Globalizing Central Asia: Geopolitics and Challenges of Economic Development.: By Marlene Laruelle and Sebastien Peyrouse

GLOBALIZING CENTRAL ASIA: Geopolitics and Challenges of Economic Development. By MARLENE LARUELLE AND SEBASTIEN PEYROUSE. ix and 355 pp.; maps, ills., bibliog., index. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2013. $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 9780765635044. For the last decade, the U.S. State Department has actively promoted globalization in Central Eurasia. Among the most high-profile projects brought to bear in this effort is the "New Silk Road" strategy, as suggested in Hillary Clinton's "Remarks at the New Silk Road Ministerial Meeting," in New York on 22 September 2011. This ambitious plan seeks to reify networks of transregional mobility across Central Asia in the hopes that fees from overland trade between China, India, the Middle East, Europe, and Russia will provide sustainable revenue streams to the former Soviet "stans" and Afghanistan. With the imminent NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan, such an approach also seeks to address the biding concern that the region could devolve into a bastion of Islamic radicalism. The rationale behind this project derives from Thomas Barnett's argument in The Pentagon's New Map (2004) that isolation equates to danger and instability. Barnett advocates for coordinated efforts to integrate isolated regions into global networks as a means of compelling alignment of domestic "rule sets [with] the emerging global rule of democracy, rule of law, and free markets" (pp. 125-127). While substantive investments have been channeled into Central Asia from a variety of sources--IGOs, NGOs, and individual donor states--to facilitate greater cross-border connectivity and develop specific resources, there is concern that cliche-ridden thinking embodied in the phrases "silk road" and "great game" has unduly influenced policy pertaining to the region. The most recent book by Marlene Laruelle and Sebastien Peyrouse entitled Globalizing Central Asia: Geopolitics and Challenges of Economic Development joins their prior works along with the a variety of recent scholarly efforts to expand understanding of the region's complex political and economic landscapes, (such as Alexander Cooley's Great Games Local Rules and Robert Bedeski and Niklas Swanstrom's Eurasia's Ascent in Energy and Geopolitics 2012). What all of these efforts hold in common is a contention that any true commentary on Central Asia must take into account not only the broad geopolitical/geoeconomic forces affecting the region, but also domestic actors, conditions, and institutions. Speaking of Central Asia in broad terms and through referents to distant historical epochs and events risks overgeneralization and can ignore the varied trajectories and coping strategies of each state. Globalizing Central Asia constitutes a much-needed effort to counter this trend by texturing discussion of the region through detailed analysis of both systemic forces of influence and the local realties through which this influence is filtered. While this work's sweeping survey of Central Asia's complex political and economic conditions will be of great interest to many international-relations experts, it is most useful to geographers in its objective and penetrating treatment of individual states, now more than two decades after independence. Over the course of the past decade, Laruelle and Peyrouse have individually and together proven to be among the most perceptive and productive scholars in Central Asian studies. Their erudition, as brought to bear in this book, is virtually unmatched. While neither author is a geographer by training, they have nevertheless produced a work that is fundamentally geographical in nature. Beyond framing the study in terms of economic space and the complex border process that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the notion of scale is implicitly invoked throughout this work. The very structure of the book suggests a multiscalar analysis, wherein the first half outlines the geopolitical and geoeconomic interests and activities of six major external actors influencing Central Asia. …