Environment and Post-Soviet Transformation in Kazakhstan’s Aral Sea Region

2021-10-25
Environment and Post-Soviet Transformation in Kazakhstan’s Aral Sea Region
Author: William Wheeler
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2021-10-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1800080336
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The Aral Sea is well known for its devastating regression over the second half of the twentieth century, and for its recent partial restoration. Environment and Post-Soviet Transformation in Kazakhstan’s Aral Sea Region is the first book to explore what these monumental changes have meant to those living on the sea’s shores. Following the fluctuating fortunes of the pre-Soviet, Soviet and post-Soviet fisheries, the book shows how the vast environmental changes the region has undergone cannot be disentangled from the transformations of Soviet socialism and postsocialism. This ethnographic perspective prompts a critical rethinking of the category of environmental disaster through which the region is predominantly known. Tracing how the sea’s retreat and partial return have been apprehended by diverse local actors in the former port of Aral’sk and surrounding fishing villages, as well as by scientists, bureaucrats and international development workers, William Wheeler draws out the multiple meanings environmental change acquires within different contexts. This study of how people make their lives amidst overlapping ecological and political-economic upheavals is rich in ethnographic detail that is both rooted in Soviet legacies and alive to the new transnational connections that are reshaping the region. Offering a rigorous political ecology of Soviet socialism and after, the book is a major contribution to the nascent environmental anthropology of Central Asia. It will be of interest to environmental anthropologists, environmental historians, and scholars of all disciplines working on Central Asia and the former USSR.

Environment Post-Soviet Transformation

2021-10-25
Environment Post-Soviet Transformation
Author: WHEELER
Publisher:
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2021-10-25
Genre: Aral Sea Region (Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan)
ISBN: 9781800080348
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Presents a political ecology of life amid overlapping environmental and political upheaval. Once the fourth largest lake in the world, Kazakhstan's Aral Sea dried into an unrecognizable fraction of its size during a period of dramatic political change. Through the experiences of local fisheries across the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, Environment and Post-Soviet Transformation in Kazakhstan's Aral Sea Region explores the diverse ways people in different socioeconomic contexts understand environmental change. In this book, William Wheeler offers a rigorous political ecology of life amid overlapping upheavals, attentive both to the legacies of Sovietism and the possibilities of transnationalism.

The Transformation of Central Asia

2018-08-06
The Transformation of Central Asia
Author: Pauline Jones Luong
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2018-08-06
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1501731335
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With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, former Communist Party leaders in Central Asia were faced with the daunting task of building states where they previously had not existed: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Their task was complicated by the institutional and ideological legacy of the Soviet system as well as by a more actively engaged international community. These nascent states inherited a set of institutions that included bloated bureaucracies, centralized economic planning, and patronage networks. Some of these institutions survived, others have mutated, and new institutions have been created. Experts on Central Asia here examine the emerging relationship between state actors and social forces in the region. Through the prism of local institutions, the authors reassess both our understanding of Central Asia and of the state-building process more broadly. They scrutinize a wide array of institutional actors, ranging from regional governments and neighborhood committees to transnational and non-governmental organizations. With original empirical research and theoretical insight, the volume's contributors illuminate an obscure but resource-rich and strategically significant region.

Environmental Humanities in Central Asia

2023-08-30
Environmental Humanities in Central Asia
Author: Jeanne Féaux de la Croix
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2023-08-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000983196
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This book is the first collection to showcase the flourishing field of environmental humanities in Central Asia. A region larger than Europe, Central Asia possesses an astounding range of environments, from deserts to glaciated peaks. The volume brings into conversation scholarship from history to social anthropology, demonstrating the contribution that interdisciplinary and engaged research offers to many urgent issues in the region: from the history of conservationism to the tactics of environmental movements, from literary engagements with ‘pure nature’ to the impact of fossil fuel extraction. The collection focuses on the Central Asian republics of the former USSR, where a complex layering of nomadic and sedentary, Turkic and Persianate, Islamic and Soviet cultures ends up affecting human relations with distinct environments. Featuring state-of-the-art contributions, the book enquires into human-environment relations through a broad-brush typology of interactive modes: to extract, protect, enspirit and fear. Broadening the scope of analysis beyond a consideration of power, the authors bring into focus alternative local cosmologies and the unintended consequences of environmental policy. The volume highlights scholarship from within Central Asia as well as expertise elsewhere, offering readers diverse modes of knowledge-production in the environmental humanities. This book is an important resource for researchers and students of the environmental humanities, sustainability, history, politics, anthropology and geography of Asia, as well as Soviet and Post-Soviet studies.

