ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how the politics of the Central Asian region are unfolding after the end of the Cold War. Alker defined world orders as “geographically-linked socio-historical entities, identifiable on the basis of patterned regularities discernable among international or world actors, involving their conscious and unconscious relationships with each other and or with their social and natural environments. The pro-Western liberal elite, who gained ascendancy in the early years after the end of the Cold War, regarded Central Asia as a “burden” and “alien”. The differences among the transnational Islamic groups in Central Asia have a strong parallel to the differences among the Muslim states. The Islamic states though primarily work within the nation-statist framework, but have their own distinctive versions of Islamic models. The Russian–Slavic world order is poised to subsume the Residual Socialist order because of its historical linkages with the Communist elite of Central Asia.
