An online discussion with the author Marlene Laruelle, Director of the Central Asia Program at the George Washington University.

For more information, please visit: https://www.centralasiaprogram.org/vi...

Central Peripheries explores post-Soviet Central Asia through the prism of nation-building. It looks at how states in the region have been navigating the construction of a nation in a post-imperial context where Russia remains the dominant power and cultural reference. Exploring state discourses, academic narratives and different forms of popular nationalist storytelling, the book depicts the complex construction of the national pantheon in the three decades since independence. The second half of the book focuses on Kazakhstan as the most hybrid national construction and a unique case study of nationhood in Eurasia.

Speakers

Author, Marlene Laruelle, Ph.D., is Director, Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies; Director, Central Asia Program; Co-Director, PONARS-Eurasia; and Research Professor of International Affairs at George Washington University. She works on political, social and cultural changes in the post-Soviet space. Marlene’s research explores the transformations of nationalist and conservative ideologies in Russia, nationhood construction in Central Asia, as well as the development of Russia’s Arctic regions.

Diana T. Kudaibergenova is a Lecturer at the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. Prior to that, she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the GRCF COMPASS project at the Centre of Development Studies (Department of Politics and International Studies) also at the University of Cambridge. She studies different intersections of power, regimes, state-building and nationalism.

Sabina Insebayeva is an assistant professor of Central Eurasian Studies at the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, the University of Tsukuba (Japan). She is concurrently a research associate at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore (NUS), where she also was a post-doctoral research fellow. Prior positions include research fellowships with the IERES at the George Washington University (GW) and Fudan University.

Berikbol Dukeyev is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science and International Relations at the Center for Arab and Islamic Studies (the Middle East and Central Asia) at the Australian National University. Berikbol’s research explores the politics of memory, history production, and media studies in Central Asia.