New Books in Central Asian Studies
152 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★★ - 16 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Central Asia about their New Books
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Episodes
Legal Cultures in the Russian Empire
March 13, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourLaw. How does the state form and use it? How do people use and shape it? How does law shape culture? How does the practice of law change over time in a modernizing colony? What was stable and what was malleable in the application of law in early modern Russia versus its Central Asian colony in the Empire’s final century? What’s the difference between a bribe and a gift? These are some of the questions at the heart of this fascinating conversation about two books that probe the theoretical and...
Eren Tasar, “Soviet and Muslim: The Institutionalization of Islam in Central Asia” (Oxford UP, 2017)
December 30, 2023 09:00 - 57 minutesHow was the Soviet Union able to avoid issues of religious and national conflict with its large and diverse Islamic population? In his new book, Soviet and Muslim: The Institutionalization of Islam in Central Asia (Oxford University Press, 2017), Eren Tasar argues that the Soviet Union was successful in building its relationship with Muslims in Central Asia because it created a space for Islam within the state’s ideology. Exploring sources from Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, Tasar gi...
Sasha Goldstein-Sabbah et al., "Life & Legacy: A Window into Jewish Life Across the Islamic World" (U Groningen Press, 2023)
December 08, 2023 09:00 - 50 minutesThrough stunning images, maps and insightful commentary, Life & Legacy: A Window into Jewish Life Across the Islamic World (U Groningen Press, 2023) offers a glimpse into the diversity, historical legacy, and rich culture of Jewish communities within the Muslim world. From the growing Jewish community of Dubai to ancient synagogues and shrines, these photographs capture the beauty and complexity of Jewish life around North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. Above all, this photographi...
Empires of the Steppes: A History of the Nomadic Tribes Who Shaped Civilisation
December 02, 2023 09:00 - 58 minutesThe “barbarian” nomads of the Eurasian steppes have played a decisive role in world history, but their achievements have gone largely unnoticed. These nomadic tribes have produced some of the world’s greatest conquerors: Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, among others. Their deeds still resonate today. Indeed, these nomads built long-lasting empires, facilitated the first global trade of the Silk Road and disseminated religions, technology, knowledge and goods of every description th...
Valerie Kivelson et al., "Picturing Russian Empire" (Oxford UP, 2023)
November 07, 2023 09:00 - 57 minutesPicturing Russian Empire (Oxford UP, 2023) appears as Russia’s imperialist war of aggression against Ukraine grinds on. The stakes could not be higher. It follows that grappling with Russia’s imperial history is inescapable. After all, “[s]elective, exaggerated or patently false reimaginings” of the past “have been central to Russia’s justification of its claims on its neighbor to the southwest,” write today’s guests in the introduction to his new edited volume. Picturing Russian Empire offer...
Christopher P. Atwood, "The Rise of the Mongols: Five Chinese Sources" (Hackett, 2021)
October 08, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn this interview we deep dive into the historiographical issues of the texts in The Rise of the Mongols: Five Chinese Sources (Hackett, 2021), edited and translated by Christopher P. Atwood, with Lynn Struve. For a complementary, more general interview of the book dealing with the period under discussion listeners can also check out the July 2023 interview with Professor Atwood over at the Chinese Literature Podcast. Rise of the Mongols offers readers a selection of five important works tha...
Isaac McKean Scarborough, "Moscow's Heavy Shadow: The Violent Collapse of the USSR" (Cornell UP, 2023)
October 01, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourMoscow's Heavy Shadow: The Violent Collapse of the USSR (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Dr. Isaac Mckean Scarborough tells the story of the collapse of the USSR from the perspective of the many millions of Soviet citizens who experienced it as a period of abjection and violence. Mikhail Gorbachev and the leaders of the USSR saw the years of reform preceding the collapse as opportunities for rebuilding (perestroika), rejuvenation, and openness (glasnost). For those in provincial cities acr...
The Secret History of the Mongols
September 24, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe Secret History of the Mongols is one of the literary wonders of the world. Writing in the thirteenth century, the Secret Historian - whose identity remains unknown - combines insider history and verse to chronicle the life of Chingghis Khan and the empire he founded. In an evocative new translation, Chris Atwood brings to life for contemporary readers the world of the Mongol steppe, the Mongol conquests, and life within the tent cities of the Mongol empire. In this episode, Prof. Atwood j...
