Customer Reviews

The New Central Asia: The Creation of Nations

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This book is packed with useful insights but it is not for the Central Asian novice. I give it two stars because it is hard to read and could be better organized. The information in it is five star. It is a graduate-school level analysis of the evolution of the current Central Asian nation-states. It is what would be expected from a person in Roy's position; researcher at the Centre National des Recherches Scientifques. The book was originally written in French and translated into English for this edition. That in itself is not a problem but the writing style is one that has a heavy "fog factor". There are numerous sentences that are 60 words long and contain multiple commas, parenthetical statements, hyphens and semi colons in one sentence. If you can slog through syntax you can glean a lot of useful information. My suggestion is you have some understanding of Central Asian history and geography before you attempt this book. The lack of maps would make it really difficult for a beginning reader of Central Asia. Central Asia in Historical Perspective (edited by Manz), although a graduate-level text, is better organized and easier to understand.

I purchased this book after I developed an increasing interest in the politics and history of Central Asia. At that point, I had read a couple of books on the topic, leaving me with a feeling of general competence. This book, however, was seriously beyond my level of knowledge, and I'd like to caution readers with anything below a superior understanding of Soviet and Central Asian History. The author "jumps" around the region quite a bit, creating problems which compound themselves, particularly as no maps are included anywhere in the book. If you do not possess an intimate knowledge of the geography, I suggest waiting until your mental map is more complete (as I'll be doing).
The book is translated from French. After reading about 20 pages, this fact amazed me from the vocabularly chosen by the translator. I can't remember the last time I had to use a dictionary, but this book sent me searching on more than one occasion. Moreover, the writing style is incredibly dry, even for a work of history. "New Central Asia" is loaded with solid research and cogent argumentation, but the presentation leaves much to be desired.

Olivier Roy is a well-known expert on Islam, the Arab world and Central Asia. His The New Central Asia is an excellent examination of the creation of new nations that emerged from the end of the Soviet Union in 1992. He contends that while these new republics are in search of identity (in essence creating new nationalisms), they have also inherited the older Soviet system of rule and institutions, which were not democratic and more oriented to personality cults and heavy-handed treatment of the opposition. This explains the difficult path countries such as Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have had through the 1990s and into the next decade. For anyone looking at the problems of development as well as wishing to obtain a better understanding of a pivotal geo-political zone, Roy's well-researched book is worth the read.

This work explains the origins of the independent republics of Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan). It was mostly written in 1997, with only a brief introduction updating events to 2007.

The translated text can sometimes be extremely hard going, but I found it valuable reading.

Prof. Roy explains that before the arrival of the Tsars, Central Asia was an amorphous mix of many different ethnic groups and identities, loosely unified by Sunni Islam, with strong overlays of Persian and Turkic culture, organized into many competing local khanates and smaller groups. Individuals tended to associate themselves with local clans rather than larger "national" groups and could often have overlapping group identities, speaking either Persian (Tajik) or a Turkic dialect as circumstances required.

Both the Tsars and later the Soviets observed that there was enough commonality amongst the various groups that the whole region could easily unify into a single pan-Islamic or pan-Turkic identity, creating a significant regional power. Therefore first the Tsars and later Stalin consciously adopted a divide and rule strategy. The Soviets, applying considerable creativity, carved out specific languages and national identities from the continuum of dialects and shared histories and forced every individual to accept one specific role. Stalin carefully created new Soviet Socialist Republics with gerrymandered boundaries, such that both intertwined geography and misplaced peoples led to permanent tensions and squabbles between the republics, which then looked to Moscow as the mediator of their quarrels, rather than as their common enemy.

Under the Soviet system, Moscow's main goal was to have the new republics quietly look after their own internal affairs, but to always look to Moscow to resolve any larger regional or national issues. In a fateful decision, Moscow avoided using citizens of each republic beyond its borders. Thus an ambitious Kazakh apparatchik could not aim to build a career in the wider USSR, but was restricted to a local Kazakhstan career. This created clannish local elites, tightly bound to their own republics, looking to Moscow for leadership but with no wider regional ties. So when Moscow's leadership crumbled, the republics were (rather to their surprise) already ripe for independence. And their existing Soviet elites naturally led that independence, set within the boundaries Stalin had created.

The main weakness of the book is that it was written in academic French and has suffered further in a poor translation into jargon laden English. Thus it can sometimes be difficult going and occasionally sentences don't quite come across in English.

My advice would be that if you are seriously interested in Central Asia, then it is well worth the effort of persevering through the text. It provides extremely valuable historical background on the region. However, it is definitely not something for light reading

Olivier Roy is a well-known expert on Islam, the Arab world and Central Asia. His The New Central Asia is an excellent examination of the creation of new nations that emerged from the end of the Soviet Union in 1992. He contends that while these new republics are in search of identity (in essence creating new nationalisms), they have also inherited the older Soviet system of rule and institutions, which were not democratic and more oriented to personality cults and heavy-handed treatment of the opposition. This explains the difficult path countries such as Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have had through the 1990s and into the next decade. For anyone looking at the problems of development as well as wishing to obtain a better understanding of a pivotal geo-political zone, Roy's well-researched book is worth the read.