Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan became free of the Soviet Union in 1991. But though they are new to modern statehood, this is a region rich in ancient history, culture, and landscapes unlike anywhere else in the world.


Traveling alone, Erika Fatland is a true adventurer in every sense. In "Sovietistan", she takes the reader on a compassionate and insightful journey to explore how their Soviet heritage has influenced these countries, with governments experimenting with both democracy and dictatorships.


In Kyrgyzstani villages, she meets victims of the tradition of bride snatching; she visits the huge and desolate Polygon in Kazakhstan where the Soviet Union tested explosions of nuclear bombs; she meets shrimp gatherers on the banks of the dried out Aral Sea; she witnesses the fall of a dictator.


She travels incognito through Turkmenistan, a country that is closed to journalists. She meets exhausted human rights activists in Kazakhstan, survivors from the massacre in Osh in 2010, and German Mennonites that found paradise on the Kyrgyzstani plains 200 years ago. We learn how ancient customs clash with gas production and witness the underlying conflicts between ethnic Russians and the majority in a country that is slowly building its future in nationalist colors.


Once the frontier of the Soviet Union, life follows another pace of time. Amidst the treasures of Samarkand and the brutalist Soviet architecture, "Sovietistan" is a rare and unforgettable adventure.

Sovietistan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan

Chinghiz Aitmatov (b. 1928) gained fame after the appearance of Jamila, his first major work. "Jamila is like one's first love, it cannot be experienced twice," Aitmatov wrote. The author's voice rings passionately in the story of a young teacher, the founder of the first school in a Kirghiz village (Duishen), it is gentle and sad as a young couple recall their lost love (To Have and to Lose), it is bold and powerful in telling the story of Tanabai Bakasov, a sheperd (Farewell, Gyulsary!). An inherent poetic quality unites all of Aitmatov's work. Thus does he speak of Kirghizia, with its boundless steppes, majestic mountain ranges and its people, who are so deeply attached to their native land.

Tales of the Mountains and Steppes

Kyrgyzstan is probably the best known of any central Asian country, the one that has elicited the most academic publications, reports by NGOs or advocacy groups, and op-eds in the media. The country opened up massively to Western influence through development aid for civil society and for economic reforms, faced two revolutions in 2005 and 2010, and experienced bloody interethnic conflict in 2010. Kyrgyzstan is therefore commonly studied as a twin case: that of having been, for more than two decades, both an "island of democracy" in Central Asia--and the only country of the region to have made the transition to a parliamentary regime--and the archetypical example of a "failing state," one marked by endemic corruption, criminalization of the state apparatus, and collapse of public services. This volume goes beyond these two cliches and provides a research-based and unideological narrative on the country. It identifies political dynamics, their powerbrokers, and the role of international organizations; investigates the profound social transformations of both the rural and the urban worlds; and examines the broad feeling, by local actors, that Kyrgyzstan's fragile state identity should be consolidated. This book gives the floor to the new generation of scholars whose long-term vernacular-language field research made it possible to provide new interpretative prisms for the complex evolution of Kyrgyzstan.

Kyrgyzstan Beyond "Democracy Island" and "Failing State": Social and Political Changes in a Post-Soviet Society

Ferdinand Magellan's daring circumnavigation of the globe in the sixteenth century was a three-year odyssey filled with sex, violence, and amazing adventure. Now in "Over the Edge of the World", biographer and journalist "Laurence Bergreen" entwines a variety of candid, firsthand accounts, bringing to life this groundbreaking and majestic tale of discovery that changed both the way explorers would henceforth navigate the oceans and history itself.

Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe

Born out of the collapse of the USSR, Kyrgyzstan has been notable for its struggle to develop a pluralist polity and free market, an attempt that distinguishes it from some of its more authoritarian neighbors. This volume introduces students and businessmen to this most attractive of republics, offering an overview of its history, politics, economic development, and place in the international community. In particular, it focuses on the problematic nature of political development, with democratic and pluralist impulses struggling to survive against the dominance of more traditional forms of governance.

Kyrgyzstan: Central Asia's Island of Democracy?

