ABSTRACT
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Central Asian states and societies have sought to (re)affirm their identity and position in a highly contested region. Central Asia is generally considered to include Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, while Afghanistan and Mongolia may sometimes be included. Tensions between European vs. Asian, rural vs. urban, secular vs. religious, democratic vs. autocratic, capitalist vs. socialist, and individualistic vs. communal values, ways of life and modes of governance confront the region’s citizens and leaders. The tensions extend to civil society. In this edited volume, it is notable that the chapter on Central Asia has been included in the section on ‘Asia’. While geographically firmly grounded in the Asian continent, much of the region’s population has felt a strong pull from Imperial Russia since the nineteenth century. Within the USSR, the populations of Central Asia belonged not only to a common political and economic system, but also to a social and cultural space that linked them to the Caucasus, the Baltics and Central Europe. Since the USSR’s break-up much of this space has dissolved. Central Asia has gained its own specificity as a vast, postcommunist, largely Muslim territory, composed of countries following increasingly divergent development paths. As generalizations between the region’s states are difficult to make, this paper will focus on Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, which historically, geographically and culturally are more closely linked with each other than with the three other states of the area.
