1st Edition
Decolonizing Central Asian International Relations Beyond Empires
1. Towards Decolonizing Central Asian International Relations 2. Critical Assessment of Contemporary Approaches to Central Asia 3. Manipulating Post-Soviet Nostalgia: Contrasting Political Narratives and Public Recollections in Central Asia 4. Emerging Japan-EU strategic partnership and its implications for Central Asia 5. De-securitizing the "Silk Road": Uzbekistan’s cooperation agenda with Russia, China, Japan and South Korea in the Post-Karimov Era 6. Connectivity, Energy and Decolonization: Uzbekistan’s strategy vis-à-vis Russia, China, South Korea and Japan 7. Decolonizing the Afghanistan-Central Asian relations Concluding remarks: Seven points for decolonizing agenda setting in Central Asia
Biography
Timur Dadabaev is a Professor of International Relations and the Director of the Special Program for Japanese and Eurasian Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Tsukuba, Japan. His recent books include Transcontinental Silk Road Strategies (2019), Chinese, Japanese and Korean In-roads into Central Asia (2019), Japan in Central Asia (2016) and Identity and Memory in Post-Soviet Central Asia (2015).
[This book...] offers a comprehensive meta-theoretical analysis of international relations (IR) vis-à-vis post-Soviet Central Asia (CA), and an empirical contribution to ‘decolonization’ of the same, with a particular focus on Uzbekistan in terms of empirical evidence to go towards this latter argument. [... it] makes a rich contribution to IR literature and is striking in its novelty. Dadabaev’s foremost contribution to existing IR and CA studies literature is the characterisation of CA IR as being defined by “its own model of modernity and progress” (p. 151, emphasis added). That “the notions of neighbourhood (both subnational and regional), brotherhood, informal community of states as well as norms prevalent to CA region” (p. 151) and political master narratives based on the same (p. 152) shape CA identity and foreign policy behaviour are succinctly reiterated in text’s concluding chapter. Decolonizing Central Asian International Relations lays a solid, albeit incredibly complex, foundation for a “post-doublecolonial” (p. 152) understanding of CA IR. It is essential reading for theoretical IR scholars and a worthwhile read for those interested in Central Asia. -- Diane Tippett, Eurasian Affairs, 2023.
