This volume offers a systematic comparison of political change, leadership style and stability in Central Asia. The contributors, all leading international specialists on the region, offer focused case studies of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan comparing how the regimes have further consolidated their power and resisted change.

How does empire affect the route to successor sovereign state systems and the features of the sovereignty of these systems? This unique systematic comparison of empires and of their consequences for sovereignty in the Middle East and Central Asia brings theory on empire and sovereignty to bear on empirical variation across the two regions. The novel approach to understanding the political structures of states in two significant areas of the non-European world offers an important comparative discussion of post-imperial development and sovereignty. It raises a clear set of research questions...

With the collapse of communism, post-communist societies scrambled to find meaning to their new independence. Central Asia was no exception. Events, relationships, gestures, spatial units and objects produced, conveyed and interpreted meaning. The new power container of the five independent states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan would significantly influence this process of signification. Post-Soviet Central Asia is an intriguing field to examine this transformation: a region which did not see an organised independence movement develop prior to Soviet...