Every summer for the past eight years, Michael Frachetti has come to the desert steppe that rolls like endless yellow waves across Kazakhstan searching for evidence of a vast, connected nomadic society.
With each new excavation, Frachetti, an archeologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, hopes to complicate received notions of the lives and societies of the nomads who once thrived in this region.
Frachetti's work concerns Bronze Age nomads, and his scholarship is aimed purely at a historical understanding of how a pre-literate society functioned more than 3,000 years ago. But his work coincides with a geopolitical reality that has important implications for US foreign policymakers: many of the countries that most trouble the West -- such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia -- have government institutions that reflect a nomadic past.
"Take Afghanistan, where politics are much more dispersed," said Frachetti, while sitting in an upscale Almaty cafe last month, a few days before trekking to the Saryesik-Atyrau Desert to conduct that remote area's first archeological survey.
"I think some of our foreign policy complications derive from our inability to locate a nomadic dynamic within contemporary political structures," he said.
Recent investigations have challenged long-held views of nomadic culture as purely transient, with little impact on the urban, sophisticated societies that emerged later.
Instead, scientists like Frachetti are discovering that nomadic cultures are flexible, switching between transient and more sedentary ways of life, and assimilating and inventing new ideas and technologies. Nomads created durable political cultures that still influence the way these countries interact with outsiders or negotiate internal power struggles.
While the view that tribe and clan -- the basic building blocks of nomadic, or semi-transient societies -- influence the contemporary politics of some countries is nothing new, specialists in nomadic studies argue that policymakers have overlooked important "cultural intelligence," such as family relationships, when analyzing governments that grew out of tribal traditions.
"Families, tribes these are the things that matter here," said Oraz Jandosov, cochairman of a Kazakhstan opposition political party. "Foreigners talk about these things, but it's only talk. They don't understand them."
Countries like Iraq and Afghanistan may take on the trappings of modern, Western nation-states, with parliaments, justice departments and other governmental agencies, researchers say. But politics are still driven by the customs and institutions of nomadism, in which political disputes were settled at the level of family, clan and tribe.
"In and of itself you can't graft what happened two thousand years ago and say that's what it is today, but it helps to understand how these societies have found successful strategies and how they respond to outside forces," Frachetti said. "By not exploring the depth to which nomadic populations have contributed to local political systems, we are naive to an important aspect of the social fabric of parts of the Near East and Central Asia."
The US military has learned the importance of tribes in Iraq, as evidenced by its policy of arming Sunni Arab tribal chiefs in Anbar province to fight the leading insurgent group there, al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia.
Yet, despite calls for a deeper appreciation of cultures far from the mainstream, "the United States government hasn't been willing to pony up the money to educate" policymakers on "these areas with deep nomadic traditions," said a Central Asia specialist working for the US government.
The official requested anonymity because he was not cleared to speak with reporters.
"It takes a half a million dollars and four or five years to train a specialist in these parts of the world," the official said. "Even now we hardly have anyone up to speed about the border areas of Pakistan or the tribal politics of Somalia."
And in Central Asia, recent US foreign policy setbacks -- such as a deal in May between Turkmenistan and Russia to build a new gas pipeline, widely viewed as a rebuke to US interests -- can be traced partly to a US misunderstanding of how nomadic traditions shape attitudes in the region.
In that case, said Sean Roberts, a Central Asia researcher at Georgetown University, US negotiators mistakenly emphasized the benefits of joining the orbit of Western nations. With its nomadic traditions, he said, Turkmenistan placed a far higher emphasis on independence.
"If there's anything for American policymakers to understand about formerly nomadic people is that they generally place an all-important pride in their independence," he said in a telephone interview.
Pride in nomadism itself is on the upswing, with many countries using what is an increasingly glamorous historical inheritance as an important nation-building tool.
When Kazakhstan's government-subsidized film company decided last year to film a national epic that would galvanize the population around a unifying myth, studio executives reached into the country's past and produced Nomad. The movie has been a huge hit across the former Soviet Union.
In some instances, politicians seek to use nomadic traditions to justify their policies, just as US politicians try to exploit nostalgia for the US' rural past to justify farm subsidies, said Robert Rotberg, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, who studies failed states in Africa and Asia.
"Take Gadhafi in Libya," Rotberg said. "He would say, you Westerners don't understand us because we have a nomadic ethos that is essentially socialist, and so we have to nationalize our country's oil industry to be true to our tradition."
Nomads continue to hang on in a substantial area of Central Asia, especially in Kazakhstan and neighboring Kyrgyzstan, and in many cases are prospering. But in evaluating the influence of nomadism on contemporary politics, it is important to look past superficial elements, Roberts said.
"What's almost as dangerous as ignoring the cultural context of politics is misinterpreting it," he said. "The policy community just doesn't have a background at looking at cultures' differences. So even if they do the right thing and start to look at cultural intelligence, the result is they will take stereotypes of Kazakhstan's nomadic past and call it a complete truth."
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
Every day since Oct. 7 last year, the world has watched an unprecedented wave of violence rain down on Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories — more than 200 days of constant suffering and death in Gaza with just a seven-day pause. Many of us in the American expatriate community in Taiwan have been watching this tragedy unfold in horror. We know we are implicated with every US-made “dumb” bomb dropped on a civilian target and by the diplomatic cover our government gives to the Israeli government, which has only gotten more extreme with such impunity. Meantime, multicultural coalitions of US