The Smolensk archive, one of the most famous collections for the study of Stalinism and Soviet provincial government, and which supported pioneering research from the 1950s can now be found online
Join us tomorrow for a webinar on #CentralAsia-#China relations, hosted by @caspiancenter.bsky.social er.bsky.social. Register here to tune in on Tuesday 10 March, 1000 UK time, 1500 in #Kazakhstan #Uzbekistan
www.caspianpolicy.org/events/detai...
Super excited to have this out! Please listen and share! :) With @juanitamarieelias.bsky.social @mybisa.bsky.social!
What a great topic.
The book is out! www.hup.harvard.edu/books/978067...
A PhD opportunity at Malmö University, 'with a focus on administrative law reform and authoritarian legitimation in Central Asia'. Deadline 31st Jan. If anyone's interested I can put you in touch with people at Malmö.
web103.reachmee.com/ext/I005/101...
Indeed!
Much has been said about the colonial roots of anthropology. Area studies have been criticized for being an arm of US soft power. Western academia and soft power structures provided employment for those with niche interests in other places. But what happens now that it’s all crumbling?
Honest question, not at all snarky: why don't journal editors ever send brief notes of thanks to peer reviewers? I always submit prompt and (I'd like to think) fair, thorough peer reviews, and a two-sentence email of thanks would really hit the spot sometimes.
'Eurasian exchanges: Central Asian nomadic pastoralists, mountain ecosystems, and market economies in the early twentieth century', by Jennifer Keating UCD [open access]
www.cambridge.org/core/service...
Congratulations to Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, winner of the Barbara Jelavich Book Prize for Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State with Stanford University Press.
#ASEEESPrizes
See all winners: buff.ly/rh9Tt7b
Since this wound up being a popular thread, sharing an excellent backgrounder on the elections in Kyrgyzstan from @aijanco.bsky.social in The Diplomat: thediplomat.com/2025/11/is-p...
Incredible resource for Central Asianists, just as you'd expect from Sergei Abashin: abashin.org
Returning to teaching materials that I devised years ago provides a vivid sense of how far we've moved. The agonising efforts I made to force students to really think about the minutiae of bias, subjectivity, (in)accuracy, in source material; it all seems so quaint in the era of Google's AI summary.
Instead of building on Bishkek’s advantages (it was such a lush and green city, trolleybuses, new bike lanes). The authorities are going tabula rasa with the promise of a bombastic leap into the future, an attempt to imitate Almaty, Tashkent and the Gulf states all at once
Bishkek (Frunze) was in a tough spot following the Civil War, and local authorities were loath to let herders compromise its fragile urban envionment. They did, though, and not as a sop to the ideology of national emancipation, but for reasons of economic and political pragmatism 2/2
My new article has just been made available online, open access, with Urban History. It looks at how Kyrgyz pastoralists, returning to the Chui Valley after the violence of 1916, were received in their new capital city in the early Soviet period 1/2
doi.org/10.1017/S096...
100%. Management do this also and its effect is to bring you into complicity with the idea that we are all just trading equally valid 'narratives', when in fact some of us are speaking more truthfully than others.
Earlier this year I was looking at documents about the clearing of land for the construction of the airport and its connecting road. And a little warning about the dangers of digital automation: the code change has played havoc with some flight bookings I've been making.
Manas Airport in Bishkek finally changes its IATA code from FRU (to BSZ). FRU was a legacy of the Soviet era when Bishkek was named after Mikhail Frunze, a Bolshevik revolutionary born in the city.
24.kg/english/3391...
The BASEES Eurasian Regions Study Group have put together a roundtable at #ICCEES on publishing in academic journals for postgraduates and early career researchers. Come along to meet friendly editors and ask questions! You can submit questions anonymously here too: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
Heading to #ICCEES2025 next week? We have put together a list of sessions that may be of interest to Peripheral Histories? readers here: www.peripheralhistories.co.uk/post/iccees-...
My forthcoming article on the Thaw in Tatarstan is now available online through The Russian Review. Thanks to colleagues and friends who helped make it possible!
It's easy to roll your eyes at much of the research governance jargon, but 'original contribution to knowledge' does neatly encapsulate some of what we do that ChatGPT absolutely does not do.
Delighted to contribute to this book of essays by authors around the world examining 35 of the world's pressing problems - for me it was "Is Democracy Under Threat?" Thanks to Dosym Satpayev for being the inspiration for the book. Now in bookshops in Kazakhstan + on Kaspi - buy it!
Today's Central Asian Photo of the Day:
📷 The statue of Lenin in Osh, a city in southern Kyrgyzstan. Once the biggest Lenin in Central Asia, Kyrgyz authorities took it down this week.
lifeincentralasia.picfair.com/images/02163...
Oh wait I was on at 9 😅
Basically I said the statue story is about the local politics of Osh, and the big question (which I don't think I've seen answered yet?) is less why Lenin came down, but who replaces him on that plinth...
Basically I said the statue story is about the local politics of Osh, and the big question (which I don't think I've seen answered yet?) is less why Lenin came down, but who replaces him on that plinth...
