The former-Soviet states that make up Central Asia are among the most challenging group of countries to understand in the twenty-first century geopolitical and geoeconomic context. As one of the last of the world’s frontiers, much of this regions’ energy potential in oil and natural gas has yet to be tapped or, even, be found; and the region’s strategic position make Central Asia a significant region for energy markets and global affairs. The last few decades in Central Asia have been shaped by the determination to develop their energy sectors with a balance between attracting foreign energy firms and preserving its authority over its energy assets. States have also struggled to protect their sovereignty over their political and economic affairs from militant, nationalist or sectarian groups as well as from great powers like Russia and China. In spite of its many challenges, Central Asia has many opportunities to develop those institutions, regional relationships and positive economic and political practices that will promote a productive energy sector and a thriving economy. Central-Asian states must achieve its goals of establishing an energy policy that secures prosperity for all, promoting productive energy relations with all Central-Asian states, reducing undue foreign influence but promoting foreign cooperation that benefits Central-Asia’s global relationships, and establishing peace and stability that protect energy infrastructure, production and exports. The future of Central-Asian energy relations can take many different paths and is dependent on the fate of its neighbors Russia, Afghanistan, South Asia and Iran. Russia’s needs for Central Asia’s neighbors to become unstable or inhospitable to energy development, but peace in Afghanistan and Pakistan can open new markets for Central Asia; and changes in Iran can unlock new opportunities to ship oil and gas to Western markets around Russia. For all that the region has endured since independence, the world should apply greater value on this region as its energy prowess and strategic importance make Central Asia an influential player in twenty-first century global relations. / text

This research is aimed at understanding versatile and evolving perceptions of childhood in Kazakhstan after the independence of the country. It draws on a variety of primary data including in-depth interviews and surveys with young people and representatives of non- governmental organisations working with young people. This research employs two concepts of sociology of childhood, which address the socio-historical condition of childhood as a social experience. It explores the role children played in traditional Kazakh families in the mid-19th- beginning of the 20th century. It also addresses state policy concerning children in Kazakhstan after independence. This research presents an analysis of how young participants perceive categories of ‘child’ and ‘adult.’ The question is raised whether traditional thresholds of childhood like education, marriage, and financial independence still play a role in understanding the transition from childhood to adulthood. Further, it presents a dialogue between young participants of this research with their older contemporaries on the characteristics of the young generation born after the independence. Finally, it sheds more light on discrimination of young females in the family and society.

Thesis (M.A.)--Florida State University, 2006. / Advisor: Ljubisa Adamovich, Florida State University, College of Social Sciences, Dept. of International Affairs. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed June 7, 2006). Document formatted into pages; contains x, 109 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

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This thesis addresses the efforts of different states to establish their authority over the Pashtun ethnic group. The Pashtun are at the heart of the conflict in Afghanistan, and provide both an important and current example of why "ungoverned spaces" have become such hot topic among many of the world's countries. People that exist within a sovereign state's borders and outside the state's authority present a dangerous problem to both the state itself and the international community. To address the challenges facing a state engaged in establishing its authority over the Pashtun, this thesis identifies normative and organizational structural factors associated with rural Pashtun tribes and discusses how these factors impede state authority. These factors are applied to three cases which involved a modern government's efforts to establish its authority over the Pashtun. In almost every case, the state failed when it either misunderstood the importance of these structural factors or willfully ignored them to pursue other interests. Looking beyond the Pashtun case, the research in this thesis determines that policies focused purely on suppression, isolation, or accommodation are destined to fail in establishing state authority. The common failing of these three policies occurs when the state fails to understand the difference between establishing order and establishing authority. Finally, the state must seriously consider its capacity to expand its authority-the lower the capacity, the longer it will take and the more accommodating (but not purely accommodating) the state must act. / US Air Force (USAF) author.

This thesis examines the contemporary religious renewal and discourse on modernity of the Shi‘a Imami Ismaili Muslims of Nizari branch (hereinafter Ismaili) in post-Soviet Tajikistan. These developments are set against their reunion with the worldwide spiritual leader, the Aga Khan IV, and their convergence with the transnational (or global) Ismailis, following seven decades of Soviet isolation. The subject of ‘religious renewal’ among Ismailis of Tajikistan remains barely explored both in post-Soviet and Western academia. It is situated against the backdrop of rapidly expanding body of scholarly analysis on Central Asian Islam, which until recently was framed predominantly through securitisation discourses. These discourses provided a distorted picture of the nature of Islam in post-Soviet Central Asia. While not negating the relevancy of the aforementioned securitisation discourses, this thesis challenges their portrayal of both ‘international Islam’ and Islam in Central Asia as monolithic entities. It also questions how the former is being perceived as anti-Western, and therefore anti-modern, and the latter as a passive receiver. Drawing on the notions of ‘multiple modernities’ (Eisenstadt 2000) and ‘discursive tradition’ (Asad 1986), this thesis emphasises the multiplicity, diverse trajectories and distinct patterns of Islamic discourses on modernity not just among, but within each Central Asian state. It provides a better understanding of the complex and constantly evolving nature of Islam in Central Asia and its dynamics with modernity. Moreover, the research findings contribute to the understanding of modernity and secularisation, and indeed westernisation, as not identical in Central Asia. They highlight that dynamics between Islam and modernity are inclusionary, which interact, cross-fertilise and transform one another critically and creatively, rather than through a dichotomous relationship between the traditional and the modern, Islamic and secular (and/or Western). This work builds its analysis on local archives, reports, oral memories and multiple interviews with various stakeholders from within the Ismaili community and outside, in Gorno-Badakhshan region of Tajikistan and beyond. It depicts how contemporary readings of modernity within Ismailism in Tajikistan and its discourses derive extensively from the religious and temporal guidance of the Aga Khan that are entrenched in Ismaili doctrines and values of Islam. It also portrays how these discourses are then informed, altered and recreated acutely by various dynamics both within the faith and without, including the historical past and growing globalisation. As a result, this paper came to argue that these dynamics [within and without] are contested widely among the local Ismailis. They instigate systematic and indigenous approaches and answers that go beyond the ‘traditional’ discourses on Islam and modernity, and, nevertheless, accentuate the continuity of the Ismaili tradition.

