Introduction: 30 years of Central Asian studies – the best is yet to come

ABSTRACT

In the last 30 years since the advent of independence, the field of Central Asian studies has become more diverse and new generations of scholars have emerged. This issue assembles seven articles by 10 authors who represent the field at large. In addition to embracing the growing field, the authors critique what they view as remaining misinterpretations or omissions in their respective disciplines. Exciting innovations for understanding Central Asia continue to flourish from the region as well as in collaboration with international partners. The coming decade is a turning point for the Central Asian studies – a time to host spirited debates and explore experimental approaches, new theories and topics.

KEYWORDS:

• scholarship
• knowledge
• decolonial
• post-colonial

The past three decades have been eventful in Central Asian studies. Despite dire predictions that the region is destined to lose its importance and even turn uninteresting to international audiences, it is time to celebrate the ever-expanding cross-disciplinary scholarship about Central Asia. This issue assembles seven articles by 10 authors who represent the field at large. They all have long shaped Central Asian studies with new perspectives and deep empirical analyses. In addition to embracing the growing field, the authors critique what they view as remaining misinterpretations or omissions in their respective disciplines. Authors from Central Asia see lasting oversights and hasty generalizations in studies of the region, while Western counterparts are more concerned with how the region is lagging in its contribution to disciplinary studies. Both critiques are important and reflective of the growing richness of Central Asian studies.

Of particular importance in highlighting both the richness and the limitations of the field is Kassymbekova and Chokobaeva’s (2021, in this issue) article, which tactfully critiques stereotypes about the Soviet formation of Central Asia commonly perpetuated in the literature about the period. Too often, Soviet rule in Central Asia is portrayed as emancipatory and modernizing based on Soviet records of the colonial regime. The authors challenge a superficial argument: that the creation and modernization of Soviet Central Asia was proceeded by active involvement of Central Asian elites. They point to the Stalinist elimination and marginalization of a cohort of Central Asian leaders and its diverse populations. The authors then ask, ‘[d]oes it matter that we have not yet heard – or will never hear – the voices of those who fell victim to the regime or fled it?’ Not hearing the subaltern reveals how historians’ view of Central Asia derives from their own political context that sees modernization as the biggest counterfactual claim against comparing the Soviet Union with other colonial experiences. It becomes too easy to excuse atrocities and cultural erasure of the Soviet regime if compared with colonial experiences in other regions where top-down modernization efforts were not as robust as in Central Asia. Kassymbekova and Chokobaeva’s (2021, in this issue) article is a call for scholars across contexts to examine their own position in the field more thoroughly when interpreting the Soviet past.

Unexamined stereotypes persisted in the post-Soviet period as well. Tutumlu (2021, in this issue) recounts how most publications in the 1980s and 1990s treated Central Asia as a simplistic and exotic locale. US scholarship, influenced by the security paradigm from the Cold War era, saw the region from threatening or geostrategic perspectives. In a similar vein, Zanca (2021, in this issue) critiques American anthropological approaches to Central Asia for focusing on the binaries of compliance and resistance to the Soviet regime informed by the Cold War. Local identities, he writes, were viewed from the perspective of how opposed non-Russian populations were to the communist regime. Scholars missed the complexities of ethnic, linguistic and territorial identities. Despite their shortcomings, these early works were widely read and appreciated, including by Central Asian political regimes. Central Asian studies became filled with unchallenged tropes about local and international dynamics. Some of them are more routine: ‘little-known’, ‘backyard’ or ‘playground’ region. Others are more subtle and reference medical or essentialist notions.

According to Khalid (2021, in this issue), Cold War thinking also influenced interpretations of the role of Islam in Central Asia that simultaneously viewed the religion as a necessary opposition to communism and as a looming threat to the West. Thirty years into Central Asia’s independence, Khalid reflects how the scholarship on Islam is rife with internal debates that focus on the continuity and interruption of Islamic practices since Soviet rule, the significance of Muslim tradition for Central Asia, and the range of meanings of religion for Central Asians (ancestral heritage, objectified set of beliefs and practices or part of a national heritage). He concludes that it is a field that requires continuous innovation in methodologies and approaches.

In the field of International Relations (IR), Cooley (2021, in this issue) shows how Western understanding of Central Asia was heavily influenced by security crises that often reflected ‘its own prevailing security and governance agendas’. Much of Western scholarship tended to assess Central Asia from the global liberal order, but recent studies show that the region is deeply involved in Chinese and Middle Eastern commerce and cultural networks. Markowitz and Radnitz (2021, in this issue) notice how Central Asian studies moved its focus away from statehood to more granular topics of protest, civil society, informality and others that offered more opportunities for comparative studies within the region and other disciplines. The conversations within Central Asian area studies have benefitted from interdisciplinary approaches.

