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 rep...