This unique work provides the only sustained political history of independent Kyrgyzstan, explaining events in the context of its society and the broader international order. Drawing on three decades of personal encounters with ordinary citizens and leading public figures, Eugene Huskey takes readers on a journey through the unlikely birth and tumultuous development of Central Asia's most open society. Starting with the heady, romantic first days of independence and moving through the popular uprisings and inter-ethnic violence of recent years, he chronicles the struggles of a new state to establish a democratic order and to find its place in the international community, while caught between China, the Middle East, and the Russian world. At the center are the very human stories of leaders and citizens trying to navigate the transition from communism, where identities, property, and the rules of the political game were constantly in dispute. With citizens of independent Kyrgyzstan stripped of their Soviet identity, the book illustrates how alternative loyalties based on kinship, geography, statehood, and religion competed for prominence in ways that often complicated the new country's political, social, and economic development. --Scott Horton, contributing editor, Harper's Magazine

Encounters at the Edge of the Muslim World: A Political Memoir of Kyrgyzstan

"The Force of Custom" presents a finely textured ethnographic study that sheds new light on the legal and moral ordering of everyday life in northwestern Kyrgyzstan. Through her extensive fieldwork and firsthand experience, Judith Beyer reveals how Kyrgyz in Talas province negotiate proper behavior and regulate disputes by invoking custom, known to the locals as "salt. "While "salt" is presented as age-old tradition, its invocation is shown to be a highly developed and flexible rhetorical strategy that people adapt in order to meet the challenges of contemporary political, legal, economic, and religious environments. Officially, codified state law should take precedence when it comes to dispute resolution, yet the unwritten laws of "salt" and the increasing importance of Islamic law provide the standards for ordering everyday life. As Beyer further demonstrates, interpretations of both Islamic and state law are also intrinsically linked to "salt".
             By interweaving case studies on kinship, legal negotiations, festive events, mourning rituals, and political and business dealings, Beyer shows how "salt" is the binding element in rural Kyrgyz social life and how it is used to explain and negotiate moral behavior and to postulate communal identity. In this way, "salt" provides a time-tested, sustainable source of authentication that defies changes in government and the shifting tides of religious movements.

The Force of Custom: Law and the Ordering of Everyday Life in Kyrgyzstan

Winner of the 2014 Central Eurasian Studies Society Book Award in the Social Sciences.

"Under Solomon’s Throne" provides a rare ground-level analysis of post-Soviet Central Asia’s social and political paradoxes by focusing on an urban ethnic community: the Uzbeks in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, who have maintained visions of societal renewal throughout economic upheaval, political discrimination, and massive violence.

Morgan Liu illuminates many of the challenges facing Central Asia today by unpacking the predicament of Osh, a city whose experience captures key political and cultural issues of the region as a whole. Situated on the border of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan—newly independent republics that have followed increasingly divergent paths to reform their states and economies—the city is subject to a Kyrgyz government, but the majority of its population are ethnic Uzbeks. Conflict between the two groups led to riots in 1990, and again in 2010, when thousands, mostly ethnic Uzbeks, were killed and nearly half a million more fled across the border into Uzbekistan. While these tragic outbreaks of violence highlight communal tensions amid long-term uncertainty, a close examination of community life in the two decades between reveals the way Osh Uzbeks have created a sense of stability and belonging for themselves while occupying a postcolonial no-man’s-land, tied to two nation-states but not fully accepted by either one.

The first ethnographic monograph based on extensive local-language fieldwork in a Central Asian city, this study examines the culturally specific ways that Osh Uzbeks are making sense of their post-Soviet dilemmas. These practices reveal deep connections with Soviet and Islamic sensibilities and with everyday acts of dwelling in urban neighborhoods. Osh Uzbeks engage the spaces of their city to shape their orientations relative to the wider world, postsocialist transformations, Islamic piety, moral personhood, and effective leadership. Living in the shadow of Solomon’s Throne, the city’s central mountain, they envision and attempt to build a just social order.

Kyrgyzstan

Sovietistan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan

Erika Fatland

Tales of the Mountains and Steppes

Chingiz Aitmatov

Kyrgyzstan Beyond "Democracy Island" and "Failing State": Social and Political Changes in a Post-Soviet Society

Marlène Laruelle

Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe

Laurence Bergreen

Kyrgyzstan: Central Asia's Island of Democracy?

John Anderson

Encounters at the Edge of the Muslim World: A Political Memoir of Kyrgyzstan

Eugene Huskey

The Force of Custom: Law and the Ordering of Everyday Life in Kyrgyzstan

Judith Beyer

Under Solomon's Throne: Uzbek Visions of Renewal in Osh

Morgan Y. Liu