Both Cooley’s and Markowitz and Radnitz’s articles mention Central Asian studies’ small contribution to IR and comparative political theories. This critique is fair and reflective of the general omission by Western theories of studies from the Global South. IR, for instance, has long been criticized for building on the Western experience, while in comparative political studies, experimental methodology or theoretical concepts may advance the discipline; the discipline itself often offers only complimentary findings to more empirically rich studies.

Area studies, including Central Asian studies, can identify when theoretical debates are limited or misrepresentative. As Cooley explains elsewhere, Eurasia, more broadly, offers a preview of the tendencies that unfold in other parts of the world. The analysis of transnational networks of corruption revealed flaws in the Western financial and law enforcement systems that fuelled despotism in the region. Studies of despotism and populism have also offered helpful language in understanding autocratic tendencies among elected officials in the West. In an optimistic tone, Tutumlu (2021, in this issue) points out how Central Asian studies can now offer more to global studies on the decoloniality of political and social processes.

Finally, contributors mention the growing inadequacy of framing Central Asia as ‘post-Soviet’. The Soviet legacy still looms large and is ingrained in the countries’ current names and territories. Indeed, to many scholars the ‘post’ in post-Soviet is synonymous with post-colonial when analysing the political roles of security structures or policies towards ethnic minorities. Yet most domestic political and economic developments in the region are now entirely detached from the communist regime and are more influenced by access to global cultures and economic opportunities. Thinking beyond state-building, regime changes and inter-state politics is the next challenge in moving away from dominant post-Soviet perspectives. Instead, looking at ways of life, religious practices, shared traditions, gender, trade, repertoires of political activism, social mobility, geographical dislocation, concerns about past and future, worries about environmental degradation, and the political activity of diasporas can all shed more light onto how political and social processes transpire in the region.

Central Asian studies: still an unequal field

The above critique is useful because it shows how with more diverse voices joining Central Asian studies, the field is maturing into a more self-aware community as well. Central Asian scholars who started their careers soon after the Soviet collapse remember how they were spectators of discussions in the United States, Europe or Russia about their native contexts. Conversations about Central Asia were siloed in the West and in Russia. When not speaking a high enough level of English (or not Russified enough), scholars were not heard. In the 2000s, Western and Russian scholars began holding joint forums more often, yet, still without the representation of Central Asian voices. Speaking ‘about us, but not for us’ was a common experience (Sultanalieva 2019). When scholars spoke to Central Asian colleagues, it was rarely to co-produce knowledge together, but rather to extract notes from the field and assistance with local contacts.

The critique here is not of the Western scholarship per se that has produced tremendous amounts of empirical and theoretical studies. It is more an acknowledgment that to continue the fruitful growth of Central Asia studies, we are now faced with the task of consciously incorporating more non-Western perspectives. For much of the three decades, Western scholarship was limited in that sense: only focusing on debates within its own community with the occasional inclusion of the other. Now scholars must actively engage all perspectives and not focus solely on discussions within one position. Intentional understanding of whose voices and perspectives are not available or not heard should be part of this effort. Central Asian studies must embrace different styles of writing, argumentation and theory production.

This issue also reflects on how international discussions of Central Asia continue to be dominated by Western scholarship. Less than half of this issue is represented by scholars from Central Asia. This is not for lack of trying to be inclusive. Scholars in Central Asia face structural challenges to publishing in Western academic journals: heavy teaching loads, lack of access to paywalled journals and the high cost of attending international conferences. The Covid-19 pandemic devastated the region, further isolating Central Asia from international travel and interrupting collaborations. The Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021 complicated work for university teaching faculty whose students from Afghanistan were unable to leave the country as the 2021–22 academic year began.

Authoritarianism is another significant impediment to hearing Central Asian voices. On the example of Tajikistan, Antonov, Lemon, and Mullojonov (2021, in this issue) illustrate how three decades into President Emomali Rakhmon’s leadership, academics in Tajikistan are both acquiesced through self-censorship and incorporated into the national government’s propaganda. Scholars suspected in government critique are surveilled, arrested, intimidated and forced out of the country. Academic productivity in an autocratic context naturally declines.

These findings are applicable across Central Asia – scholars can only speak when conforming with the incumbent regimes’ politics. Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Education offers generous research grants, but applications for state funding praise the political course set out by President Nursultan Nazarbayev. Independent scholars are more likely to critique the work of specific government agencies and avoid any negative review of Nazarbayev personally. Universities in Kazakhstan expect their faculty to meet impossibly demanding publication quotas. Five years into Shavkat Mirziyeev’s rule, scholars in Uzbekistan cover socio-economic problems in the country, but avoid the critique of political topics such as elections or corruption. Even in Kyrgyzstan where academic discussion is generally free, the conflict at the Kyrgyz-Tajik border in April 2021 silenced some scholars and analysts who feared they would attract aggressive nationalistic mobs against their balanced view that sympathized with civilian casualties on both sides of the border.

