Background

Central Asia has a mystical resonance in the British imagination, whether through the writings of the Orientalists or the biographers of the Great Game. The colonial withdrawal and Soviet takeover of the region instigated a steady decline in what was once a glorious tradition of scholarship of the region in Britain as the access to it became restricted. The dissolution of the Soviet Union and liberalisation in China and Mongolia have removed barriers to research in Central and Inner Asia, but the UK academic community is only now beginning to fill this vacuum.

In the last decade there have been some initiatives from within the UK (e.g. archaeological work at Merv in Turkmenistan, social anthropology in Central Asian states and Mongolia, research into the politics, international relations and security of Central Asia), and a considerable number of post-graduate dissertations have been, or are being, written on Central and Inner Asian subjects. It is now widely accepted that the region has tremendous potential for academic research in the arts, humanities and social sciences, as well as being of strong contemporary commercial, political and strategic interest to the United Kingdom.

The prospects for research into the archaeology, history, languages and literatures, art and material culture, and contemporary states and societies of Central Asia are exciting, especially when one considers the possibility of collaboration with scholars of an established academic tradition of the region. Central Asian research promises to generate findings that will be of intrinsic academic significance, and to stimulate comparative insights for the study of the surrounding regions. In Cambridge we are committed to direct collaboration with the colleagues in Central Asia, Russia, and China as a priority, and hope to co-ordinate our activities with already well developed initiatives in Japan, Europe and the United States.

Cambridge Central Asia Forum was formed in 2001 (then under the name Cambridge Committee for Central and Inner Asia) and its efforts are concentrated on promoting research within established disciplines, as well as encouraging new multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research on Central and Inner Asia. The seven years of the Forum’s existence demonstrates the high level of interest in the field among UK-based scholars and students, and suggests that there is a need to build further on the work of the initial period, to develop a longer term mechanism to support existing initiatives and to promote new work in the region.