Energy, Environment and Geopolitics in Eurasia

2023-12-22
Energy, Environment and Geopolitics in Eurasia
Author: Norman A. Graham
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2023-12-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1003823645
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This book advances our understanding of security and its intricate interactions with geopolitics and the environment in Eurasia. Norman A. Graham and Şuhnaz Yılmaz focus on Eurasia, where the energy-water-food nexus has emerged as a vital aspect of political economy and increasinglyas a decisive factor for human security. As clearly revealed during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this nexus rests on a precarious balance. Graham and Yilmaz argue that Central Eurasia is currently “Running on Empty” and highlight the key environmental challenges, including water quantity and quality and food security. The authors draw on their extensive fieldwork in countries including Azerbaijan, China, Georgia, Kazakhstan, the Russian Federation, Turkey, and Uzbekistan to assess the interests and impact of pivotal actors and evaluate the competition and complementarities of these actors regarding water, energy, food security, and foreign policy imperatives. They also examine the broader interaction and implications of security at multiple levels by analyzing the local, national, and international factors in light of geopolitical and environmental challenges. Taking a novel and highly interdisciplinary approach, this book will be an important resource for students and scholars of energy and food security, political economy, international conflict and cooperation, and natural resource politics.

The Hungry Steppe

2018-11-15
The Hungry Steppe
Author: Sarah Cameron
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 395
Release: 2018-11-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501730452
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The Hungry Steppe examines one of the most heinous crimes of the Stalinist regime, the Kazakh famine of 1930–33. More than 1.5 million people perished in this famine, a quarter of Kazakhstan's population, and the crisis transformed a territory the size of continental Europe. Yet the story of this famine has remained mostly hidden from view. Drawing upon state and Communist party documents, as well as oral history and memoir accounts in Russian and in Kazakh, Sarah Cameron reveals this brutal story and its devastating consequences for Kazakh society. Through the most violent of means the Kazakh famine created Soviet Kazakhstan, a stable territory with clearly delineated boundaries that was an integral part of the Soviet economic system; and it forged a new Kazakh national identity. But this state-driven modernization project was uneven. Ultimately, Cameron finds, neither Kazakhstan nor Kazakhs themselves were integrated into the Soviet system in precisely the ways that Moscow had originally hoped. The experience of the famine scarred the republic for the remainder of the Soviet era and shaped its transformation into an independent nation in 1991. Cameron uses her history of the Kazakh famine to overturn several assumptions about violence, modernization, and nation-making under Stalin, highlighting, in particular, the creation of a new Kazakh national identity, and how environmental factors shaped Soviet development. Ultimately, The Hungry Steppe depicts the Soviet regime and its disastrous policies in a new and unusual light.

Transformation Index BTI 2012: Regional Findings Post-Soviet Eurasia

2012-06-27
Transformation Index BTI 2012: Regional Findings Post-Soviet Eurasia
Author: Bertelsmann Stiftung
Publisher: Verlag Bertelsmann Stiftung
Total Pages: 541
Release: 2012-06-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 386793455X
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Der politische und wirtschaftliche Entwicklungsstand eines Landes ist messbar: Im internationalen Vergleich lassen sich die Leistungen politischer Entscheidungsträger und die daraus resultierenden Transformationsprozesse gegenüberstellen. Den Entwicklungsstand in 128 Entwicklungs- und Transformationsländern dokumentiert die Bertelsmann Stiftung alle zwei Jahre in ihrem Transformationsindex: Anhand ausführlicher Ländergutachten beleuchtet der Index die Wirkung von Reformstrategien auf dem Weg zu rechtsstaatlicher Demokratie und sozialer Marktwirtschaft. Er gibt damit Akteuren in Politik, Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft und Wissenschaft wichtige Hinweise und Impulse für ihre Arbeit.Der Untersuchungszeitraum des "Transformationsindex BTI 2012" reicht vom Frühjahr 2009 bis zum Frühjahr 2011. Die sieben ergänzenden Materialbände "Regional Findings" beinhalten die ausführlichen englischsprachigen Regionalüberblicke und Langfassungen der Länderberichte zu den sieben untersuchten Regionen: Ostmittel- und Südosteuropa; Lateinamerika und Karibik; West- und Zentralafrika; Naher Osten und Nordafrika; Östliches und südliches Afrika; Postsowjetisches Eurasien; Asien und Ozeanien. The peaceful transition of authoritarian regimes towards democracy and a market economy poses enormous challenges for citizens and politicians alike. Around the world, under widely differing conditions and with varying degrees of success, reform-oriented groups are struggling to democratize their countries and to strengthen the market economy. Good governance is the decisive factor for the success or failure of any transition process. The Bertelsmann Stiftung's Transformation Index is published every two years. The global ranking measures and compares transition processes worldwide on the basis of detailed country reports. Comparing systematically the status of democracy and market economy on an international basis, the BTI also provides comprehensive data on the quality of political manage

The New Spirit of Hospitality

2023-10-24
The New Spirit of Hospitality
Author: Rodanthi Tzanelli
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2023-10-24
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1837531625
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Through methodological elaborations on case studies, Tzanelli explains that we have entered a new era of tourism and hospitality mobilities dominated by crises of cultural representation and host presence.