‘The Stans’ are the five post-Soviet Central Asian republics — Kazakhstan, Krygyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan — with similar historical, political and cultural roots.

These nations are asserting their cultural identity by proposing ethnic language policies — potentially banning the use of the Russian language.

In Kyrgyzstan, there’s a proposal to make Kyrgyz the dominant governmental language, and in Tajikistan, there’s another to ban the use of Russian in public institutions and official documents.

This week, Chinese President Hu Jintao opened a new gas pipeline that extends from Turkmenistan to north-west China — the first without Russia’s Gazprom.

Martin Savidge hosts William Fierman, a professor of Central Asian studies at Indiana University, and Nikolay Petrov, a scholar at the Carnegie Moscow Center.

Ethnic map of Central Asia. View a larger version by Pmx

They discuss:

• Common political, cultural and historical roots but not a homogeneous entity
• Post-Soviet relationships between ‘The Stans’ and Russia — how ethnic tensions and discrimination continue
• Economic crisis, drug trafficking, oil and migration
• How Russia, China and the United States are vying for ‘The Stans’
• Political instability and poor economic well-being raise concerns about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism
• Could Central Asia become the next conflict zone — even the next Afghanistan?

GUESTS:
Nikolay Petrov is a scholar-in-residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center. He has served in the Supreme Soviet and Russian Presidential Administration. Nikolay writes a regular column for The Moscow Times.

William Fierman is a professor of Central Asian studies at Indiana University. His research focuses on the politics of Central Asia, especially policies affecting language, Islam and state identities. He’s currently researching language politics and problems in Kazakhstan.

Credits:
Host: Martin Savidge
Producers: Christine Kiernan, Lisa Biagiotti and Ben Piven
Researcher: Michael Ramirez

Using the detailed mapping software, you can see into your own backyard - literally. You can look out across the Himalayas from the peak of Mt. Everest. But how to navigate Google Earth’s decidedly un-user-friendly customization settings to make them suitable for a television broadcast? That’s a different story.

An example: thanks to increasingly specific satellite imagery, we now have the ability to zoom into cities not only in the U.S. or Europe, but also in many African cities, where for a long time detailed satellite imagery was lacking.

The problem: as you can see in this most recent 2009 composite view of satellite images of Africa, the continent now resembles a 19th-century impressionist painting. Pixelated splotches of color dot the landscape, where some areas have much more satellite coverage than others.

Happily, we were able to figure out a solution to this dilemma. Google Earth has an underused “history” button, which allows the user to view satellite images from different dates in the past. (Naturally, the number of dates available depends on what part of the world you are looking at and how far away from Earth you are.)

So if I want to show a view of Africa, but want to see a clean view of the continent, without all the satellite clutter, I can simply select the earliest date possible on the “history” view - in this case 1930.

This won’t actually show you 1930s satellite views if there were none from that time, but in the absence of such satellite imagery, Google Earth will automatically default to a clean satellite view of the landscape. So with this simple work-around, we’ve gotten one step closer to implementing Google Earth on our broadcast. Stay tuned!

Watch this video for some more Google Earth history tips and an interesting visual comparison of how the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan has shrunk over the years.