Abstract
In his article “In Search of the Global East: Thinking between North and South”, Martin Müller offers a number of radical, although not new, insights on the role that post-socialist states presumably play in the modern world, as well as their perception, and the production of knowledge about themselves in these countries. This article is a response to Müller’s text and a reflection on the historiography of Central Asia, an integral part of the “Global East”. In the first part of this text, we analyze Müller’s own approach and explain why it is problematic from a historical point of view. In the second part, we focus on the production of “external” and “internal” knowledge about Central Asia and propose another paradigm labeled as “tactical essentialism”, which we believe best describes the production of historical narratives in the region at the moment. Despite the differences between the two concepts, it seems to us that “strategic” and “tactical” essentialism are essentially manifestations of the same process, namely, the attempts to oust the Soviet past from the ethos of post-socialist researchers (or replace it with other narratives).