2003 Central Asia and Its Neighbors Regional Policy Symposium

Senior Scholars

William Fierman is the director of the Inner Asian and Uralic National Resources Center as well as the Center for the Languages of the Central Asian Region; he is an associate professor of Uralic and Altaic studies at Indiana University. Prior to this, he taught political science courses at the University of Tennessee for eleven years. He has served as a consultant for the evaluation of Radio Liberty Central Asian Services, and Soros Foundation - Kyrgyzstan, and Soros Foundation - Kazakhstan. Dr. Fierman is the author of the book, Language Planning and National Development: The Uzbek Experience (1991), and numerous academic articles and chapters, including "Changing Urban Demography and the Prospects of Nationalism in Kazakhstan," Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism (2000), "Language and Identity in Kazakhstan: Formulations in Policy Documents," Communist and Post-Communist Studies (1998), and "Political Development in Uzbekistan: Democratization?," Conflict, Cleavage, and Change in Central Asia and the Caucasus (1997).  He is the recipient of several research grants and fellowships, including two IREX grants and a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship. Dr. Fierman received his PhD in political science from Harvard University.

Dru Gladney is a professor of Asian studies and anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.  He has been a Fulbright Research Scholar twice, and has conducted long-term field research in China, Central Asia, and Turkey.  He has authored over 50 academic articles and chapters, as well as the following books:  Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People's Republic (Harvard University Press, 1996, 1st edition 1991) Ethnic Identity in China: The Making of a Muslim Minority Nationality  (Harcourt Brace, 1998); Making Majorities: Constituting the Nation in Japan, China, Korea, Malaysia, Fiji, Turkey, and the US (Editor, Stanford University Press, 1998); and  Dislocating China: Muslims, Minorities, and Other Sub-Altern Subjects  (London, C. Hurst, forthcoming).  As a consultant to the World Bank, UNHCR, the Ford Foundation, National Academy of Sciences, and UNESCO, Dr. Gladney has been regularly featured on CNN, Voice of America, National Public Radio and in Newsweek, Time Magazine, Honolulu Advertiser, International Herald Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times. His most recent article is: “China’s Interests in Central Asia: Energy and Ethnicity” in Energy and Conflict in Central Asia and the Caucasus, Robert Ebel and Rajan Menon, editors, 2000. He received his PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Washington, Seattle.

Roger Kangas is a professor of Central Asian studies at the College of International and Security Studies at the George C. Marshall European Center for Strategic Studies in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany.  He is a specialist on political and economic matters in Central Asia and the Caspian Sea basin.  Prior to joining the Marshal Center in 1999, Dr. Kangas was the Central Asian course coordinator for the US Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute and adjunct professor at Georgetown University.  From 1996-1998, Dr. Kangas was deputy director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at The Johns Hopkins University--Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and a Fellow of the Johns Hopkins University Foreign Policy Institute in Washington, DC.  Since 1992, Dr. Kangas has worked with and advised the USAF Special Operations School, the National Democratic Institute, IREX, ACTR, AED, USIA, USAID, and other US government agencies on issues relating to Central Asia, as well as Russia and the Southern Caucasus.  Dr. Kangas graduated from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in 1985 and earned his PhD in political science at Indiana University in 1991. 

Kathleen Kuehnast is a cultural anthropologist and research associate at the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at the George Washington University. She recently concluded a year of post-doctorate research as a research scholar at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies and as a Mellon Foreign Area Fellow at the Library of Congress, where she focused on the topic of "Islam and the New Politics of Gender Ideologies in Central Asia." Dr. Kuehnast received her doctorate in anthropology from the University of Minnesota. Her doctoral research focused on the politics of gender ideologies in the post-Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan, where she spent a total of 22 months between 1990 and 1999 conducting both academic and applied research. She is the recipient of numerous research grants and fellowships, including an IREX grant; the Wenner-Gren Anthropological Fellowship for Dissertation Research; the Social Science Research Council Doctoral Dissertation Research; and the Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship of the University of Minnesota. Her fifteen publications include the recent "From Pioneers to Entrepreneurs: Young Women, Consumerism, and the ‘World Picture’ in Kyrgyzstan," Central Asian Survey (1998). Dr. Kuehnast’s anthropological research has also taken her into the field of international development and the study of "transitional poverty." She has conducted several studies on the impact of economic change in Kyrgyzstan for the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. She has co-authored two books from these studies: Women and Gender Relations: The Kyrgyz Republic in Transition (1998); and A Generation at Risk: Children in the Central Asian Republics of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan (1997).

John Schoeberlein is the director of the program on Central Asia and the Caucasus at Harvard University, which he was instrumental in founding in 1993.  His research focuses on identity, ethnicity, gender, nationality, and community organization among the Islamic peoples of "Greater" Central Asia, southern Russia and the Caucasus.  Dr. Schoeberlein has taught courses in the anthropology, history and politics of the region as lecturer on Central Asian Studies at Harvard University since 1993.  During 1998-1999, he headed the United Nations' Ferghana Valley Development Programme, working on participatory approaches to conflict resolution in the region.  During 2000-2001, he was director of the Central Asia Project of the International Crisis Group, working to diminish the possibilities of conflict in the region, and he continues to be involved in this project.  His current research includes a study of the impact of national state formation in Central Asia on identity, investigation of the community level institutions which effect the potential development of violent inter-communal conflict in the region, and research on means of promoting community-level participation in economic reform.  He has done development consulting work on the potential of local communities to participate in economic reform efforts, including major survey research in Uzbekistan.  He gives frequent consultations to various governmental and international organizations and the press regarding developments in Central Asia. Dr. Schoeberlein received his PhD in social anthropology from Harvard University. 

