One of the burgeoning areas of political study over the past ten years has concentrated on the role of non-state actors in world politics. In the wake of the Soviet collapse and the end of the Cold War rivalry, some social scientists began to construct paradigms and theories centered on identity and to concentrate their research on ethnodemographic challenges posed by migration and porous borders in the post-Soviet states, including how various groups facilitated secessionist movements and insurgencies, undermining regional stability and efforts at democratization in the process.

For the Russians, Siberia has always been “Other” and, as a result, it has often been imagined as something other than what it is. As Mark Bassin argues in this richly detailed book, this habit of the Russian imaginaire was on full display during the mid-1800s when hopeful Russian observers and statesmen envisioned the Russian Empire's latest territorial acquisition—the Amur river in far eastern Siberia—as a new Mississippi and the region around it as a potential second America. Ultimately, of course, these geographical analogies proved well off the mark. The region of the Amur never went on to experience the prosperity of the United States and the Amur river never even remotely rivaled the importance of the Mississippi as an artery of trade and settlement. And what is so interesting about all this is that the Russians themselves began to have their doubts about the Amur within just a few years of annexing it. Bassin's work, in fact, concentrates on explaining this strange shift. It is a study of why the Russian vision of the Amur that began so hot ended up turning so cold so quickly and what the vision itself seems to reveal about the content of Russian national identity.

When it comes to identity, nationalism and the various perceptions of “the Other,” postcolonial theory has inspired historians of Central and Eastern Europe for years. This inspiration, however, has not overcome a certain superficial level of slogans and catchphrases: identity is a cultural construction, yes, so it is somehow connected to the problem of power; knowledge too, since we have read Said and Foucault, is to be considered as both a result and an instrument of power. Now it seems that this superficiality will not be accepted any more. Recently, scholars of Central Europe organized a conference focusing on the questions of whether and how postcolonial theory can be applied on the study of Austria-Hungary. Was the Habsburg Empire really an Empire, can perspectives developed in Delhi be transferred to Prague and Bratislava?

Virginia Martin tells the fascinating story of the change of legal culture that occurred among the Middle Horde Kazakh nomads under Russian colonial rule in the nineteenth century. Her essential argument is based on the premise of conceptualizing law as a cultural system. This leads her to describe “law in action” in a convincing way, as she shows in her book the flexible use of law by various social groups.

Pessimism and skepticism dominate this most recent work by Martha Brill Olcott, one of the leading scholars of Central Asia and the Eurasian realm. Her central theme is that, even with abundant natural resources, an educated population, and a situation between East and West, Kazakhstan's seemingly bright future and promised prosperity failed to materialize. In short, political and economic corruption has dominated the transition from Soviet dependency to post-Soviet independence.