The History of Perestroika in Central Asia

DATES: 30 May - 1 June 2013

Convenor: Dr. Irina Morozova (Seminar for Central Asian Studies, Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany)

Conference languages: Russian and English (professional simultaneous translation is provided)

Hosted by Aigine Cultural Research Center

Sponsored by VolkswagenStiftung and Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung

The conference aims to shed a critical light at the processes of academic knowledge production on the history of late socialism and perestroika in Central and Inner Asia. The process of institutionalisation of Central Asia-focused research in the social sciences and humanities started in the 1980s with the launch of perestroika in the USSR and the Mongolian People’s Republic. The re-conceptualisation of socialist legacies and the systemic change of the late 1980s - beginning of the 1990s had a tremendous impact upon the way academic understanding of the region is now shaped. The conference will bring together international scholars actively engaged in researching late socialist Central and Inner Asia.

Our knowledge of socio-political developments, communal life, identities and religion in late socialist Central and Inner Asia has been greatly influenced by conventional approaches on the causes of socialism’s deconstruction, which are still reflected in people's attitudes towards the reform. The ideological trends, which resurfaced with perestroika, have been determined by the course of social transformation and complex inter-dependencies of various international and transregional actors. The conference is organised by the international group of scholars, pursuing a comparative analysis of the social groups’ transformation, socio-political dynamics and reform during perestroika, the status of different elites vis-à-vis Moscow and particularities in cultural and religious institutions and identities in Central and Inner Asia before and after the USSR’s and CMEA’s disintegration.