ABSTRACT
Russia, Central Asia, Azerbaijan and Lithuania can be more satisfactorily explained in non-culturalist and non-ethnocentric terms – as coping strategies
adopted and developed in order to operate and survive in very difficult Soviet and post-Soviet environments, rather than as ethnocentric manifestations of
“essentially” Russian, Central Asian, Azerbaijani or Lithuanian culture. Unfortunately, the rapid expansion of “area studies” in the West after 1945
was not initially accompanied by a commensurate expansion of comparisons
between regions. Instead, there was a proliferation of inter-country comparisons within macro-regions (or geopolitical “zones of influence”) designated by
Westerners. Until the dramatic “rise of the Rest” between the 1980s and the 2000s (complemented by the rise of postcolonialism, multi-regional democ-
ratization studies and subaltern studies), “the Rest” were seen through Western, rather than local “conceptual lenses”. Area studies “severed regions
from one another in the scholarly mind”, so they were “almost never studied in relation to one another”; and this narrow focus perpetuated “dichotomies and stereotypes” and fostered “radical separation and opposition”, in ways
that implied “a neat division of the world into clear and simple zones, each with a fixed place in a [global civilizational] hierarchy. Yet cultures and
societies are not abstract, oppositional, static and sealed units that function in isolation, or fit along an evolutionary spectrum from the barbaric to the
civilised” (Nader 2010, 84).
