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Home > Initiatives > Central Asia Initiative

Central Asia Initiative

With Central Asia attracting renewed attention for its strategic importance, the UCLA Asia Institute launched an initiative, in the spring of 2008, to promote understanding of the region's histories and cultures as well as its place in global affairs.

With generous support from the UCLA International Institute, the Asia Institute will lead a three-year Central Asia Initiative in collaboration with the Center for European and Eurasian Studies and the Center for Near Eastern Studies. Promoting the inter-disciplinary and inter-regional study of Central Asia, the initiative serves as an 'intellectual crossroads' at which scholars working on India, China, the Middle East and Europe can exchange ideas with visiting specialists on Central Asia itself. Our goal is to offer the location and opportunities for the scattered community of scholars, students and citizens in California working on or interested in Central Asia to meet to advance scholarship and understanding of the region.

The organizing theme for the first year was "Mobility and Governability." Highlighting the significance of Central Asia as both a distinct geographic region with its own discrete traditions and a site of repeated migrations and conquests, a series of films, workshops and conferences encouraged reflection on how the mobility of Central Asian peoples has allowed for conquest inside and outside Central Asia as well as for the ungovernability that has faced rulers from outside the region.

In line with the trans-regional aims of the Initiative, forthcoming projects for 2009 include a seminar series on historical exchanges between Central and South Asia, a conference on Tibetan merchant networks and an ongoing seminar series on Afghanistan in transnational perspective.

Central Asia Initiative Steering Committee

• Nile Green, Professor of History, Committee Chair
• Nancy Levine, Professor of Anthropology
• Helen Rees, Professor of Ethnomusicology
• Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Director, Center for India and South Asia and Doshi Professor of History

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