Central Asian Survey History

The journal was later born out of a dedicated forum in the early 1980s which was focussed on the broad study of Central Asia and not just a Russian/Soviet angle. 

 The first ever issue of Central Asian Survey was published in 1982 with a prominent academic and defence/security strategist at the helm as Editor, S Enders Wimbush.

For almost a quarter of a century, Marie Bennigsen Broxup, an expert on the Caucasus and Central Asia, edited the journal. She was an academic, activist and pioneer in research of Muslim communities in the area and a strong advocate for the people of Chechnya.

Marie broadened the scope of the journal outside Europe and the US by soliciting contributions from Turkey, China, India, Japan and elsewhere.

In 1997, all articles were archived into a digital library. View them online on the publisher, Taylor & Francis website.

The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) London, established an annual event with speakers including M. Masoom Stanekzai (former Minister of Communication, Government of Afghanistan), Nancy Hatch Dupree (an American historian) and Jonathan Steele (Author/ International affairs columnist).

Anthony Hyman (1946 -1999) was an expert on Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and Central Asia, and a commentator for the BBC World Service for more than twenty years.

An intense five day war between Russia and Georgia broke out in August of 2008. 

Central Asian Survey published a special issue on the war in 2009 titled ‘Georgia Ablaze: War and Revolution in the Caucasus’.

Associate Editor of the journal, Alexander Morrison, based at the University of Oxford, UK, and an historian of empire and colonial warfare curates a special issue, The Russian conquest of Central Asia.

A prize dedicated to the memory and scholarly achievements of Irene Hilgers, a German scholar of Uzbekistan, was set up in 2015. She died tragically young in 2008, shortly before completing her doctoral dissertation at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany. The prize celebrates the work of early-career scholars in the field.

Her dissertation was published posthumously as ‘Why Do Uzbeks Have to be Muslims? Exploring Religiosity in the Ferghana Valley’. A collection of papers from the prize winners is available online.

Rico Isaacs, Professor of International Politics at the University of Lincoln, UK, is the current Editor. His work focuses on political institutions and nation-building in Central Asia.

In 2021, CAS published a unique special issue exploring the social role that the art and cultural scene plays in society, and the issues raised by cultural production and the shape it could take. Contributions covered performance, architecture, music, dancing, architecture and literature.

One of the most popular and downloaded CAS articles of all time, ‘A void in Central Asia research: climate change’, was published in 2022, which assesses the extent to which the academic community engaged with climate change in Central Asia between 1991 and 2021.

One of the journal’s most popular articles was published in 2023, ‘The cat in Mongolian society: a good, bad and ugly animal’, which explores the symbolism and cultural significance that Mongols bestow on cats and how it has changed throughout Mongolian history.

The journal also publishes several book reviews every year, including those written in regional or other global languages,so as to further disseminate knowledge about the area. 

Two new Editors joined the editorial team in 2023, Zhanibek Arynov of Nazarbayev University, Astana, Kazakhstan and Philipp Lottholz  of University of Marburg, Germany.