De-Westphalizing Central Asia: from Soviet biopolitics to a Silk Road mentality

This essay undertakes a project of “de-Westphalization” in the study of Central Asia, challenging the persistence of the Westphalian state model as a colonial legacy. It diagnoses this legacy by analysing the region’s Soviet-era formation through the lens of Foucauldian biopower and Hegelian teleology, arguing that these frameworks continue to shape post-Soviet concepts of sovereignty and citizenship. Adopting the methodological stance of a “wandering historian,” this essay employs an analytical trio to enact its decolonial inquiry: Michel Foucault’s critique of power provides the diagnosis, the allegorical wisdom of Khoja Nasreddin offers the counter-epistemology, and the philosophy of Ibn Sina provides the foundation for an alternative vision of the self. Contrasting the rationalist subject of Western modernity with Ibn Sina’s metaphysical self, the essay proposes a “Silk Road mentality,” a repurposed analytical framework, to recover non-territorial, ethically grounded forms of personhood beyond the confines of the nation-state.