Download or read book The Dialectics of Post Soviet Modernity and the Changing Contours of Islamic Discourse in Azerbaijan written by Murad Ismayilov and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-09-15 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Azerbaijan’s independence came after seven decades of militant atheism of Soviet modernization project and emerged into staunch secularism of Western modernity, two factors that, on a par with the country’s precarious neighborhood, promised a sustained indigenous effort towards the desacralization of the country’s political space and the associated exclusion of religion from politics, a modern blueprint that the Azerbaijani state and its society have stood united to diligently follow over the cause of the country’s independent existence. Yet the specific dynamics facing the country in the third decade of independence and the changing contours of its international engagements have gradually been working to set the country free from the stifling grips of Western-style modernity and lay the groundwork for quintessentially and esoterically Azerbaijani pathway of statehood to follow, one combining the nation’s historical embeddedness in an Islamic milieu with its century-old practical experience of modern policy making. This book offers a detailed account of the dynamics behind the religious-secular divide in Azerbaijan over the past two decades of independence and the conditions underlying the ongoing process of normalization of Islamic discourse and the rising cooperation across the country’s secular-religious political landscape and looks into some future dynamics this transformation is set to unleash. It begins with an outline of hybrid intentionality behind the elite’s manifold attitudes to Islam, with particular focus on the strategy of separation between religion and politics in which those attitudes have found expression. It then proceeds to show the complicity of civil society and the broader populace, as well as the international community and the country’s Islamic stratum itself, in the reproduction of the narrative of Islamic danger and the resultant religious-secular divide in post-Soviet Azerbaijan. The study then continues with an account of a number of dialectical tensions inherent in policy outcomes to which the hybrid nature of elite intentionality has given rise. It then follows on to discuss key factors contributing to the ongoing normalization of Islam across the public realm and the gradual bridging of the religious-secular divide amidst the ongoing state repression. The volume concludes with a comparative insight into some common features and conditioning factors behind the dynamics underlying the religious-secular nexus in Azerbaijan and across the broader region of the Middle East. It also offers an insight into some future potentialities that the current dynamics have laid bare.

Download or read book Resilient Communities of Central Eurasia written by Elena Korosteleva and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-03-21 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues for the need to rethink governance through the lens of 'resilience as self-governance'. Building on complexity-thinking, it contends that in the context of change and complex life, challenges are most efficiently dealt with, at the source, 'locally', to make 'the global' more responsive and sustainable. Resilience as self-governance is advanced as an overriding framework to explore its constitutive elements - identity, ‘good life’, local coping strategies and support infrastructures - which, when mobilized, can turn communities into ‘peoplehood’ in the face of adversity. It is argued that these communities of relations, self-organised and self-aware of their worth, is what makes them so resilient to crises, and what helps them to transform with change; and how they should be governed today. Central Eurasia, spanning from Belarus in the west, to Azerbaijan in the south and Kyrgyzstan in the east, provides fertile grounds for exploring how resilience works in practice in times of complex change. By immersing into centuries-long traditions and philosophy, local experiences of survival, and visions for change, this book shows that governability at any level requires a substantive 'local' input to make 'the global' more enduring and resilient in a complex adaptive world. This book will be of great value to students and scholars in the fields of Politics including Eurasian politics and the various aspects of Governance. Most of the chapters in this book were published as a special issue of Cambridge Review of International Affairs.

Download or read book Modern Central Asia written by Yuriy Malikov and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-12-04 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern Central Asia: A Primary Source Reader is an academic resource that discusses the basic political, social, and economic evolution of Central Asian civilization in its colonial (1731–1991) and post-colonial (1991–present) periods. Among other aspects of Central Asian history, this source reader discusses resistance and accommodation of native societies to the policies of the imperial center, the transformation of Central Asian societies under Tsarist and Soviet rule, and the history of Islam in Central Asia and its role in nation and state-building processes. This primary source book will be instrumental for familiarizing students with the nationality policies of imperial Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet governments as well as the effects produced by these policies on the natives of the region. The documents collected in this reader challenge the traditional approach, which has viewed Central Asians as passive recipients of the policies imposed on them by central authorities. Modern Central Asia: A Primary Source Reader demonstrates the active participation of the indigenous peoples in contact with other peoples by examining the natives’ ways of organizing societies, their pre-colonial experience of contact with outsiders, and the structure of their subsistence systems. The source book will also help students situate the major events and activities of Central Asia in a global context. In addition to the value of this collection to the Central Asian historical record, many of the included texts will be essential for comparative analyses and cross-disciplinary approaches in the study of world history.