Antony Kalashnikov, "Monuments for Posterity: Self-Commemoration and the Stalinist Culture of Time" (Cornell UP, 2023)
September 23, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesAntony Kalashnikov's Monuments for Posterity: Self-Commemoration and the Stalinist Culture of Time (Cornell UP, 2023) analyzes Stalinist monument-building. From the 1930's through the Great Patriotic War, architectural monuments such as subway stations were designed to emphasize the perpetual endurance of the nation, regardless of the many crises of the period. The contemporary popularity of Stalinist-era architectural forms has endured. Why this should be so is a question worth pondering, an...
A Better Way to Buy Books
September 12, 2023 08:00 - 34 minutesBookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communiti...
Adeeb Khalid, "Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present" (Princeton UP, 2021)
August 16, 2023 13:19 - 1 hourIn Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present (Princeton University Press, 2021), Adeeb Khalid presents a comprehensive narrative of modern Central Asian history based on original research and an exhaustive synthesis of recent scholarship. Khalid explores how the modern forces of empire, revolution, and communism (and its collapse) have shaped both the "Russian" and "Chinese" parts of Central Asia from the 18th century to the present. Countering portrayals of Cent...
Yiannis Kokosalakis, "Building Socialism: The Communist Party and the Making of the Soviet System, 1921–1941" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
August 06, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourBy placing the party grassroots at the centre of its focus, Yiannis Kokosalakis' book Building Socialism: The Communist Party and the Making of the Soviet System, 1921–1941 (Cambridge UP, 2023) presents an original account of the formative first two decades of the Soviet system. Assembled in a large network of primary party organisations (PPO), the Bolshevik rank-and-file was an army of activists made up of ordinary people. While far removed from the levers of power, they were nevertheless ch...
Archaeology and Nomadism in the Russian Empire: An interview with Ismael Biyashev
July 29, 2023 08:00 - 56 minutesIn the second half of the 19th century, both professional and amateur archaeologists, surveyors, and explorers of the “periphery” of the Russian Empire became increasingly interested in the perceived ancient nomadic histories of Siberia, Central Asia, and Ukraine. Their excavations of “nomadic sites” associated with the Scythians or the Mongol Empire were aimed not just at scientific investigation and scholarly inquiry, but were also born out of and contributed to discourses around modernity,...
Mongol Nomadism, Mongol Identity, and the Fall of the Mongol Empire
June 25, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesIn part two of our conversation about his book The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East (Basic Books, 2022), Nicholas Morton, Associate Professor of History at Nottingham Trent University, joins me to share more about his research into Mongol imperial expansion and the Mongol conquests of the Near East. In this episode, we talk about practices of Mongol nomadism and mobility; how Mongol identity can be defined and understood; and where and when the Mongol empire...
Sofia Samatar, "The White Mosque: A Memoir" (Catapult, 2022)
June 22, 2023 08:00 - 34 minutesIn the late 19th century, a group of Mennonites leave Russia for what is now Uzbekistan. Driven out by Russian demands that the pacifist group make themselves available for conscription, and pushed forward by prophecies of the imminent return of Christ, over a hundred families travel in a grueling journey, eventually building a settlement and church that locals still remember fondly today. Over a century later, the author Sofia Samatar comes across this story when exploring her own Mennonite ...
Alexander Jabbari, "The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
April 16, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourAlexander Jabbari’s The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India (Cambridge University Press, 2023) narrates the cultural and literary history of one of the world's most significant yet understudied lingua francas. From the ninth to the nineteenth centuries, Persian was the pre-eminent language of learning far beyond Iran, stretching from the Balkans to China. In this book, Alexander Jabbari explores what became of this vast Persian literary heritag...
Alfrid Bustanov and Vener Usmanov, "Muslim Subjectivity in Soviet Russia" (Brill, 2022)
April 10, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe world as seen by a Qur’an specialist in late imperial and early Soviet Russia. Alfrid Bustanov and Vener Usmanov's book Muslim Subjectivity in Soviet Russia (Brill, 2022) tells a dramatic story of ’Abd al-Majid al-Qadiri, a Muslim individual born in the Kazakh lands and brought up in the Sufi environment of the South Urals, who memorized the entire Qur’an at the Mosque of the Prophet. In Russia he travelled widely, performing the Qur'an recitations. The Stalinist terror was merciless to ...
