This study uses the experiences of Swedish prisoners of war in the Great Northern War (1700–1721), to nuance the connection between coercion and imperial expansion. It examines the discursive and practical applications of coercion, coerced actors in settlements, and religious missions. Based on ego-documents as well as administrative material, it shows how the 25,000 Swedish prisoners presented themselves as, and were perceived as, prisoners, slaves, serfs, settlers, and missionaries—all in parallel. With examples of various male and female actors, this study shows how their experiences were classed and gendered. With its focus on prisoners of war in Russia’s eastward expansion, this study thereby broadens our view of early modern imperial ambition, and the diverse roles of coerced actors in it.

This article examines the geojurisprudential turn in international law in the context of an emerging multipolar order, focusing on the Organization of Turkic States (OTS) as a site of selective regional legal legitimation. It argues that the OTS does not itself create binding rules of regional international law, but uses non-binding instruments, especially summit declarations, to coordinate legal narratives grounded in shared cultural and geopolitical ties. Through the case studies of Nagorno-Karabakh and Northern Cyprus, this article demonstrates how the OTS selectively mobilizes international legal norms – most notably what this article terms the contested war of recovery doctrine – in line with geopolitical preferences. This comparison shows that the OTS supports a recovery narrative in Nagorno-Karabakh while resisting the generalization of that logic in relation to Northern Cyprus, revealing doctrinal inconsistency shaped by geopolitical alignment.

This article examines the reintegration of children and women captured from areas formerly controlled by the so-called Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq, and subsequently repatriated to Central Asian States, through the lens of the International Committee of the Red Cross’s (ICRC) integrated protection and mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) approach. Drawing on mixed methods, it combines routine pre- and post-intervention data from DASS-21 and Paediatric Emotional Distress Scale (PEDS) assessments of fifty-two participants with semi-structured interviews with seven repatriated women and six psychologists involved in ICRC-supported MHPSS services.

Quantitative findings indicate reductions in overall psychological distress across adults, adolescents and younger children during a period in which they received integrated protection–MHPSS support. Qualitative narratives complement these results by illustrating how participants experienced these improvements, while also highlighting persistent challenges related to the weight of memory, separation from family members left behind, ambiguous loss, stigma and social difficulties. The study contributes to the limited empirical literature on post-return trajectories by highlighting the role of receiving families and communities in fostering acceptance of returnees and reducing stigma, the need for long-term support for both returnee families and front-line practitioners, and the importance of integrating mental health and psychosocial considerations into national reintegration frameworks.

The article argues that protection measures – aiming to ensure that the rights and dignity of returnees are upheld, their legal and administrative issues are addressed, and their family links are protected – and layered MHPSS care supporting emotional well-being and psychological recovery are operationally interdependent and can be mutually reinforcing in practice. It suggests that integrated approaches may offer a relevant framework for addressing the layered vulnerabilities experienced by these populations, as responses are more likely to match the depth and complexity of their needs when protection and MHPSS are implemented in a coordinated manner. By documenting the experiences of returnees and practitioners, the article offers operational insights into integrated protection–MHPSS strategies for people affected by conflict and reflects the ICRC’s engagement in supporting the safe, dignified and rights-based reintegration of returnee children and women.

The following article presents a hitherto unknown kābı̄n (marriage contract) text in the New Persian language from a manuscript originally kept in Beijing, now held in Taipei. The text is both an important monument of the Christian Early New Persian linguistic community and a testimony of the social life of such communities along the Silk Road in the pre-Mongol period. Arabic borrowings could be a clue that dates the text to the tenth or eleventh centuries. The text represents an important witness to the permanence of the Iranian custom of the dowry payment combined with the Syriac Christian wedding ritual of the Church of the East. The New Persian in the fragment points to the history of early language forms functioning in pre-Mongol non-Muslim communities.

