CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

In this talk Dr. Rucker-Chang employs a postcolonial frame to highlight how the depiction of Roma in post-Yugoslav film render them postcolonial “objects,” knowable by way of difference constructed through racial hierarchies, stereotypes, and culture.

In this lecture, Dr. Austin Charron discusses findings from his PhD dissertation concerning socio-spatial identities among residents of Crimea who were internally displaced to mainland Ukraine following Russia’s annexation of the peninsula in 2014. Building on previous research into Crimean identities from before the annexation, Charron’s work examines evolving discourses of regional and national belonging among Crimea’s ethnic Crimean Tatars, Ukrainians, and Russians now living in the Ukrainian cities of Kyiv and Lviv, and considers the question of whether these groups may constitute a diaspora.

Timothy Nunan is a Lecturer (Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) and a Freigeist Fellow at the Center for Global History at the Free University of Berlin. He is the author of Humanitarian Invasion: Global Development in Cold War Afghanistan (Cambridge UP, 2016). In this lecture he discusses how the Islamic Republic of Iran was founded on the slogan of “Neither East Nor West”–neither alignment with the Soviet Union nor the United States. The end of the 1980s saw, however, a rapprochement between Tehran and Moscow that would form the basis for relations between the countries to the present day. Drawing on archival resources and memoirs from the former Soviet Union, Iran, and Afghanistan, this talk explores how CPSU General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and Iranian elites such as Hashemi Rafsanjani and Ali Khamene’i abandoned pretensions of leading the global anti-imperialist movement and sought to use relations with the other to navigate world politics between the end of the Cold War and the Gulf War.

In this lecture, Dr. Nikita Zakharov explores the political economy of media harassment in Russia by using a unique monthly dataset on the incidents of harassment of the media in Russian cities between 2004 and 2017 to establish political cycles driven by local elections. This research analyzed frequency of harassment incidents during the two months before a local election – a period that coincides with the official period of the electoral campaign. The lecture will also discuss how the effect differs with respect to the level of local election.

This talk examines Soviet nationalities policy in Central Asia through the lens of a prosopographical overview of ethnic Kazakhs within the Kazakhstan’s pre-war nomenklatura, using biographical data to provide a statistical picture of Kazakhstan’s Party elite. Analyzing those Kazakhs who served as members of the republic’s Party Bureau between 1920 and 1937—examining when and where they were born, where they went to school, and when and how they joined the Party—offers insight into the broader process of elite formation in the early Soviet period, revealing clear patterns in terms of who became a Bolshevik and what types of people achieved political success in the first two decades of Soviet rule. It also illustrates the enduring resonance of the Russian colonial presence in Kazakhstan in determining the course of revolutionary change in the republic, and indeed its political landscape across the following decades.

This talk introduces key themes from Scott Levi’s recent book on the Khanate of Khoqand, a surprisingly dynamic state that emerged over the course of the eighteenth century in eastern Uzbekistan’s Ferghana Valley. The lecture addresses the ways that political, economic, technological and environmental developments influenced life in Central Asia and contributed to the rise, and fall, of Khoqand. It also identifies a number of ways that Central Asians influenced the policies of their much larger imperial neighbors on the Eurasian periphery – especially Tsarist Russia and Qing China.

The past three decades are marked by substantial improvements in many Reproductive Health indicators across the countries of Central Asia. Increases in aggregate levels of knowledge, access, and practice of family planning are particularly impressive and represent substantial improvements in the health and well being of women. However, are these benefits shared equally across all women? Employing qualitative and quantitative data Cynthia traces the impact of cultural norms and structural factors on limiting the ability of rural, less educated, unmarried, and childless men and women to reap the benefits of reproductive health improvements.

When you enter to field to collect data for your dissertation or thesis, what are some basic safety precautions you need to consider? What does it mean to receive informed consent from individuals in a Tajikistani village? This short talk will delve into these and other related topics for you to consider as you prepare to enter the field. Christopher Whitsel has been involved with education in Central Asia since 1999, including teaching English in Uzbekistan, conducting fieldwork in Tajikistan, and most recently working at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan. He has published several articles addressing education and inequality of access, including trends in inequality in the Soviet and Post-Soviet periods, gender differences, as other social inequalities in education. More specifically, his work highlights barriers that families face in sending their children to school and the ways that community differences constrain their decisions. In addition to his academic endeavors, Dr. Whitsel has worked with international organizations like UNICEF-Tajikistan and the Open Society Foundation on projects about education, as well as social aspects of poverty in Tajikistan.

China’s on-going policies of transforming Uyghurs have been increasing more rapidly than ever before. In this talk, Mr. Aksu discusses the main policies that the Chinese government is enforcing in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region; how did state policies influence the Uyghur people, and how different are these policies from previous ones. He explores these transforming policies by providing both quantitative and qualitative examples in terms of labor transfer, language change, and the “Re-education” Camps.

Patronage is often described as the ‘glue’ that binds Central Asian patronal presidents and elites, creating strong material incentives to uphold the political status quo. With one hand, the president rewards loyal elites, giving them access to ‘the fruits of office’ and other valued resources; with the other, the president punishes wayward elites, taking away whatever benefits they have accumulated and closing off access to future ones. Yet, material conceptions of patronage-based rule are incomplete without consideration of norms–the rules and expectations governing ‘who gets what, how’ and how much. As a routinized practice, patronage entails a ‘mutual promise-keeping’: just as elites agree to comport themselves according to expectations, the president promises to do the same, enforcing patronage norms as needed. Presidential legitimacy depends in large part on how well he is able to satisfy the demands of those closest to him (patronage norm #1: differential access) while also meeting his obligations to the broader set of elites whose support he depends upon to stay in power (patronage norm #2: fair play). To do otherwise not only risks alienating a broad swath of elites, but is also likely to make the president appear weak and ineffective, a ruler who is controlled by his inner circle rather than in control of it. The cases of President Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan under President Karimov illustrate the argument.