Few observers anticipated a surge of Islamism in Central Asia, after seventy years of forced communist atheism. Muslims do not inevitably support Islamism, a modern political ideology of Islam. Yet, Islamism became the dominant form of political opposition in post-Soviet Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. In Politicizing Islam in Central Asia, Kathleen Collins explores the causes, dynamics, and variation in Islamist movements-first within the USSR, and then in the post-Soviet states of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Drawing upon extensive ethnographic and historical research on Islamist mobilization, she explains the strategies and relative success of each Central Asian Islamist movement. Collins argues that in each case, state repression of Islam, by Soviet and post-Soviet regimes, together with the diffusion of religious ideologies, motivated Islamist mobilization.

Sweeping in scope, this book traces the dynamics of Central Asian Islamist movements from the Soviet era through the Tajik civil war, the Afghan jihad against the US, and the foreign fighter movement joining the Syrian jihad.

SPEAKER

Kathleen Collins is the Arleen C. Carlson Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. Collins' research explores the dynamics of clan and religious identities, democratization, Islamist mobilization, and conflict in Eurasia. Collins is a recipient of the national Carnegie Scholar Award for “innovative scholarship,” and of the McKnight Land-Grant Professorship Award. Collins is author of: Clan Politics and Regime Transition in Central Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2006), which won the Central Eurasian Studies Society Award for the Best Book in the Social Sciences on Central Eurasia. Her second and recent book is Politicizing Islam in Central Asia: From the Russian Revolution to the Afghan and Syrian Jihads (Oxford University Press, 2023). Collins has presented her work to the Helsinki Commission, the Department of State, the Department of Defense, NATO, and the UNDP, among other agencies, as well as to academic audiences across the U.S. and internationally. Collins is currently the recipient of a Fulbright Global Scholars Award, and is pursuing research for a third book on postcommunist military reform.