Jonan Pilet, "Nomad, Nomad" (Bound to Brew, 2021)
April 03, 2023 08:00 - 42 minutesIn his debut short story collection, Nomad, Nomad (Bound to Brew, 2021), Jonan Pilet explores the lives of Mongols and expats looking for a sense of home within the nomadic culture. Based on Jonan’s insights having grown up in Mongolia, the series of interlinked narratives capture the cultural turmoil Mongolia experienced after the fall of the Soviet Union, painting a vivid picture of Mongol landscapes, Western interactions, and the rise in cultural tensions. Maggie Freeman is a PhD student i...
The Transformation of Livestock Herding in Socialist Mongolia
March 31, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourBetween 1956 and 1960, leaders in the Mongolian People’s Republic embarked on a collectivization campaign to change the way in which Mongolians interacted with animals and the environment. Collectivization in Mongolia, which followed the Soviet model, confiscated private livestock to create collectively-owned and -worked livestock herds, and was seen as one of the building blocks of a modern socialist state. In a society where nomadic herders represented a large segment of the population, how...
Nomadic Pastoralism Among the Mongol Herders
March 14, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutesNomadic Pastoralism among the Mongol Herders: Multispecies and Spatial Ethnography in Mongolia and Transbaikalia (Amsterdam University Press, 2021) is based on anthropological research Charlotte Marchina carried out between 2008 and 2016 to investigate the spatial features of nomadic pastoralism among the Mongol herders of Mongolia and Southern Siberia. In addition to classical survey methods, Charlotte used GPS tracking to analyze the ways in which pastoralists envision and concretely occupy...
Xin Wen, "The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road" (Princeton UP, 2023)
March 09, 2023 09:00 - 47 minutesMany of us–who maybe aren’t historians–have an image of the Silk Road: merchants who carried silk from China to as far as ancient Rome, in one of the first global trading networks. Historians have since challenged the idea that there really was such an organized network, instead seeing it as a nineteenth-century metaphor that obscures as much as it explains. But Xin Wen, the author of The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road (Princeton University Press, 2023), tries to rev...
The Future of the Silk Road: A Discussion with Tim Winters
March 07, 2023 09:00 - 38 minutesThe term "Silk Road" evokes images of trade and exotic luxurious goods and Orientalist images. Today, however, it also is associated with the projection of Chinese power abroad. And as that pairing suggests, the term "Silk Road" in fact has many meanings as Professor Tim Winter has been explaining in his book The Silk Road: Connecting Histories and Futures (Oxford University Press, 2022). Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett-Jones. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and w...
Jangar: The Heroic Epic of the Kalmyk Nomads
February 13, 2023 09:00 - 33 minutesSaga Bougdaeva is the translator of the first English version of Jangar (University of California Press, 2023), the heroic epic of the Kalmyk nomads. The Kalmyks are the Western Mongols of Genghis Khan’s medieval empire in Europe. Today, Kalmykia is situated in the territory that was once the Golden Horde, founded by Genghis Khan son’s Juchi. Although their famed khanates and cities have long since disappeared under the sands of the Great Eurasian Steppe, the Kalmyks have witnessed, memorized...
Star Wars: Andor’s Aldhani and its Real-World Parallels
February 10, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn this episode, Dr. Kenny Linden, an environmental and animal historian of Mongolia and Inner Asia, joins me to discuss the Disney+ Star Wars prequel series Andor and its real-world parallels to pastoralism and the treatment of pastoralists in Central and East Asia by state authorities. We talk about nomadism in the Star Wars universe, depictions of nomads in pop culture, and the planet Aldhani in Andor as a reflection of modern histories of pastoralism and nomad-state relations in Central a...
Gillian Tan, "Pastures of Change: Contemporary Adaptations and Transformations among Nomadic Pastoralists of Eastern Tibet" (Springer, 2018)
January 24, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourTibetan nomads have developed a way of life that is dependent in multiple ways on their animals and shaped by the phenomenological experience of mobility. These pastoralists have adapted to many changes in their social, political and environmental contexts over time. From the earliest historically recorded systems of segmentary lineage to the incorporation first into local fiefdoms and then into the Chinese state (of both Nationalist and Communist governments), Tibetan pastoralists have maint...
Jeff Fearnside, "Ships in the Desert" (Santa Fe Writer's Project, 2022)
January 19, 2023 09:00 - 40 minutesMany of us have likely seen photos of the Aral Sea, and the rusted Soviet-era ships, sitting in the desert with no water in sight. The Aral Sea is now just 10% of its former volume, shrinking down from what was once the fourth-largest body of inland water in the world, after what writer Jeff Fernside calls “one of the worst human-caused environmental catastrophes.” Jeff traveled to the region as a Peace Corps volunteer. Afterward, he turned his experiences into an essay collection, Ships in t...