Download or read book The European Union s Influence in Central Asia written by Olga Alinda Spaiser and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2018-03-12 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unknown yet highly strategic, Central Asia attracts the interest of major global powers due to its vast energy resources and crucial geographic position. Russia, China, and the European Union view this region as an indispensable springboard to enhance their political and economic influence on the Eurasian landmass. Thus, facing strong competition and working on low budget, the EU is attempting to establish itself as a relevant and influential actor in an environment in which its leadership role is far from certain. Unlike in other post-communist regions, the EU is not able to rely on the attractiveness of its political models, and risks being marginalized by other global powers. The crucial question then is: How does the EU exert influence in such a challenging geopolitical context? Which strategies does the EU apply to be an actor who counts? Through an analysis of the EU’s discourse, instruments, and the reception of its policies in Central Asia, this study argues that the EU consciously takes the position of a second-tier actor who acts as a “consultant” and projects a picture of itself as an honest broker with no geopolitical agenda. The EU’s influence is confined to niche domains in the security sphere that are nevertheless important for the regional security. The EU is not a great power in the region nor is it willing to become one. It does, however, have comparative advantages in being perceived as inoffensive and for occupying areas that are neglected by the other actors, such as governance and water security.

Download or read book The Cinema of Soviet Kazakhstan 1925 1991 written by Peter Rollberg and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-02-12 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph traces the history of Kazakh filmmaking from its conception as a Soviet cultural construction project to its peak as fully-fledged national cinema to its eventual re-imagining as an art-house phenomenon. The author’s analysis places leading directors—Shaken Aimanov, Abdulla Karsakbaev, Sultan-Akhmet Khodzhikov, Mazhit Begalin—in their sociopolitical and cultural context.

Download or read book Central Asia in the Era of Sovereignty written by Daniel L. Burghart and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2018-03-16 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After twenty-five years of independence, there is little doubt that the five Central Asian states will persist as sovereign, independent states. They increasingly differ from each other, and are making their way in global politics. No longer connected only to Russia, they are now connected in important ways to Afghanistan, South Asia, China, Iran, and each other. This volume covers a wide range of issues and presents the work of emerging scholars authors well-known for their expertise in the region. The first part addresses social issues. Covering a wide range from HIV/AIDs to social media, the rebirth of Islam, outmigration, and problematic borders, this section follows two main currents: political development in the region and states’ responses to transboundary challenges. The second part, addressing economics and security, provides analyses of new infrastructure, informal economies (from bazaars to criminal networks), energy development, the role of enclaves in the Ferghana Valley, and the development of the states’ military structures. This section illuminates the interactions between economic developments and security, and the forces that could undermine both. The final part, comprised of five case studies, offers a “deeper dive” into a specific factor that matters in the development of each Central Asian state. These cases include Kazakhstan’s foreign policy identity, Kyrgyzstan’s domestic politics, Tajikistan’s pursuit of hydropower, foreign direct investment in Turkmenistan, and the perception of everyday corruption in Uzbekistan.

Download or read book State Building in Kazakhstan written by Dina Sharipova and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book challenges the conventional wisdom that informal institutions—networks, clientelism, and connections—have to disappear in modern societies due to liberalization of the economy, rapid urbanization, and industrialization. The case of Kazakhstan shows that informal reciprocal institutions continue to play an important role in people’s everyday lives. Liberalization of the economy and state retrenchment from the social sphere decreased the provision of public goods and social support to the population in the post-independence period. Limited access to state benefits has, in turn, stimulated people’s engagement in informal reciprocal relations. The author investigates informal channels and mechanisms people use to gain access to quality public goods—education, housing, and healthcare. Comparing the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, the author shows that people are more likely to rely on family networks and clientelist relations rather than on help from the state to obtain scarce resources. The book provides an important contribution to the literature on informal institutions and explains the relationship between a formal welfare state and informal reciprocity.