Scholarly awareness on framing the region and specific developments within its geographical borders has yet to catch up with the dominant, often paternalistic, political class as well. To this day, Central Asian political elites, when travelling abroad, feel the need to justify the significance of their lands within world history.

Lack of safety for scholars correlates to lack of access to the field. Active fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan allows for innovative methods and topics to emerge for the broader audiences. We see exciting compilations of excellent scholarly work on contemporary art and culture (de Tiesenhausen 2021), notions of securityscapes (Lemon 2018) and traditionalization (Beyer and Finke 2019) coming mostly from these countries. Access to Tajikistan and Uzbekistan remains more limited, and little scholarship has been published on Turkmenistan. Within the region, political authoritarianism limits access to external perspectives and academic perspectives. Lagging connections between scholarly communities is one of the main reasons why knowledge about Central Asia continues to be heavily influenced by Soviet, Russian or Western epistemologies and ontologies.

The changing times

A lack of access to the field should not be conflated with a lack of knowledge. The amount of research grants distributed by the US Department of Defense, or the frequency of events hosted by Washington and London think tanks, may ebb and flow. But the richness is found in the conversations that take place outside the public eye. Local intellectuals and analysts contain the knowledge in even the most sealed areas, and they are limited about what can be expressed in venues accessible to scholars outside the region. Discussions are dynamic, deeply informed and often clandestine. As Antonov, Lemon, and Mullojonov (2021, in this issue) mention, scholars need to simultaneously protect themselves from the ruling political regimes and retain academic independence.

Many scholars in the region also produce knowledge commissioned by international organizations, but barred from open access. Collaboration with international organizations offers competitive compensation, but local scholars’ publications, building on their deep understanding of the local dynamics and extensive networks in the community, are then used in narrow circles of expat experts. Likewise, local scholars’ knowledge is often represented in published works of their foreign counterparts who unknowingly may be extracting data and analysis without attribution or co-authorship. Because local knowledge is not published in Western outlets or presented in familiar forms, it is used without proper citations.

A few years ago, several scholars from Central Asia seem to have simultaneously noticed how, despite their multifaceted contributions to the field, they still found themselves marginalized in discussions within the field. Even when included in conversations, their views were deemed as nativist, nationalist, irrational or lacking scientific rigor. The Covid-19 pandemic, while devastating on many levels, allowed otherwise rarely intersecting poles of scholarship located in Central Asia, Europe, North America and Japan to connect online and share mutually held grievances on the neocolonial language of some Western scholarship, and, ultimately, inspire new joint initiatives. These online communities offered refuge and validation. The awareness of tokenism was repeatedly confirmed through the conferences of area studies, which became stages for the promotion of mostly Western scholarship.

Stepping into the next decade, we need to be more intentional about representing the entirety of our field. Scholars based in the region can focus on developing their own unique approaches without the need to meet Western formats of analysis, as well as to assert their right to ownership over produced knowledge when collaborating with international organizations. Scholars travelling to the region for fieldwork must strive to coproduce knowledge with their counterparts. Such interactions can include the exchange of data, analysis and paywalled publications. Local scholars cannot be used as sources for compilation of facts or raw data on the latest developments that can easily be found in reports by local media outlets. The same ethics applies to Central Asian scholars in the West who enjoy more privileges and often serve as the only voices representing non-Western perspectives in international forums. Yet, the diaspora scholarship is part of the conversation and is no substitute for discussions taking place on the ground or for scholars in direct contact with the fieldwork.

I am optimistic about the next decade of Central Asian scholarship. In the 30 years since the advent of independence, the field of Central Asian studies is more diverse, and new generations of scholars have emerged. Exciting innovations for understanding Central Asia will continue to flourish from the region as well as in collaboration with international partners. Some are likely to be reflected in the usual Western outlets, while others will invite the international scholarly community to gather knowledge from new and different venues, languages, visuals, and sounds. Ideas are floating among scholars who are waiting for the pandemic to end and will be explored in joint physical spaces. It is no longer a self-contained field, nor is it hostage to limited perspectives and familiar tropes. The coming decade is a turning point for the Central Asian studies – a time to host spirited debates and explore experimental approaches, new theories, and topics.

Acknowledgment

I'd like to thank Dr. Assel Tutumlu, Dr. Botakoz Kassymbekova, Dr. Diana Kudaibergenova, Dr. Gulzat Botoeva, Dr. Nodira Kholmatova, and Dr. Asel Dooletkeldieva for our rich discussions about the state of Central Asian studies that helped develop ideas presented in this essay. Responsibility for the content included in this essay is mine only. Views expressed in this essay do not represent positions or policies of the National Defense University, U.S. Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.