Please join the Harriman Institute for a book talk by Kathleen Collins. Moderated by Elise Giuliano.
Few observers anticipated a surge of Islamism in Central Asia after seventy years of forced communist atheism. Yet, Islamism became the dominant form of political opposition in post-Soviet Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. In Politicizing Islam in Central Asia, Kathleen Collins explores the causes, dynamics, and variation in Islamist movements—first within the USSR, and then in the post-Soviet states of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Drawing upon extensive ethnographic and historical research, she explains the strategies and relative success of each Central Asian Islamist movement. Collins argues that in each case, state repression of Islam, by Soviet and post-Soviet regimes, together with the diffusion of religious ideologies, motivated successive waves of Islamist mobilization. Sweeping in scope, this book traces the origins and trajectories of Central Asian Islamist movements from the Soviet era through the Tajik civil war, the Afghan jihad against the United States, and the foreign fighter movement in Syria.