Download or read book Tajikistan on the Move written by Marlene Laruelle and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-05-25 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The southernmost and poorest state of the Eurasian space, Tajikistan collapsed immediately upon the fall of the Soviet Union and plunged into a bloody five-year civil war (1992–1997) that left more than 50,000 people dead and more than half a million displaced. After the 1997 Peace Agreements, Tajikistan stood out for being the only post-Soviet country to recognize an Islamic party—the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (IRPT)—as a key actor in the civil war as well as in postwar reconstruction and democratization. Tajikistan’s linguistic and cultural proximity to Iran notwithstanding, the balance of external powers over the country remains fairly typical of Central Asia, with Russia as the major security provider and China as its principal investor. Another specificity of Tajikistan is its massive labor migration flows toward Russia. Out of a population of eight million, about one million work abroad seasonally—one of the highest rates of departure in the world. Migration trends have impacted Tajikistan’s economy and rent mechanisms: half of the country’s GDP comes from migrant remittances, a higher share than anywhere else in the world. However, it is in the societal and cultural realms that migration has had the most transformative effect. Migrants’ cultural and societal identities are on the move, with a growing role given to Islam as a normative tool for regulating the cultural shock of migration. Islam, and especially a globalized fundamentalist pietist movement, regulates both physical and moral security in workplace and other settings, and brings migrants together to make their interactions meaningful and socio-politically relevant. It offers a new social prestige to those who work in an environment seen as threatening to their Islamic identity. The first section of this volume investigates the critical question of the nature of the Tajik political regime, its stability, legitimacy mechanisms, and patterns of centralization. In the volume’s second part, we move away from studying the state to delve into the societal fabric of Tajikistan, shaped by local rural specificities and social vulnerabilities in the health sector and gender relationships. The third section of the volume is devoted to identity narratives and changes. While the Tajik regime works hard to control the national narrative and the interpretation of the civil war, society is literally and figuratively on the move, as migration profoundly reshapes societal structures and cultural values.

Download or read book Visions of Development in Central Asia written by Noor O’Neill Borbieva and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2019-07-16 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Visions of Development in Central Asia: Revitalizing the Culture Concept, Noor O’Neill Borbieva reflects on anthropology’s withdrawal from discussions about culture and the parallel rise of the intellectually and politically problematic discourse of “culture matters thinking,” or CMT. CMT asserts that cultures are homogeneous and that the dominant values of its culture determine a state’s socioeconomic and political trajectories. Drawing on practice theory, ecological psychology, complexity science, and poststructuralism, Borbieva urges anthropologists to revisit debates about culture in order to counteract the influence of simplistic formulations such as CMT. Through an examination of ethnographic material from Kyrgyzstan, gathered during the years she worked as a Peace Corps Volunteer and as an anthropologist, Borbieva examines how debates about culture shaped the development sector’s agenda in Central Asia. She argues that mainstream discussions of culture not only misunderstand the cultural basis of human diversity but also threaten that diversity by promoting a one-size-fits-all vision of well-being. Borbieva suggests an alternative vision, one that recognizes the profound complexity of human sociality and embraces the many forms of human thriving that grow out of our cultural differences.

Download or read book The Nazarbayev Generation written by Marlene Laruelle and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-08-30 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This social and cultural analysis provides a new understanding of Kazakhstan’s younger generations that emerged during the rule of Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has been presiding over Kazakhstan for the thirty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Half of Kazakhstan’s population was born after he took power and have no direct memory of the Soviet regime. Since the early 2000s, they have lived in a world of political stability and relative material affluence, and have developed a strong consumerist culture. Even with growing government restrictions on media, religion, and formal public expression, they have been raised in a comparatively free country. This book offers the first collective study of the “Nazarbayev Generation,” illuminating the diversity of the country’s younger generations and the transformations of social and cultural norms that have taken place over the course of three decades. The contributors to this collection move away from state-centric, top-down perspectives in favor of grassroots realities and bottom-up dynamics in order to better integrate sociological data.

