Central Asian Affairs Journal: Call for Special Issue Proposals, 2023

– Contentious Politics in Central Asia

In the aftermath of the bloody January 2022 mass protests in Kazakhstan, the 2020 Kyrgyz protests, and other notable events, we collectively question: What is the state of Central Asia’s contentious politics? What can we offer conceptually and empirically to the broader field of contentious politics, mobilizations, social movements, and/or revolutions? We invite wide-ranging topics from all scholars working on contentious issues in Central Asia (single cases or comparative studies, historical and contemporary research) to theorize and conceptualize controversies in Central Asia and their contribution to the wider literature. 

– Decolonizing the Post-Soviet

The Central Asian Affairs Journal is delighted to host a number of crucial interventions on decolonial debates in the Central Asian region with some of the excellent forthcoming work. We want to expand our dialog and expertise in addressing decolonial thought and decolonial dialogs further in the field and open the call for special issues, special sections, and articles that would provide original and critical engagement in this field. We particularly invite scholars working with “epistemic ethnographies” in Central Asian studies. Together we strive to expand and build more dialogs on decolonizing the “Post-Soviet” (widely defined) and decolonizing Central Asia. 

– Extractive Economies in Central Asia 

We invite a wide range of topics and discussions: methodological, historical, political, geopolitical, cultural, socio-cultural, socio-economic, neoliberal, critical theory with a particular focus on gender, ethnicity, class, or any other important category that innovatively engages and expands current debates on the state of extractive economies in Central Asia.

– Russian-Central Asian Relations 

In the light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its impact on the whole post-Soviet region, we invite scholars and special issues that focus on any aspect of the aftermath of February 24, 2022, and any period from the 2014 Crimean annexation onward. We invite a wide range of scholars in international relations, politics, economics, war studies, history, migration, culture, nationalism, gender and interdisciplinary studies to propose their critical scholarly engagement on this issue. Proposed projects can be comparative, historical, methodological, decolonial and innovative. 

We invite proposals for special issues and special sections in a wide range and innovative approach to these key themes. Please send a short proposal that includes rationale, description of key interventions, and a list of abstracts with the participating authors’ and editors’ details by June 30, 2022 to infocap@gwu.edu. If you have any questions, please feel free to email the Editorial Board at infocap@gwu.edu. You can check a list of previous special issues at Central Asian Affairs Journal.