This edited volume, produced with the support of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Academy in Bishkek and made freely available under a Creative Commons licence, addresses a genuine lacuna in the literature: the place of Central Asia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, within the theory and practice of international law. Fifteen chapters, arranged across eight thematic parts, move from conceptual framing (Sayapin, Atadjanov, Mihr, Sakhariyev, Rasulov) through politics and institutions, security, human rights, criminal law, trade and investment, environmental law, and legal education. The editor’s stated ambition is to displace Eurocentric narratives by treating the region not as a passive recipient of international norms but as a site where they are interpreted, contested, and reshaped.

The collection’s principal strength lies in its empirical range. Zambrana-Tévar’s reassessment of the January 2022 unrest in Kazakhstan usefully unsettles the “colour revolution” framing that has structured much Western commentary, while Mateeva, Kasybekova, and Esenkulova’s account of the Aral Sea and Taldykol lakes cases demonstrates, with welcome specificity, the gap between treaty ratification and domestic enforcement that recurs throughout the volume. Pecoraro’s treatment of stabilisation clauses in subsoil-use contracts and Shadikhodjaev’s analysis of the WTO Fisheries Subsidies Agreement’s bearing on landlocked members are similarly well-grounded, bringing under-examined instruments into productive contact with regional practice. Emtseva’s closing chapter on the teaching of international law, contrasting Western-oriented private universities with Soviet-influenced public curricula, is among the more original contributions and raises questions of disciplinary reproduction that extend well beyond Central Asia.

The volume is less successful in achieving methodological coherence. The editor’s framework, pluralism against Eurocentrism, is asserted more often than theorised, and chapters vary considerably in depth: some (Atadjanov, Rasulov) engage seriously with theory, while others read as descriptive surveys of ratification status. The absence of a concluding chapter synthesising the case studies against the editorial thesis is a missed opportunity. Coverage is also uneven: Turkmenistan and Tajikistan feature only marginally, a limitation left largely unaddressed.

For scholars of public international law, the volume’s chief contribution is documentary rather than doctrinal: it assembles material on treaty implementation, institutional participation, and legal pedagogy that is difficult to find collected elsewhere, and its open-access status ensures accessibility to regional practitioners and students who might otherwise lack it. Specialists in transitional justice, investment law, or international environmental law will find individual chapters of direct relevance, even if the volume as a whole functions better as a reference point than as a unified argument. It is a useful, timely addition to the still-thin scholarship on Central Asia’s place in the international legal order, and deserves attention from comparativists and regional specialists alike, notwithstanding its uneven analytical register.