Download or read book Mapping the Media and Communication Landscape of Central Asia written by Elira Turdubaeva and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-02-16 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Central Asian post-independence media and communication industries, professional practices, education, persisting and evolving values, and traditions remain critically understudied with a notable scarcity of research and scholarly publications on the complex and increasingly changing communicative ecology landscape of this region. Mapping the Media and Communication Landscape of Central Asia: An Anthology of Emerging and Contemporary Issues addresses this gap in literature by exploring, analyzing, and shedding light to the field, practice, research and critical inquiry of media and mass communication in four countries in Central Asia—Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. This book includes local authors as well as new and emerging researchers from this region to contextualize the issues explored and provide a supportive dialogue between different points of view.

Download or read book The History of the Tajik Civil War 1992 1997 written by Parviz Mullojonov and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-12-16 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The History of the Tajik Civil War, 1992–1997 presents a historical and analytical survey of the Tajik civil war—one of the bloodiest and most violent conflicts that took place in the post-Soviet space after the collapse of the USSR. The conflict continued for five years as a political and military confrontation between pro-government, pro-Communist forces, and United Tajik Opposition (an alliance between Tajik democrats and Islamists). This book is an analytical reconstruction of the course of political, economic, and military events covering the entire period of the civil war starting from Perestroika to the beginning of 2000s. It explores a set of conceptual aspects such as conflict generating factors, causes, conflict dynamics, peacebuilding, and conflict transformation.

Download or read book Militant Islam written by Stephen Vertigans and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-10-30 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Militant Islam provides a sociological framework for understanding the rise and character of recent Islamic militancy. It takes a systematic approach to the phenomenon and includes analysis of cases from around the world, comparisons with militancy in other religions, and their causes and consequences. The sociological concepts and theories examined in the book include those associated with social closure, social movements, nationalism, risk, fear and ‘de-civilising’. These are applied within three main themes; characteristics of militant Islam, multi-layered causes and the consequences of militancy, in particular Western reactions within the ‘war on terror’. Interrelationships between religious and secular behaviour, ‘terrorism’ and ‘counter-terrorism’, popular support and opposition are explored. Through the examination of examples from across Muslim societies and communities, the analysis challenges the popular tendency to concentrate upon ‘al-Qa’ida’ and the Middle East. This book will be of interest to students of Sociology, Political Science and International Relations, in particular those taking courses on Islam, religion, terrorism, political violence and related regional studies.

Download or read book The Cambridge History of Communism written by Norman Naimark and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-21 with total page 700 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second volume of The Cambridge History of Communism explores the rise of Communist states and movements after World War II. Leading experts analyze archival sources from formerly Communist states to re-examine the limits to Moscow's control of its satellites; the de-Stalinization of 1956; Communist reform movements; the rise and fall of the Sino-Soviet alliance; the growth of Communism in Asia, Africa and Latin America; and the effects of the Sino-Soviet split on world Communism. Chapters explore the cultures of Communism in the United States, Western Europe and China, and the conflicts engendered by nationalism and the continued need for support from Moscow. With the danger of a new Cold War developing between former and current Communist states and the West, this account of the roots, development and dissolution of the socialist bloc is essential reading.

Download or read book Russia in Flames written by Laura Engelstein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 866 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Laura Engelstein, one of the greatest scholars of Russian history, has written a searing and defining account of the Russian Revolution, the fall of the old order, and the creation of the Soviet state.

Download or read book Values in Islamic Culture and the Experience of History written by N. S. Kirabaev and published by CRVP. This book was released on 2002 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book An Introduction to Islamic Law written by Wael B. Hallaq and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-09 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of Islamic law can be a forbidding prospect for those entering the field for the first time. Wael Hallaq, a leading scholar and practitioner of Islamic law, guides students through the intricacies of the subject in this absorbing introduction. The first half of the book is devoted to a discussion of Islamic law in its pre-modern natural habitat. The second part explains how the law was transformed and ultimately dismantled during the colonial period. In the final chapters, the author charts recent developments and the struggles of the Islamists to negotiate changes which have seen the law emerge as a primarily textual entity focused on fixed punishments and ritual requirements. The book, which includes a chronology, a glossary of key terms, and lists of further reading, will be the first stop for those who wish to understand the fundamentals of Islamic law, its practices and history.