Customer Reviews

The New Geopolitics of Central Asia and Its Borderlands

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When you decide to edit a volume on a particular topic, there's always one problem aside from the obvious one of getting the authors to submit on time and in the proper format. That is that each participant may repeat a lot of the same information, giving background to readers. Single articles need such background, of course, but those compiled in volumes do not. What am I talking about ? I am saying that if you read this book you are going to get a lot of information over and over again. A second caveat for readers is that the wirters cover the state of geopolitics in 1990-1993. We have moved on. Some observations seem pertinent fifteen years later, others do not. The expected roles of Turkey and Iran in Central Asia have not come to much, while Russia's cultural, political, and economic dominance continues. The elites, which must eventually transform into less Soviet-style groups, have not yet changed. America's role, after Sept. 11, 2001, changed dramatically, but not in a positive way. The cautious predictions made in this volume will startle no one; few of the problems described have been tackled, much less solved.

Readers interested in Central Asian geopolitics of the period may want to select Martha Brill Olcott's "Central Asia's New States" because it is better written and has the advantage of books by single authors---tight organization and no repetition. Olcott wrote a chapter for the present volume too, but the chapters I found most interesting were Muriel Atkin's on Tajikistan's relations with Iran and Afghanistan and Tadeusz Swietochowski's chapter on Azerbaijan. Both these provided information which I had not found elsewhere. Two chapters on Turkey's approach to the Caucasus and Central Asia and Iran's approach resembled some of the other chapters, but presented the material from a different point of view. In general, I thought that this book might have been prepared in a hurry back when it came out because there was a great dearth of material then. Not the case now. We may say that THE NEW GEOPOLITICS OF CENTRAL ASIA is out of date.