Book Launch – Central Peripheries: Nationhood in Central Asia

Book Launch Discussion

Central Peripheries: Nationhood in Central Asia

with Author Marlene Laruelle and discussants Diana Kudaibergenova, Sabina Insebayeva, and Berikbol Dukeyev.

Central Peripheries explores post-Soviet Central Asia through the prism of nation-building. It looks at how states in the region have been navigating the construction of a nation in a post-imperial context where Russia remains the dominant power and cultural reference. Exploring state discourses, academic narratives and different forms of popular nationalist storytelling, the book depicts the complex construction of the national pantheon in the three decades since independence. The second half of the book focuses on Kazakhstan as the most hybrid national construction and a unique case study of nationhood in Eurasia.

Speakers

Marlene Laruelle, Author

Marlene Laruelle, Ph.D., is Director, Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies; Director, Central Asia Program; Co-Director, PONARS-Eurasia; and Research Professor of International Affairs at George Washington University. She works on political, social and cultural changes in the post-Soviet space. Marlene’s research explores the transformations of nationalist and conservative ideologies in Russia, nationhood construction in Central Asia, as well as the development of Russia’s Arctic regions. She has been the Principal Investigator of several grants on Russian nationalism, on Russia’s strategies in the Arctic, and on Central Asia’s domestic and foreign policies from the US State Department, the Defense Department, the National Science Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Henry Luce Foundation, etc.

Diana T. Kudaibergenova, Panelist

Diana T. Kudaibergenova is a Lecturer at the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. Prior to that, she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the GRCF COMPASS project at the Centre of Development Studies (Department of Politics and International Studies) also at the University of Cambridge. She studies different intersections of power, regimes, state-building and nationalism.

Sabina Insebayeva, Panelist

Sabina Insebayeva is an assistant professor of Central Eurasian Studies at the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, the University of Tsukuba (Japan). She is concurrently a research associate at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore (NUS), where she also was a post-doctoral research fellow. Prior positions include research fellowships with the IERES at the George Washington University (GW) and Fudan University. In addition to these fellowships, her research has been supported by a number of non-governmental and governmental institutions in the United States, Japan, China, Singapore, Norway and Germany. Dr. Insebayeva studies issues related to identity politics, power relations and security, and is particularly interested in approaches rooted in social theory and historical sociology. She has published peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Europe-Asia Studies (Taylor&Francis), Nationalities Paper (Cambridge University Press), and International Journal of Refugee Law (Oxford University Press).

Berikbol Dukeyev, Panelist

Berikbol Dukeyev is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science and International Relations at the Center for Arab and Islamic Studies (the Middle East and Central Asia) at the Australian National University. Berikbol’s research explores the politics of memory, history production, and media studies in Central Asia. He was the Research Fellow at Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research in Germany in 2019 and Central Asia Program at George Washington University in 2015-2016. Berikbol has work experience in fields of political analysis and development at the governmental, private, and international organizations in Kazakhstan and Australia.