Tricia Starks, "Cigarettes and Soviets: Smoking in the USSR" (Cornell UP, 2022)
January 11, 2023 09:00 - 42 minutesSeeing cigarette smoking as a cultural phenomenon of Western modernity is perhaps easier when the test case is outside the US where the narrative is dominated by Big Bad Tobacco and litigation. Tricia Starks's two volume study does just that. Her second volume, Cigarettes and Soviets: Smoking in the USSR (Cornell University Press, 2022) traces the rise and fall of cigarettes during the Soviet period. (Her first volume covered the pre-Revolutionary era.) In a beautifully written and jargon-fre...
Regine A. Spector, "Order at the Bazaar: Power and Trade in Central Asia" (Cornell UP, 2017)
January 04, 2023 09:00 - 39 minutesOrder at the Bazaar: Power and Trade in Central Asia (Cornell UP, 2017) delves into the role of bazaars in the political economy and development of Central Asia. Bazaars are the economic bedrock for many throughout the region--they are the entrepreneurial hubs of Central Asia. However, they are often regarded as mafia-governed environments that are largely populated by the dispossessed. By immersing herself in the bazaars of Kyrgyzstan, Regine A. Spector learned that some are rather best char...
Buddhist Medicine in Tibet: A Discussion with Bill McGrath
December 26, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourIn this episode, I sit down with my friend Bill McGrath, a historian of Tibetan Buddhism and medicine. He's one of the most knowledgeable people in the world on this subject, and we get deep into the weeds in an academic conversation about traditional Tibetan medicine, the category of Buddhist medicine, and Bill's perspectives on magic, religion, and science. We also reminisce about the time that Bill once used a Tibetan mantra to save the day when we ran out of gas driving home from a confer...
Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, "Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism" (Princeton UP, 2022)
December 16, 2022 09:00 - 58 minutesRevolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (Princeton UP, 2022) explores why dictatorships born of social revolution—such as those in China, Cuba, Iran, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam—are extraordinarily durable, even in the face of economic crisis, large-scale policy failure, mass discontent, and intense external pressure. Few other modern autocracies have survived in the face of such extreme challenges. Drawing on comparative historical analysis, Steven Levi...
Vladislav M. Zubok, "Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union" (Yale UP, 2021)
December 13, 2022 09:00 - 56 minutesIn 1945 the Soviet Union controlled half of Europe and was a founding member of the United Nations. By 1991, it had an army four million strong with five thousand nuclear-tipped missiles and was the second biggest producer of oil in the world. But soon afterward the union sank into an economic crisis and was torn apart by nationalist separatism. Its collapse was one of the seismic shifts of the twentieth century. Thirty years on, Vladislav Zubok offers a major reinterpretation of the final ye...
James Mark and Paul Betts, "Socialism Goes Global: The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonisation" (Oxford UP, 2022)
December 09, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourSocialism Goes Global: The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonisation (Oxford UP, 2022) is the first work to provide a broad history of the relationship between Eastern Europe and the decolonising world. It ranges from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century, but at its core is the dynamic of the post-1945 period, when socialism's importance as a globalising force accelerated and drew together what contemporaries called the 'Second' and 'Third Worlds'. At the cent...
Zaure Batayeva and Shelley Fairweather-Vega, "Amanat: Women's Writing from Kazakhstan" (Gaudy Boy, 2022)
December 02, 2022 09:00 - 35 minutesA man is arrested for a single typo, a woman gets on buses at random, and two friends reunite in a changed world.... Diverse in form, scope and style, Amanat: Women's Writing from Kazakhstan (Gaudy Boy, 2022) brings together the voices of thirteen female Kazakhstani writers, to offer a glimpse into the many lives, stories, and histories of one of the largest countries to emerge from the breakup of the Soviet Union. The twenty-four stories in Amanat, translated into English from Kazakh and Rus...
John Keay, "Himalaya: Exploring the Roof of the World" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
November 24, 2022 09:00 - 44 minutes“History has not been kind to Himalaya,” writes historian and travel writer John Keay in his latest book Himalaya: Exploring the Roof of the World (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022). The region, nestled between India, China and Central Asia, has long been subject to political and imperial intrigue–and at times violent invasion. But the region also provided a wealth of scientific information, like geographers puzzling over how these tall peaks were thrust upwards by plate tectonics. And, of course,...
