Central Asia is most commonly understood to include the five former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyr-gyzstan and Tajikistan, as well as China’s northwestern province of Xinjiang. The languages of the indigenous populations predominantly belong to the Turkic group of languages or are varieties of Persian, but the history of Russian Tsarist, Soviet and […]
The Far East, as an expression, suggests a great distance from the West, but it may as well evoke a total disconnection with the familiar. China, Japan, and North and South Korea are the dominant nation-states in what is also called, less ethnocentrically, East Asia. Since the end of World War II, and particularly in […]