This book examines the development of Uzbekistan’s international relations since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Over the past three decades, Uzbekistan has attracted the attention of the academic and policy communities because of its geostrategic importance, its critical role in shaping or unshaping Central Asia as a region, its economic and trade potential, and its demographic weight: every other Central Asian being Uzbek, Uzbekistan’s political, social, and cultural evolutions largely exemplify the transformations of the region as a whole. And yet, more than 25 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, evaluating Uzbekistan’s post-Soviet transformation remains complicated. Practitioners and scholars have seen access to sources, data, and fieldwork progressively restricted since the early 2000s. The death of President Islam Karimov, in power for a quarter of century, in late 2016, reopened the future of the country, offering it more room for evolution. To better grasp the challenges facing post-Karimov Uzbekistan, this volume reviews nearly three decades of independence. In the first part, it discusses the political construct of Uzbekistan under Karimov, based on the delineation between the state, the elite, and the people, and the tight links between politics and economy. The second section of the volume delves into the social and cultural changes related to labor migration and one specific trigger – the difficulties to reform agriculture. The third part explores the place of religion in Uzbekistan, both at the state level and in society, while the last part looks at the renegotiation of collective identities.

While security concerns have assumed salience across the globe, Afghanistan’s proximity to Central Asia has meant that security or perceptions of insecurity dominate the strategic discourse in the region. Issues that stand out include the challenges that the Central Asian states will face in terms of stability, ethnic tensions, radicalization of youth, destabilization of commodity flows and energy security and the impact that these could have on Central Asian society. However, security cannot just be defined in terms of security at the borders. It needs to be defined in ‘cosmopolitan’ terms through an array of issues like movements across borders, radicalism within states, the sharing of water, and various multilateral attempts at combating insecurity. This volume is an attempt to focus on some of these issues that reflect on perceptions of security principally from Indian and Uzbek positions. It examines shifts over the last two decades, from debates on the geopolitical importance of the region from a great game perspective to the salience of new engagements within the international arena.

Heartlands of Eurasia explores how received metageographical knowledge informs the understanding of global processes and is subsequently transformed into geopolitical reasoning with foreign policy implications. It provides a detailed examination of writings, from both within the region and outside, that look into the significance of Halford Mackinder's heritage in the context of a vastly changed world situation. In particular, it attempts to examine how policy makers and strategic thinkers have used these geopolitical concepts as justification for their policy in the region. Finally, it attempts an analysis of the extent to which this policy thinking was translated into practice. While the study looks into how the vision of the 'pivotal' significance of a vast expanse of land finds its echoes in contemporary narratives, it also underlines the very creative ways in which Mackinder's ideas have been reinterpreted in keeping with the changing global dynamics. Making use of the way in which the region has been traditionally defined and the way in which the people defined themselves, the study brings into focus a debate on the usefulness of region or 'area'-based studies that are located in geographical imaginations. Anita Sengupta uses this connection to examine the following issues: geopolitical imaginations and their relevance in identifying 'areas' in the present context; the intersection between how areas are defined from an outsider perspective and how people define themselves; the extent to which these definitions have influenced policy; and the possibility or feasibility of the development of alternative geostrategic discourses. Mackinder himself did not specify the geographical area identified first as the 'pivot' and later the 'heartland,' but his ideas were focused on the 'closed heartland of Euro-Asia,' an area that was unassailable by sea power. This study therefore centers its debates around the Eurasian space in general, though the focus is on the Central Asian region and Uzbekistan in particular. The book is ideal for specialists working on the Eurasian region, graduate students interested in geopolitics as well as Eurasian and Central Asian studies, and undergraduates studying political science and international relations.

With renewed American involvement in Afghanistan, Pakistan's growing fragility, and China's rise in power in the post-Soviet space, Central Asia-South Asia relations have become central to understanding the future of the Eurasian continent. Mapping Central Asia identifies the trends, attitudes, and ideas that are key to structuring the Central Asia-South Asia axis in the coming decade. Structured in three parts, the book skillfully guides us through the importance of the historical links between the Indian sub-continent and Central Asia, the regional and global context in which the developing of closer relations between India and Central Asia has presented itself since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the precise domains of Indo-Central Asian cooperation, and studies three conflict zones that frame Indo-Central Asian relations: the Kashmir question; the situation in Afghanistan; and fear of destabilization in Xinjiang. The international line-up of established scholars convincingly demonstrate the fundamental necessity to define the Indian approach on these issues and provide cutting-edge insights on the tools needed to understand the solutions for the decade to come.

This book is a study of the role of clan networks in Central Asia from the early twentieth century through 2004. Exploring the social, economic, and historical roots of clans, and their political role and political transformation in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, it argues that clans are informal political actors that are critical to understanding politics in this region. The book demonstrates that the Soviet system was far less successful in transforming and controlling Central Asian society, and in its policy of eradicating clan identities, than has often been assumed. In order to understand Central Asian politics and their economies, scholars and policy makers must take into account the powerful role of these informal groups, how they adapt and change over time, and how they may constrain or undermine democratization in this strategic region.

With renewed American involvement in Afghanistan, Pakistan's growing fragility, and China's rise in power in the post-Soviet space, Central Asia-South Asia relations have become central to understanding the future of the Eurasian continent. Mapping Central Asia identifies the trends, attitudes, and ideas that are key to structuring the Central Asia-South Asia axis in the coming decade. Structured in three parts, the book skillfully guides us through the importance of the historical links between the Indian sub-continent and Central Asia, the regional and global context in which the developing of closer relations between India and Central Asia has presented itself since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the precise domains of Indo-Central Asian cooperation, and studies three conflict zones that frame Indo-Central Asian relations: the Kashmir question; the situation in Afghanistan; and fear of destabilization in Xinjiang. The international line-up of established scholars convincingly demonstrate the fundamental necessity to define the Indian approach on these issues and provide cutting-edge insights on the tools needed to understand the solutions for the decade to come.

This is the 43rd volume in the Occasional Paper series of the U.S. Air Force Institute for National Security Studies (INSS). This paper, while it reports the results of research undertaken across the year prior to the events of September 11 and their aftermath, presents an analysis that is both timely and relevant given those events. This important paper represents the kind of original thinking that this Institute was designed in the hope of fostering. The two authors, each of whom is individually the winner of a previous INSS outstanding research award, develop and test a systematic, targeted, and useful methodology for examining the non-state political violence and its practitioner that the United States now faces. Their analysis also is grounded in Central Asia, a new but increasingly important region to United States military interest and presence. The paper stands well on either of those legs -- a systematic methodology for violent non-state actors or a detailed and security-oriented examination of an emerging critical region. Taken together, the two legs mark it as a singularly significant work, one well worthy of serious study.