Master thesis. / Format: PDF. Bibl.

Large uncertainties remain in estimating the anthropogenic fraction of mineral dust and the climatic impact of dust aerosol, partly due to a poor understanding of the dust source dynamics under the influence of climate variability and human-induced land-cover/land-use change (LCLUC). So far, the dust dynamics and linkage to climate and LCLUC in Central Asia have received little attention from the aerosol research community. This thesis comprises a comprehensive study of the dust dynamics in Central Asia focusing on 1) the seasonality of erosion threshold and dust emission affected by soil moisture, vegetation phenology and surface roughness, 2) the dust interannual variability and connections with large-scale climate variation (ENSO) through effects on the atmospheric circulation, precipitation, vegetation dynamics and drought, and 3) the impact of dust aerosol on surface radiative balance and photosynthetically active radiation, and possible effect on dryland ecosystems. A coupled dust model and multi-year ground and satellite observations of dust frequency, dust loading, and atmospheric and land conditions are used in this study. We find the threshold friction velocity significantly varies in space and time in response to soil moisture seasonality, surface roughness heterogeneity and vegetation phenology. Spring is associated a higher threshold friction velocity than summer, due to wetter soils and more vegetation cover. As a result, although more frequent strong winds occur during spring, spring dust emission is less than summer by 46.8% (or 60.4 Mt). Ignoring the dependence of the threshold friction velocity on the surface characteristics leads to biased spatial distribution and seasonality of dust emission. There is a strong linkage between dust and ENSO in Central Asia: La Nina years produce drought condition and enhance the dust activity. A decline in the strong wind frequency during 1999−2012 results in a decreasing trend in the modeled dust emission, at a rate of -7.81±2.73 Mt yr-1, as well as a decreasing trend in the ground observed dust frequency index, at a rate of -0.14±0.04%. We estimate that 58.4% of dust emission is caused by human activity during the 1999−2012 period. Our estimates suggest human plays an important role in the region’s dust budget through agriculture and water resource usage.

This dissertation proposes a political reading of the religious revival taking place in Tajikistan following the country’s independence in 1991. It considers the impact of the Soviet legacy on the place of religion in Tajik society and on different modes of religiosity. It also highlights the continuities between the Soviet and post-Soviet eras and the porous boundaries between the religious and secular realms in Tajikistan. First, the thesis describes the specificities of the Soviet secularization process and emphasizes the holistic character of the Soviet ideology. I suggest that the secularization of Central Asia should be understood not as the complete eradication of religion but as the societies’ accommodation to assertive secular policies, which produced a certain understanding of the place of religion in society. The research then looks at the resilience of Soviet values within both institutional and discursive traditions, as well as within individuals’ perspectives on religion. This dissertation avoids reifying the state and accounts for the great diversity of state actors’ strategies and interests as well as within communities. Finally, drawing upon extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Northern Tajikistan, the research depicts the religious revival from a local perspective by addressing the religious experiences of born-again Muslims. I suggest that Islamic values offset the Soviet holistic ideology, which can be explained by the affinities of religious and Soviet moral codes. The research also shows that increasing levels of religiosity contribute to social tensions around the definition of new moral standards in an uncertain socio-economic environment.

This dissertation examines the role of women in post-Soviet Kazakhstan as both productive members of society and the loci of national anxieties that have created fault lines in public opinion, government policy, and international development programs. It explores how Kazakh cultural concepts of ideal womanhood are used to identify categories of women eligible for state support or who become targets of community intervention. These include survivors of domestic violence, unwed young mothers, and “at risk” girls who may strive to fulfill or deviate from the expected Kazakh norms deemed appropriate for their specific life stage. These contested expectations are embodied in national legislation, international human rights programs, and Kazakh civil society. They are implemented by social service officials who provide the aid and who perceive the women involved in them as objects of their reform projects. Ethnographic fieldwork that provided the bulk of the research data was conducted between March 2018 and August 2019 in urban Almaty and provincial cities in southern and eastern Kazakhstan in domestic violence shelters, homes for unwed mothers, and girls’ empowerment programs. This included extended periods of participant observation supplemented by open-ended interviews with activists, crisis shelter directors and employees, and other stakeholders to generate multi-cited case studies. Because media played a significant role, the research incorporated an analysis of relevant Kazakhstani films and plays that highlight the challenges of negotiating ideals of womanhood and motherhood, propriety and martyrdom, which are also central themes animating my text. The research concludes that women in these programs respond to directives from international human rights organizations, national legislation, and changing social mores by deploying and reinterpreting Kazakh life stage ideals of womanhood. In so doing, they illustrate how women’s work and reproductive choices intersect with the goals of a national state, a changing Kazakh society, and the global discourse on women’s rights. As a contribution to the larger discourse on identity and citizenship in post-Soviet states, gender, Islam, and contemporary Kazakhstan, this study illustrates how “women’s issues” remain an unusually sensitive barometer of social values where the implicit becomes the explicit. / 2024-03-04T00:00:00Z