Junior Scholars

Kyle Evered is an assistant professor of geography at Illinois State University.  He received both his PhD and a graduate certificate in Russian and East European studies from the University of Oregon in 2002, and his dissertation “Romancing the Region” dealt with the varied imagery of a “Turkic World” that has emerged in Turkey since the early 1990s.  Dr. Evered was awarded a 1998-1999 Fulbright grant to study political and environmental issues in Turkey. His current research focuses on contemporary constructs of Turkish nationalism and the increasing centrality of Turkey’s place in a Turkic region in the territorial, cartographic, and other special representations of the nation-state.

Mark Johnson received his BA degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his MA and PhD from Columbia University.  His training and research have focused on Russian and Soviet History and the history of Soviet education.  He has also done extensive consulting and educational policy work throughout the former Soviet Union, including an assessment of the Open Society Institute’s undergraduate exchange program, and an assessment of the American University of Kyrgyzstan for the US Department of State.  His current research focuses on the effects of various international assistance programs and educational exchanges in shaping post-Soviet reform.

Irina Liczek is a PhD candidate at the political science department at the New School University in New York.  She earned her MA degree in gender studies and feminist theory from the New School.  Her MA thesis, “The Masquerade of Equality: Women and Politics in Romania”, is one of the few available accounts of women’s political opportunities in post-socialist Romania and was published in Women in Post-Communism.  Ms. Liczek’s current research examines the circumstances whereby since the end of the Cold War, conservative Islamic societies, notably Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan, established new institutional agencies to advance the status of women’s rights.  Ms. Liczek’s research will be the first comprehensive analysis to capture the international and domestic aspects that brought about changes in the parameters of gender relations in the post-Cold War Central Asia.  Ms. Liczek has worked extensively in Central Asia for UNDP, wrote articles related to gender mainstreaming in the region and undertook several high level consultations for various United Nations agencies.

Eric McGlinchey received his PhD in politics from Princeton University in December 2002.  He is currently a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University’s Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies where he is expanding his dissertation, “Paying for Patronage: Regime Change in Central Asia,” into a book-length manuscript.

Michael Rouland is a PhD candidate in the history department at Georgetown University.  He is currently completing his dissertation, “Music and the Making of the Kazakh Nation, 1920-1936,” which addresses how the Soviet state utilized a popular music policy as part of a modernization campaign to promote nationalism in Kazakhstan.  This spring, he is teaching a course entitled “Nation, Empire, and Central Asia in the 20th Century, “ that explores the crisis of modernity that drove Central Asia into the Soviet fold as well as the shaping of national identity and persistence of cultural forms under Soviet pressures to homogenize.

Regine Spector is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, studying comparative politics with a regional focus on Central Asia.  Prior to enrolling at Berkeley, she worked for almost two years as a research assistant in the foreign Policy Studies Program of the Brookings Institution.  Her work at Brooking encompassed a broad range of issues including Central Asian security and politics as well as energy policy in Russia and the Caspian.  While there, she also co-authored an article in the Washington Quarterly entitled “Central Asia: More than Islamic Extremists.”  In September 2001, she and Fiona Hill published a Brookings conference report on energy policy in the Caspian Basin.  She hold her BA in international relations and an MA in international policy studies from Stanford University.

Amanda Wooden is an assistant professor of international and comparative political economy in the department of political science and women’s studies at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago.  Her area of expertise is in environmental and water policy and political economy as applied to Central Asia.  Dr. Wooden’s experience in the region includes work with the Civic Education Project (CEP) as a visiting lecturer in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, as academic coordinator for the Caucasus region for CEP, dissertation field research in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan, and extensive travel in these countries as well as Armenia and Azerbaijan.  Her most recent research on the region includes: environmental policy as an indicator and guide for the sequence of political and economic reform in the Caucasus and Central Asia; comparable approaches and remedies to deal with the Aral Sea Crisis in Central Asia including evaluations of the role of IFIs, bilateral and international donors and national political institutional responses to the disaster; and comparative water policy in the former Soviet Union.

Jonathan Zartman received his MA in international relations, economics and politics at the University of Denver’s Graduate School of International Service in 1998, and is current working on his PhD.  From his studies, he has become interested in understanding state policy formation and conflict resolution, particularly in Tajikistan.  This interest led him to Samarkand, Uzbekistan to study Farsi/Tajiki in 1998.  During the 2000-2001 academic year, he taught international economics, international relations, and American foreign policy at the Technological University of Tajikistan in Dushanbe.  During his time there, he visited several different regions and toured a number of enterprises. Since then, Mr. Zartman has been writing his dissertation on the factors supporting the sustainability of the peace agreement ending the Tajik civil war.