Voices on Central Asia

What changes took place in Uzbekistan when the country attained independence from the Soviet Union, and why did they result in mass job insecurity for the population? Author Franco Galdini…

As the war in Ukraine continues and Russia remains under heavy international sanctions, its political allies, economic partners, and geographic as well as cultural neighbors in Central Asia are being…

The traditional clothes of Central Asian peoples, made from abr silk and semi-silk fabrics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—chapans and munisaks, burqas and kuylaks, skullcaps and kultapushaks—became the…

An ethnically diverse region that abuts the Caspian Sea in southwestern Russia, Astrakhan Oblast is home to the country’s largest Kazakh community. Almost 150,000 people, or 18 percent of the…

The nomadic people of Eurasia left behind rich treasures that rival those of sophisticated settled societies. Many of these precious items, which can be seen today in museums around the…

Usto Mumin, or Aleksandr Vasilievich Nikolaev (August 30, 1897 – June 27, 1957), was an artist who lived and worked in the Uzbek SSR. Nikolaev arrived in Tashkent after demobilization…

Central Asia is known for its long tradition of exquisite textile production. To this day, scarves or chapans woven using the ikat technique remain sought-after items for fashionistas around the…

Ira Mukhoty is an Indian writer who writes about forgotten heroines of Indian history. Two of her books—Heroines: Powerful Indian Women of Myth and History and Daughters of the Sun:…

The most famous woman with a camera in Central Asia, Umida Akhmedova—a photographer and the author of significant documentary works—talks about herself, her creative and personal path, self-realization in the…

In Persia and the greater Central Asian region, two religions once fought for dominance. In the end, Zoroastrianism—which still enjoys adherents to this day—was forced to give way to the…

The commodity supercycle of the 2000s and 2010s gave rise to a rich debate in the academic literature about the potential for resource-rich countries to take advantage of the primary…

In his recent book, Hidden Caliphate: Sufi Saints beyond the Oxus and Indus, Waleed Ziad examines the development of Muslim Sufi networks across Asia from the eighteenth to the twentieth…

In his work—on Central Asia and recently on Ukraine—Jesse Driscoll focuses on war and post-war. The conflicts of the 1990s in Georgia and Tajikistan and the conflict in Donbas that…

Barzu Abdurazzakov (1959) is a famous Tajik playwright and theater director. Made an Honored Artist of the Republic of Tajikistan in 2001, he has since 2009 lost favor with the…

Last month, an exciting photographic exhibition on Central Asia, entitled “Bound for Life and Education”: Sara Eshonturaeva and the Jadid Movement in Soviet Uzbekistan, was shown at Asia House in…

Ayşe Zarakol’s book Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders challenges our understanding of the history of international relations and makes sense of the apparently chaotic…

Music occupies an enormous place in Central Asia, and in particular in Afghanistan. Dr. Razia Sultanova, a musicologist and cultural anthropologist, has studied the music of the Uzbeks and other…

Two seas—the Aral Sea, now almost non-existent, and the Caspian Sea—encircle the great Turan plain, where constant migrations and ethnogenetic contacts between nomadic and sedentary peoples have taken place over…

Edda Schlager, a journalist, photographer, and “natural feminist,” has spent the last 17 years researching and capturing key moments in Central Asia’s modern history: the demolition of old buildings and…

In her book entitled Modernization of the Early Soviet Era in the Fate of Women of Kazakhstan, 1920–1930: Monograph (Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, 2017), Janat Kundakbayeva, Doctor of Historical Sciences…

Tatiana Krupa, a Ukrainian archaeologist, historian, and restorer, has extensive experience studying fragments of fabrics that date back to the Golden Horde era. She has done work on fabrics that…

The artist, philosopher, and writer Vyacheslav Akhunov stands out in the Central Asian art landscape. He created his own art movement – Sotsmodernism – based on the rejection of Soviet art…