Central Asia today : issues and concerns

Central Asia region, which consists of five republics - Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, is located at the centre of Eurasian region surrounded by the Russian Federation in the north, People's Republic of China in the east, Islamic Republic of Iran and Turkey in the west and Afghanistan and the South Asia region in the south. Since the disintegration of the erstwhile Soviet Union in 1991, renewed interest in Central Asian region has prompted considerable debate. The end of Cold War era has witnessed rise of political and economic nationalism, market economy, geopolitics and geo-economics, re-emergence of religions and related issues, negotiation of ethnicity and identity, demography, migration, concepts of modernity and post modernity, human security, environmental and conservation issues, and history and historiography. This has made Central Asia a strategically important region. Against this background, this book, which is a collection of more than a dozen scholarly papers, discusses the geopolitical and geostrategic significance of the region, besides highlighting the important domestic as well as non-traditional security issues that have a serious effect on the region as a whole. This book could be handy for students, researchers, academicians, mediapersons and policy makers, who have been working on Central Asia.