Anton Weiss-Wendt and Nanci Adler, eds., "The Future of the Soviet Past: The Politics of History in Putin's Russia" (Indiana UP, 2021)
October 28, 2022 08:00 - 52 minutesIn post-Soviet Russia, there is a persistent trend to repress, control, or even co-opt national history. By reshaping memory to suit a politically convenient narrative, Russia has fashioned a good future out of a "bad past." While Putin's regime has acquired nearly complete control over interpretations of the past, Anton Weiss-Wendt and Nanci Adler's edited volume The Future of the Soviet Past: The Politics of History in Putin's Russia (Indiana UP, 2021) reveals that Russia's inability to ful...
Agha Bayramov, "Constructive Competition in the Caspian Sea Region" (Routledge, 2022)
October 20, 2022 08:00 - 39 minutesI am very pleased to host on the NBN Central Asia Studies podcast Agha Bayramov, the author of the extremely readable Constructive Cooperation in the Caspian Sea Region? An Alternative Image (Routledge, 2022). This is a much-needed book, which looks at the developments of cooperative frameworks in the Caspian Sea region, an area that is too often investigated through Great Game analysis. Challenging mainstream depictions that portray the Caspian Sea basin as a geopolitical battleground betwe...
Waleed Ziad, "Hidden Caliphate: Sufi Saints Beyond the Oxus and Indus" (Harvard UP, 2021)
September 30, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourToday, we speak with Waleed Ziad, about his book Hidden Caliphate: Sufi Saints beyond the Oxus and Indus, published in 2021 with Harvard University Press. Ziad is an assistant professor of Religion at UNC Chapel Hill and holds a PhD from Yale. In Hidden Caliphate, Ziad offers an incredibly rich, fascinating, and detailed study of Sufi networks. These are expansive networks that span a wide array of geography, from Afghanistan to China to Siberia. Challenging dominant and often simplistic narr...
Ian W. Campbell, "Knowledge and the Ends of Empire: Kazak Intermediaries and Russian Rule on the Steppe, 1731-1917" (Cornell UP, 2017)
September 23, 2022 08:00 - 47 minutesIn Knowledge and the Ends of Empire: Kazak Intermediaries and Russian Rule on the Steppe, 1731-1917 (Cornell University Press, 2017), Ian W. Campbell investigates the connections between knowledge production and policy formation on the Kazak steppes of the Russian Empire. Hoping to better govern the region, tsarist officials were desperate to obtain reliable information about an unfamiliar environment and population. This thirst for knowledge created opportunities for Kazak intermediaries to ...
Lavinia Stan and Nadya Nedelsky, "Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice" (Cambridge UP, 2013)
August 26, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThis comprehensive three-volume reference work collects and summarizes the wealth of information available in the field of transitional justice. Transitional justice is an emerging domain of inquiry that has gained importance with the regime changes in Latin America after the 1970s, the collapse of the European and Soviet communist regimes in 1989 and 1991, and the Arab revolutions of 2011, among others. The Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice (Cambridge UP, 2013), which offers 287 entries w...
Adrienne Edgar, "Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples: Ethnic Mixing in Soviet Central Asia" (Cornell UP, 2022)
August 23, 2022 08:00 - 29 minutesAdrienne Edgar's Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples—Ethnic Mixing in Soviet Central Asia (Cornell University Press, 2021) is an outstanding study of the evolution of intermarriage practices in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan across the Soviet era and beyond. Based on substantive oral history research work, plus extensive engagement with published and unpublished Soviet sources, the book tells an intriguing story, one that delves into the ever intriguing process of ethnic mixing. As a pheno...
Guangtian Ha, "The Sound of Salvation: Voice, Gender, and the Sufi Mediascape in China" (Columbia UP, 2021)
May 09, 2022 08:00 - 42 minutesThe Jahriyya Sufis—a primarily Sinophone order of Naqshbandiyya Sufism in northwestern China—inhabit a unique religious soundscape. The hallmark of their spiritual practice is the “loud” (jahr) remembrance of God in liturgical rituals featuring distinctive melodic vocal chants. The first ethnography of this order in any language, The Sound of Salvation: Voice, Gender, and the Sufi Mediascape in China (Columbia UP, 2021) draws on nearly a decade of fieldwork to reveal the intricacies and impor...
