Patterns of transformation in Uzbekistan

- The recent transformations of Uzbekistan, crucial frontier of issues.
- The selection of articles presented aims to take recent research into account, offering contributions that are distinguished by their innovation and originality.
- Representing a cross-section of current research, the volume will be useful both for those studying Central Asian history and society, and more generally for scholars of processes of transformation.

This volume presents a selection of articles which reflects the many facets of the historic-social research now being done in and around the most populous of the Central Asian republics, ranging from history to political science and anthropology.
In keeping with the theme of the variety of political, social and cultural transformations which have taken place in the recent past, or are still underway, the authors offer a rich and articulated image of a situation that today is little studied, except by a narrow circle of experts.
Can Uzbek society be still legitimately identified essentially as an example of "post-Soviet" development?
Should this development still be viewed as an imperfect transition to a Western model - as is often still posited in post-Socialist transitology?
This book tries to answer these questions by investigating the institutional legacies and contemporary developments, attempting to overcome the commonplaces of past research, and producing new, empirically grounded pictures of the region's institutional situation.

Paolo Sartori, Ph.D. in Islamic Studies (University of Rome "La Sapienza", 2006), is a Research Fellow at the Oriental Institute of the Martin-Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg, where he is working on the research project "Islamic Law in Central Asia Under Tsarist and Soviet Rule: Tashkent Islamic Courts During the Period 1865 to 1928", financed by the Volkswagen Stiftung.
Tommaso Trevisani has done socio-anthropological research in the Ferghana Valley and in Khorezm. Affiliated with the Centre for Development Research (Bonn), he is currently preparing a doctoral thesis on land reforms and the changes in the rural milieu of Uzbekistan at the Freie Universität, Berlin.