Central Asia

How Twitter’s New Policy Rewards Elite Activism

by Sarah Kendzior

On Thursday, Twitter announced that it would begin to selectively block tweets on a country by country basis. The decision prompted an immediate outcry from free speech advocates as well as a more measured response from scholars of social media, several of whom praised Twitter’s relative transparency while noting that it has no choice but [...]

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The Reverse Orientalism of the Arab Spring

by Sarah Kendzior

In 1978, Edward Said defined orientalism as “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” The Muslim world, he argued, is rarely seen as significant and complex in its own right, but derives its significance from its relationship with the West: a comparative framework that guarantees a delusory bias. The Orient [...]

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The “Wild West” of Kazakhstan: a Crisis of Aspirations and Expectations

by Alima Bissenova

The outbreak of violence in Zhanaozen, a small oil town in Western Kazakhstan, has caused people to sit up and notice that Kazakhstan, despite its carefully cultivated reputation as a stable modernizing state, is not immune to social upheaval (if it has ever been) and that some internal discontent is brewing within the country. However, [...]

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Central Asia’s Lesson for the Middle East

by Nathan Hamm

Apparently, it’s kind of like soylent green; it’s people. Specifically, it’s about where those people are. At least, that’s according to this article at FrontPage in which the authors use Central Asia to argue that a one-state solution for Israel and Palestine is simply impossible. Just as the new calendar year was about to begin, [...]

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A Chinese Strategy for Central Asia?

by Joshua Foust
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I’ve been trading arguments with Alexandros Petersen and Raffaello Pantucci the last few months about whether or not China is really gaining influence in Central Asia (see some of that here and here). I still haven’t seen much evidence that China has been terribly active or even successful in building a network of influence in [...]

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Central Asia: An Exception to the “Cute Cats” Theory of Internet Revolution

by Sarah Kendzior

Last month Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at the Berkman Center of Internet and Society, gave a lecture on how his “cute cats” theory of the internet applies to the Arab Spring. For those of you unfamiliar with the theory, Cory Doctorow sums it up in an rapturous review of the talk in the Guardian: [...]

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Book Review: A Small Key Opens Big Doors

by Michael Hancock-Parmer
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Chen, Jay, ed. A Small Key Opens Big Doors. 50 Years of Amazing Peace Corps Stories, Volume Three: The Heart of Eurasia. Travelers Tales: Palo Alto, 2011.336 pages, includes Foreword, Preface, Introduction, Acknowledgments. Disclosure: Jay Chen is a friend and fellow Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (RPCV). We served in the same group in Kazakhstan starting in [...]

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“No Great Game: The Story of Post-Cold War Powers in Central Asia”

by Joshua Foust

My contribution to the American Security Project/ Atlantic 20-year retrospective on U.S. foreign policy in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union is up, and it focuses on — what else? — Central Asia. An excerpt: The terror attacks of September 11 and subsequent invasion of Afghanistan seemed at first to cement the [...]

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Charting the Fall of the Soviet Union

by Joshua Foust

My think tank, the American Security Project, has teamed up with The Atlantic to run a 12-article series I edited about U.S. foreign policy 20 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, which happens on Christmas. There have been some really interesting essays in there that aren’t directly relevant to what we write about [...]

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A Clumsy Propaganda

by Joshua Foust

Eurasianet editor David Trilling has a probing look in Foreign Policy at a really clumsy propaganda outlet focused on Central Asia: Take a March story praising Tashkent’s effort to register religious groups. The story does not mention reputable organizations’ allegations about arbitrary arrests of Christians and Muslims from unregistered groups, but cites state-affiliated clergy lauding [...]

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