Central Asia Under Brussels’ and Moscow’s Eyes
May 04, 2022 08:00 - 20 minutesThe Soviet Republic once held tremendous sway over the politics of Central Asia as the grand hegemon of the region. But now, in the post-Soviet world, geopolitics in this region is influenced by other powers, including the European Union (EU), and Central Asia’s own tilt towards China. In this changed environment, is the EU adjusting its policies to foster strong democracies in the region free from authoritarian influences, both foreign and domestic? Will these changes be enough to ensure reg...
Raffaello Pantucci and Alexandros Petersen, "Sinostan: China's Inadvertent Empire" (Oxford UP, 2022)
April 18, 2022 08:00 - 44 minutesI am very pleased to host on the podcast Raffaello Pantucci, one of the authors of Sinostan: China's Inadvertent Empire [Oxford University Press 2022]. This great new book approaches through a very novel lens one of the most talked-about issues in Eurasian Studies: China's role in Central Asia. Pantucci and his co-author, the late Alexandros Pedersen, travel around the vast Chinese territory, Central Asia and Afghanistan to document the intensification and the multiplication of China's politi...
Darren Byler, "Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City" (Duke UP, 2022)
April 13, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThe continuing crisis in Xinjiang has, thanks to the work of many scholars and reporters, led to greatly increased awareness of the region's history and Uyghur population among publics outside China. But so far less appreciated have been the specific ways in which the targeted regime of Uyghur imprisonment operates, and its creeping emergence over the course of the 2010s. Darren Byler’s Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City (Duke UP, 2022) is therefore a vi...
Pamela Kyle Crossley, "Hammer and Anvil: Nomad Rulers at the Forge of the Modern World" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019)
April 06, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThis groundbreaking book examines the role of rulers with nomadic roots in transforming the great societies of Eurasia, especially from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries. Distinguished historian Pamela Kyle Crossley, drawing on the long history of nomadic confrontation with Eurasia’s densely populated civilizations, argues that the distinctive changes we associate with modernity were founded on vernacular literature and arts, rising literacy, mercantile and financial economies, religious ...
Ayşe Zarakol, "Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
March 29, 2022 08:00 - 45 minutesAyse Zarakol, Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge, is the author of Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Before the West offers a grand narrative of (Eur)Asia as a space connected by normatively and institutionally overlapping successive world orders originating from the Mongol Empire. It uses that vast history to rethink the foundational concepts and debates of international relations, such as order and...
Eiren L. Shea, "Mongol Court Dress, Identity Formation, and Global Exchange" (Routledge, 2020)
March 25, 2022 08:00 - 55 minutesThe Mongol period (1206-1368) marked a major turning point of exchange - culturally, politically, and artistically - across Eurasia. The wide-ranging international exchange that occurred during the Mongol period is most apparent visually through the inclusion of Mongol motifs in textile, paintings, ceramics, and metalwork, among other media. In In Mongol Court Dress, Identity Formation, and Global Exchange (Routledge, 2020), Eiren Shea investigates how a group of newly-confederated tribes fr...
Sandy Gall, "Afghan Napoleon: The Life of Ahmad Shah Massoud" (Haus Publishing, 2021)
March 17, 2022 08:00 - 54 minutesOn September 9th, 2001, Ahmed Shah Massoud—called one of the greatest guerilla leaders in history, alongside names like Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, was assassinated by two Al-Qaeda suicide bombers. Coming just two days before the terrorist attacks of September 11th, Massoud’s assassination is thus one of those points in history that invites couterfactuals: was it a warning of things to come? And what might have happened in Afghanistan had the assassination failed? Afghan Napoleon: The Life o...
Mark Edele, "Debates on Stalinism" (Manchester UP, 2020)
March 15, 2022 08:00 - 59 minutesDebates on Stalinism (Manchester University Press, 2020) considers some of the major debates about Stalinism during and after the Cold War. Was ‘Stalinism’ a system in its own right, or just one stage in the overall development of Soviet society? Was it an aberration from Leninism, or the logical conclusion of Marxism? Was its violence an expression of revenge of the Russian past, or the result of a revolutionary mindset? In approaching these questions, the book unpacks complex historiographi...
Togzhan Kassenova, "Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave Up the Bomb" (Stanford UP, 2022)
March 14, 2022 08:00 - 35 minutesThis month we are delighted to host Togzhan Kassenova on our NBN Central Asian Studies podcast. Dr Kassenova is the author of the beautifully researched yet very readable Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave Up the Bomb (Stanford University Press, 2022). Atomic Steppe tells the untold true story of how Kazakhstan said no to the most powerful weapons in human history. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the newly independent Central Asian republic suddenly found itself with the world's fourth la...