A Forgotten Core? Mapping the Globality of Central Asia

Today, the region we currently refer to as Central Asia—the geopolitical space comprised of the five post-Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan—is anything but a core in the contemporary network of globalized flows of information, people, goods, ideas, and money.[1] Due to a host of factors, the lands between the Caspian Sea and the Gobi Desert represent somewhat of a global backwater (though less so than was the case in the nineteenth century when Central Asia remained an unmapped and thus “unknown country”[2] to nearly all of the outside world). The perceptual “remoteness” of Central Asia is particularly evident by way of contrast, given that the region is neatly situated between two of the most globalized meta-regions in the world: the European peninsula and East Asia’s Pacific Rim. Central Asia’s current peripheral status represents a major inversion from the premodern era, when these lands were at the center of world trade and—at times—intellectual exchange.