A Forgotten Core? Mapping the Globality of Central Asia

The article explores Central Asia as a global region in an attempt to explain its dramatic reversal of fortune from a world core to a forgotten cul-de-sac to its current, partially global status. It briefly recounts Central Asia’s “spatially central” situation during the Silk Road centuries, the Islamic Golden Age, and the Mongol Empire, before moving to an investigation of the region’s functional “disappearance” in world affairs during the Early Modern Period. Using geopolitical and cartographic analysis of Central Asia as an increasingly relevant world region, the article then focuses on the Russo-British “Great Game,” followed by an analysis of the region’s “cocooned globality” during the Soviet era. Lastly, the article analyzes the “opening” of Central Asia after 1991 and how the events of 11 September 2001 and the region’s petro-wealth have put it “back on the map” and provided the region with a measurable level of globality.