As the birthplace of the Naqshbandiyya, Yasaviyya, and Kubrawiyya, Central Asia has received a significant amount of scholarly attention in the field of Sufi Studies, though the study of the nineteenth century is relatively underdeveloped. While scholars have done much to demons…
"82" Result
Sort By:
This dissertation examines supra-ethnic nation-building in Kazakhstan, particularly focusing on policy outcomes since the republic became independent from the Soviet Union in 1991. The population of Kazakhstan is distinctive among countries of the post-Soviet space in terms of i…
The collapse of the Soviet Union left countries of Central Asia to experience political confrontations over territory and water rights. Additionally, independence of Central Asian countries resulted in the change of control systems, including transboundary rivers of the region. …
Globalization has added to the growth of labor migration as a source of income for wives and families left behind in developing countries. The impact on wives left behind by working husbands requires further investigation in order to produce the best practices to combat the soci…
This dissertation examines the political, economic and social stresses of incorporating the newly established Ferghana Valley (1876) into the Russian Empire including the tensions engendered between the Russian and Central Asian populations and state and local authorities. Econo…
The populations of Russia, Central Asia, and China have unique demographic features that pose special theoretical and applied problems. The essays in this dissertation explore different associated phenomena directly and indirectly related to central planning, including famine, u…
Drawing on sixteen months of fieldwork in the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site region in Kazakhstan, this ethnography is an account of the local understandings of health, livelihood, and suffering among rural Kazakh communities. Using the 1949-1989 Soviet atomic testing program a…
This dissertation examines botanical resources as components of Central Asian economies in the Bronze (ca. 2500 - 800 B.C.) and Iron Ages (ca. 800 B.C. - A.D. 500) using a paleoethnobotanical data set from four archaeological sites, Begash, Mukri, Tasbas, and Tuzusai. These site…
Central Asia has been a hotspot of terrorist activities and the drug trade for at least a decade. There are reasons for the prolonged unrest in this region. First, Afghanistan, as the lair for Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, is a seedbed of a terrorist threat, whilst also the world's …
I divide political opportunity as a theme into two distinct parts that are both important factors and that influence ethnic mobilization in different ways. The first of these factors is opportunity in the sense of political space, or the idea that elites who would instrumentaliz…
The Central Asian country of Tajikistan is the poorest of the former Soviet republics; it is also prone to a plethora of natural hazards including mass wasting, flood, and extreme temperature. This thesis seeks to characterize how vulnerable rural Tajik mountain communities are …
The countries of post-Soviet Central Asia share remarkable similarities: they came into existence at the same time, have since undergone similar processes and challenges in establishing statehood, are culturally related to each other, share similar historical paths, and have nea…
Following Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms, nationalist movements arose in some—but not all—of the non-Russian republics in the Soviet Union. In the southern tier republics of Transcaucasia and Central Asia there was a regional discrepancy in the presence or absence of nationalist mo…
This dissertation examines the character and consequences of the encounter between Soviet colonial authorities and southern Central Asian society during the period 1927–1941, one expressed fundamentally through the language of gender relations and family life. I focus on Uzbekis…
Central Asian crucible steel has been neglected in the scholarly literature in favour of Indian/Sri Lankan crucible steel (commonly called wootz). This is primarily because during the last few centuries Europeans frequently traded by sea, rather than via the overland route throu…
My dissertation comparatively analyzes three puzzling cases of political transition—democratization in Kyrgyzstan, neo-authoritarianism in Uzbekistan, and regime disintegration in Tajikistan—which typify different trajectories in the post-Soviet and other post-colonial states. I…
The nineteenth century rivalry between the Russian Empire and Great Britain over Central Asia, known as the "great game," was triggered by the quest for power and dominance. This study revisits Sir Halford Mackinder's thesis, which viewed the "heartland," consisting of Russia an…
The motivation for this research comes from the belief that an over reliance on a social constructivist perspective has caused development studies in general, and post-development in particular, to under-theorize the role of discourse in development. A key issue in post-developm…
This dissertation explores the complex relationship that people have with shrines in southern Kyrgyzstan from the 1950s to the present. In particular, I look at how people, especially women, identify themselves as Muslims and how their religious beliefs and practices associated …