Introduction

It has become commonplace, in a scholarly discourse dominated by accounts of Central Asia as the battle-ground of elemental forces and a focal point for ‘civili-zational clash’, for the Ferghana Valley to be identified as the mythical epicentre of such contention. Konfliktologiia, as an academic discipline committed to the analysis, prediction and prevention of social conflicts, came into being largely since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it draws upon a model of social science as the physician of society’s ills that has a much longer genealogy in the Soviet space. Given the prevalence of themes in the conflictology literature, it is perhaps unsurprising that the Ferghana Valley is identified within Central Asia and the former Soviet space more generally as a site of potentially grave inter-ethnic conflict. A full and nuanced assessment of conflict potential in the Ferghana Valley must start from a perspective that seeks to explore, rather than merely reify, nation-state discourses.