and early 1940s and then traces how postwar reconstructions of ethnolinguistic nationality contributed to the creation of new literary canons in Japan and Korea, with a particular focus on writers from the Korean diasporic community in Japan. Drawing upon fiction, essays, film, literary criticism, and more, Yi challenges conventional understandings of national literature by showing how Japanese language ideology shaped colonial histories and the postcolonial present in East Asia. A Center for Korean Research Book

Central Peripheries explores post-Soviet Central Asia through the prism of nation-building. Although relative latecomers on the international scene, the Central Asian states see themselves as globalized, and yet in spite of – or perhaps precisely because of – this, they hold a very classical vision of the nation-state, rejecting the abolition of boundaries and the theory of the ‘death of the nation’. Their unabashed celebration of very classical nationhoods built on post-modern premises challenges the Western view of nationalism as a dying ideology that ought to have been transcended by post-national cosmopolitanism. Marlene Laruelle looks at how states in the region have been navigating the construction of a nation in a post-imperial context where Russia remains the dominant power and cultural reference. She takes into consideration the ways in which the Soviet past has influenced the construction of national storylines, as well as the diversity of each state’s narratives and use of symbolic politics. Exploring state discourses, academic narratives and different forms of popular nationalist storytelling allows Laruelle to depict the complex construction of the national pantheon in the three decades since independence. The second half of the book focuses on Kazakhstan as the most hybrid national construction and a unique case study of nationhood in Eurasia. Based on the principle that only multidisciplinarity can help us to untangle the puzzle of nationhood, Central Peripheries uses mixed methods, combining political science, intellectual history, sociology and cultural anthropology. It is inspired by two decades of fieldwork in the region and a deep knowledge of the region’s academia and political environment. Praise for Central Peripheries ‘Marlene Laruelle paves the way to the more focused and necessary outlook on Central Asia, a region that is not a periphery but a central space for emerging conceptual debates and complexities. Above all, the book is a product of Laruelle's trademark excellence in balancing empirical depth with vigorous theoretical advancements.’ – Diana T. Kudaibergenova, University of Cambridge ‘Using the concept of hybridity, Laruelle explores the multitude of historical, political and geopolitical factors that predetermine different ways of looking at nations and various configurations of nation-building in post-Soviet Central Asia. Those manifold contexts present a general picture of the transformation that the former southern periphery of the USSR has been going through in the past decades.’ – Sergey Abashin, European University at St Petersburg

This social and cultural analysis provides a new understanding of Kazakhstan’s younger generations that emerged during the rule of Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has been presiding over Kazakhstan for the thirty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Half of Kazakhstan’s population was born after he took power and have no direct memory of the Soviet regime. Since the early 2000s, they have lived in a world of political stability and relative material affluence, and have developed a strong consumerist culture. Even with growing government restrictions on media, religion, and formal public expression, they have been raised in a comparatively free country. This book offers the first collective study of the “Nazarbayev Generation,” illuminating the diversity of the country’s younger generations and the transformations of social and cultural norms that have taken place over the course of three decades. The contributors to this collection move away from state-centric, top-down perspectives in favor of grassroots realities and bottom-up dynamics in order to better integrate sociological data.

Twenty years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan are still undergoing numerous transitions. This book examines various language issues in relation to current discussions about national identity, education, and changing notions of socio-cultural capital in Central Asia.

This introduction to Central Asia and its relationship with Russia helps restore Central Asia to the general narrative of Russian and world history.