Registan.net

Selig S. Harrison has a curious relationship with reality—that is to say, not much of one. Three years ago, he wrote in Foreign Affairs that the U.S. was to blame for North Korea’s violation of the Agreed Framework he helped to negotiate with Jimmy Carter in 1994. While the tone of the piece was obviously […]

First off, here are two excellent segments from Al Jazeera English on the issues facing the NWFP and FATA in Pakistan.

Oh look, there’s Bill Roggio arguing with Pakistanis about the issues facing the tribal areas. It is interesting to hear Jalil Afridi, the editor of the Frontier Post, lend his perspective. He cops to being […]

Is Zenia Helbig really a whistleblower? Uhh, no. But she certainly had no right to be mocked like that by her peers. How shameful—for them. Zenia made a dumb comment and got nailed for it; these things happen, and they suck, but she isn’t a bad person. The AAA should be ashamed of itself […]

Here is a guest post on the AAASS conference from friend of Registan.net David Reeves.
Another year, another AAASS conference. Not as much drunken debauchery as last, year, which was surprising since this year’s conference was held in New Orleans. People tended to go to bed earlier than before, perhaps they had learned their lesson. Still […]

In today’s New York Times, Ilan Greenberg has a story on a topic of special interest to me: tribe, pastoralism, and politics in Central Asia (and beyond).
Washington University’s Michael Frachetti has been conducting research in Eastern Kazakhstan on how Bronze Age pastoral societies “employed flexible temporal and spatial patterns of mobility to negotiate ecological constraints […]

The end of this post was one of the funnier things I saw today.
One of the odder things I recall being told this year was to read Jihad because it is “mentioned a lot in the literature.” I can’t for the life of me really understand why, but I suppose it explains a bit why […]

Things I am proud to have worked into my thesis chapter on Kazakhstan:

Roman Vassilenko’s YouTube account
Kazakhstan’s rich backcatalogue of US newspaper advertisements
The response to Borat (forthcoming, anyway)

It was getting way too serious. Thank goodness for a section on public diplomacy to lighten things up…

The BBC has got an interesting story on its website about advanced geometry in Islamic art:
Researchers in the US have found 15th Century examples [of Islamic art] that use the concept of quasicrystalline geometry.
This indicates intuitive understanding of complex mathematical formulae, even if the artisans had not worked out the underlying theory, the study […]

Without going into too much detail, my master’s thesis explores how differences between domestic political competition in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan explain the differences between the two states’ foreign policies. Part of this will involve exploring certain key moments in foreign policy for each of the two. For Uzbekistan, the post 9/11 strategic partnership with the […]

In the interest of stimulating discussion, Almaz Tolymbek has agreed to share his Ann Arbor CESS paper analyzing leadership styles in Kazakhstan with Registan.net readers. Tolymbek relates questions of national character to a typology of leaders, based on survey research that indicates Kazakhs want more than a strong leader–they are looking for an inspiring one. […]