The term Eurasia, by the way, was coined by Russkis to underlined their influence over what they percieved to be their territories of influence.

Now that Soviet Union is gone, such influence is felt less and less over the years (especially in Caucausus and CA).

Perhaps it is a high time to change the term or stop using it altogether (to me this blog is all about CA).

I can’t believe there was a lack of in terest on Russia here. This country still figures prominently (and not always in good light) in the life of many FSU countries (Georgia, Estonia, Tajikistan?)

Now that we’ve ceased to cover the Caucasus, never focussed on Russia for a lack of interest and expertise and concentrate only on Central Asia, our name might really not be too suitable. But as the discussion above shows, there is so much confusion over terminology that we can definitely stick to it for some more years to come :)

The targeted funding we are receiving from Hivos aims to help blogging take off in the region - as a tool for uncensored self-expression. So that’s the hidden agenda if you want. It’s all in our “About the Partnership” section.

If Eurasia (as the name of the blog suggests) includes Russia, why is there no blog for this country here?

The way this blog is organized (CA and Caucauses) suggest a strange way of separating the countries which belong to “Eurasia”.

Anyone care to explain or you guys don’t get funding to cover Russia? ;)

If so what is this targeted funding all about? Any hidden agenda?

Just curious :)

The point of the post wasn’t really to suggest that we should abandon “Eurasia” because there is some other “true” term that we should be using. Rather, I thought Kotkin’s lecture and paper were interesting because they raise some interesting questions about why we use the terms that we do.

For instance, to Nick’s point, I think it is fine, even useful, to use different terms depending on circumstances. For instance, I doubt a Mongol Commonwealth is really all that useful today, but if we are talking about 1400, it might make a lot of sense. The important part is not finding the perfect term, but understanding the assumptions underpinning the different terms. This is not to say that all definitions are equal; I think Kotkin makes a fair point in criticizing contrived ethno-linguistic patterns as bases for regional groupings.

And to Josh’s point re: “post-Soviet Bureau,” I think Kotkin is arguing exactly that, at least to some extent.

Afghanistan is definitely stuck in limbo if we are talking about Central Asia, the Middle East, or post-Soviet Studies, but what if we talk about a “Persian Commonwealth,” to use Kotkin’s phrasing. Then Afghanistan’s status is not nebulous at all, but other areas like India or Xinjiang are instead.

Of course the rubber hits the road when government and academic departments have to decide how to organize themselves, and which positions to fund; then you can’t be as definitionally agnostic as I am advocating.

The consequence? Afghanistan flounders between Central Asia, the Middle East, and South Asia.

That would make logical sense (just as I thought the State Department should have created a separate Post-Soviet Bureau). But it might be too much like a “Post-British Studies” field, or something. Maybe connecting the region to its Mongolian roots would be more useful, even if it has a lot more in common with the rest of the FSU states.

Maybe this is just one of those natural limitations and frustrations of trying to divide and label the world?

Good point. By way of example, at SOAS, neither the survey class on Central Asian history nor the class on Islam in South Asia covered Afghanistan (and the teachers of both recommended that students wishing to study Afghanistan take the other class!)

This discussion reminds me of the hand wringing that resulted when Condoleeza Rice reordered the U.S. State Department’s bureau structure and made Central Asia (which strikes me as a perfectly acceptable name for the area) part of the South Asian bureau. Does that really make sense, when Turkmenistan has nothing to do with Sri Lanka? Not really. But neither did Uzbekistan have anything to do with Italy when it was in the European bureau (Russia, too, is a tricky beast, incorporating European, steppe, intuit, Caucasian, and even Asiatic regions and cultures).

Maybe this is just one of those natural limitations and frustrations of trying to divide and label the world?

A while back we blogged about a speech he gave: http://www.robertamsterdam.com/2007/03/princeton_prof_on_dictatorship.htm

It would seem sort of off-base these days to say that Russia isn’t successful at achieving its foreign policy goals, for example.

In regards to Kotkin’s beef with Eurasian studies and the politics of identity, I highly recommend contrasting his views with both Amin Malouf and Michael Ignatieff (who before losing his mind to Canadian politics wrote one of the most thoughtful books on nationalism and identity).