The Young Avestan text Wīdēwdād 8.81–96 deals with the contamination of fire as a result of its use in daily activities, arguing that the pristine purity of this sacred element be restored by bringing each of the polluted fires to an appropriate place. While listing non-ritual uses of fire, this text also gives precious details about the material culture of the speakers of Young Avestan in southern Central Asia during the first millennium BCE. This information is relevant for not only better understanding the history of the region in that period but also tracing the composition of these passages back to the Achaemenid period.

After the conquest of Samarkand by Russian forces in 1868, a sacred relic, the reputed Quran of Uthman, was removed from the Khoja Ahrar madrassa and taken to the Imperial Library in St Petersburg. Following the October 1917 revolution, successive Muslim organizations successfully petitioned for the Quran’s ‘return’, representing a remarkably early case of formerly colonized peoples reclaiming cultural property taken under imperial duress on the principle of decolonization. The highly politicized and publicized debates contesting this Quran’s rightful ownership and the history of its multiple ‘repatriations’—from Petrograd to Ufa to Turkestan and from mosque to museum to anti-religious exhibition—illustrate the competing claims to spiritual, ethno-national, scholarly, and ideological authority leveraged by various actors in the first decade of Soviet power, amidst visions of transnational anti-imperial revolution in the ‘East’. As Soviet rule solidified in 1926–27, the Quran was concealed from view domestically while increasingly being deployed in diplomacy abroad.

In 1877, Russian authorities in Turkestan arrested an Ottoman mullah who was reportedly spreading anti-tsarist propaganda in the Kazakh steppe. Upon closer inspection, the man turned out to be neither an Ottoman subject nor a Muslim religious leader. This article follows the travels of Hajji Ahmed, a young merchant from Dagestan who was at different times accused of being a Russian spy and an Ottoman spy. His three petitions and tsarist investigative reports reveal that he had traded throughout the Khanate of Khoqand, the Emirate of Bukhara, and tsarist Turkestan in the 1870s. This microhistory of a Muslim peddler offers a glimpse into tsarist anxieties about Muslim mobility and local fears of Russian imperialism in Central Asia. It demonstrates that Russia’s colonial expansion provided new opportunities for tsarist Muslim subjects but also destabilized Central Asian societies and institutions, making the conditions of travel perilous. Tsarist paranoia about Ottoman emissaries, Tatar missionaries, and prospects of an anticolonial uprising led to Russia’s restrictions on transregional Muslim mobility.

Since the beginning of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine in 2014, a view that interprets Russian-Ukrainian relations as colonialism has gained ground in historical scholarship. However, based on an analysis of the terms “colonization” and “colonialism” and a comparison between Ukrainian territories and the Governorate-General of Turkestan in late imperial Russia, this article argues for a more cautious use of the term “colonialism” in relation to Ukraine. It shows that contemporaries rarely viewed tsarist rule in Ukraine through the prism of colonialism, while in the case of Central Asia this perspective was pervasive. Moreover, tsarist policy toward Central Asia and its predominantly Muslim population was much more in line with colonial practices than it was in the case of Ukraine. While colonial rule is generally based on the institutionalization of difference, the opposite was the case in Ukraine: Ukraine was appropriated as part of the Russian nation. Therefore, this article argues that Russia’s claims on Ukraine, which deny Ukraine’s right to national self-determination and statehood, are not an indication of colonial subjugation, but rather of nationalist usurpation.

The Darband Wall in southern Uzbekistan marks an important political border in the Classical world, yet the dating of its construction is largely relative and contested. Presenting 10 new radiocarbon dates from the wall, the authors argue that construction began in the early or middle third century BC, likely under Seleucid or early Greco-Bactrian rule, while later reconstruction efforts coincide with Kushan expansion around the first and second centuries AD. Early Hellenistic-style fortifications reveal a defensive, and possibly an orientational, shift during Kushan rule that underscores both the strategic significance of the wall and the need for more extensive investigation.

The emergence, on the Loess Plateau of Central China, of settlements enclosed by circular ditches has engendered lively debate about the function of these (often extensive) ditch systems. Here, the authors report on a suite of new dates and sedimentological analyses from the late Yangshao (5300–4800 BP) triple-ditch system at the Shuanghuaishu site, Henan Province. Exploitation of natural topographic variations, and evidence for ditch maintenance and varied water flows, suggests a key function in hydrological management, while temporal overlap in the use of these three ditches reveals the large scale of this endeavour to adapt to the pressures of the natural environment.

Mandibular and dental material of hyaenids from the Central Asian localities of Zasukhino-3 (Russia) and Nalaikha (Mongolia), dating to the late Early Pleistocene (0.9–0.78 Ma) was identified as giant hyena Pachycrocuta brevirostris based on morphological and size similarities. Comparative analysis of Eurasian P. brevirostris from different stratigraphic levels (from 2.1 to 0.5 Ma) revealed two evolutionary stages of the lower cheek teeth of the giant hyenas. The stages are determined as morphotypes A and B, directed toward the differentiation of the function of premolar and enhancing the cutting function of m1. We traced the microprocesses that occurred during the transition from the primitive structure of the m1 talonid to its more advanced state. This event occurred during the transition from the late Villafranchian to the Epivillafranchian (ca. 1.1–0.9 Ma). The stabilized advanced morphotype B was found in samples from Zasukhino-3, Nalaikha, and other close-in-age localities such as Lakhuti-2. The new finds from Asian Russia and Mongolia suggest that P. brevirostris from these regions represent a single giant hyena population occupying the northernmost part of their Asian range.

This essay examines how blackness is lived, perceived, and negotiated in (post)socialist Kazakhstan by placing the experiences of two “dual heritage” women—Aminata Uėdrаogo, a contemporary media personality, and Yelena Khanga, a Soviet and Russian-era journalist—in conversation. Prompted by a visit with Uėdrаogo in Almaty, I use autoethnographic and Black feminist methods to explore how blackness functions as both a limit and a possibility within shifting frameworks of race, ethnicity, and national belonging. While scholarship on intermarriage and ethnic mixing in Soviet Central Asia exists, contemporary experiences of people of African descent—particularly women—remain largely absent.1 Through their narratives and embodied experiences, I argue that blackness in Central Asia complicates the presumed rupture between socialist and post-socialist periods and unsettles dominant Eurocentric paradigms of race. This analysis calls for further inquiry into African diasporic presence and theorizations of blackness in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian contexts.

In 2022–2023, fragments of figurative wall paintings were discovered in the Royal Palace at Sanjar-Shah, a Sogdian site near Panjikent in Tajikistan. The paintings depict a procession of priests approaching a large fire altar—this offers a rare insight into religious imagery and a representation of fire worship in Sogdian murals.

Multidisciplinary research is deepening our understanding of high-altitude pastoralism on the Tibetan Plateau, but such studies also highlight a strong riverine bias in the location of excavated sites. In a move to address this skewing of the dataset, the authors propose the exploration of modern highland corrals with shovel testing and test excavations as a labour-efficient survey method, streamlined through the identification of potential sites from satellite imagery. Three prehistoric sites were successfully located using this method, the earliest dating to the first millennium BC, encouraging the reconsideration of current survey strategies in Tibet and other mountainous regions.

Oasis communities across Central Asia were key to the emergence and maintenance of the ancient Silk Roads that spanned Eurasia from the late second century BC, yet our understanding of early interaction networks in this region is limited. Multi-isotopic analysis of human teeth from the Zaghunluq Cemetery, southern Xinjiang (sixth century BC to first century AD) now suggests that oasis communities established intricate exchange networks, forming strong ties with other nearby oases and mountain pastoralists and weak ties, facilitated through in migration, with more distant regions. These diverse connections, the authors argue, made possible cultural exchange across the challenging geography of eastern Central Asia.

The government of Kyrgyzstan has embarked on an ambitious hydropower development programme on the transboundary Syr Darya River, which has provoked strong opposition from downstream Uzbekistan. The programme is driven by the alignment of actual energy concerns with interests of the national hydraulic elites and the global politics of project finance, which provides a logic for dams that may exacerbate existing geopolitical tensions across the region.