Bahodir Sidikov

Dr. phil., studied Arabic and Islamic studies, History and Geography of the Middle East at the State University of St. Petersburg from 1987 to 1992. He received his PhD from the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Halle University in 2003. From 2003 to 2005 he was a Research Fellow at the Institute for East European Studies at the Free University of Berlin, where he worked on the project "Accounting for State-Building, Stability and Conflict: The Institutional Framework of Caucasian and Central Asian Transitional Societies". Scholarship on "Asia and Africa in World Reference Systems" at the Graduate School in Halle/Saale in 2005-2006. Since 2006 independent consultant and freelance journalist.
His focus of research is on the process of post-Soviet nation-building and élite formation in Central Asia and South Caucasus. His further fields of interests are informal networks, historiographical concept-building and political Islam. Bahodir Sidikov works as an expert with the World Bank, the Swiss Peace Foundation and the Bertelsmann Foundation, and as a tutor for Uzbekistan at InWent GmbH. He has been a Research Fellow at the Georg Eckert Institute since June 2007. 

Project

At the Georg Eckert Institute, Bahodir Sidikov works (in cooperation with the Faculty of Oriental Studies in Halle/S.) on a project sponsored by the Gerda Henkel Foundation  that deals with the construction of history and nation-building in history textbooks aimed at class 7-11 in post-Soviet Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The project's goal is to examine the historiographical discourse about the "emergence" and the "past" of so-called "titular nations" in post-Soviet history textbooks from Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, with special focus on how - in terms of approaches, methods, contents and models - historiography shapes and conveys post-Soviet nation-building through textbooks.

Selected publications
 
Monography

• „Eine unermessliche Region“. Deutsche Bilder und Zerrbilder von Mittelasien (1852-1914), Berlin 2003.

Essays

• Sredneaziatskie jevrei: rol’i funkcii etnoreligioznogo men'šinstva v žizni vostonogo obšestva (obšemetodologieskie voprosy), in: Evrei v Srednej Azii: voprosy istorii i kultury, sbornik naunych statej i dokladov, hrsg. v. Open Society Institute & Institute of History, Taschkent 2004, 151-169.

• Novoe ili tradicionnoe? Regional’nye gruppirovki v postsovetskom Azerbaidžane, in: Vestnik Evrazii 2 (2004), Moskow, 151-169.

• New or Traditional? “Clans”, Regional Groupings, and State in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan, in: Berliner Osteuropa Info 21 (2004), 68-74.

• Deutsche Mittelasienstudien im Lichte der Orientalismus-Diskussionen, in: Orientwissenschaftliche Hefte 20 (2006), 19-27.

• Barth, “Yeraz” and Post-Soviet Azerbaijan. Inventing a New Sub-Ethnic Identity, in: Representations on the Margins of Europe: Politics and Identities in the Baltic and South Caucasian States, Ts. Darieva and W. Kaschuba (eds.), Frankfurt/Main 2007, 291-311.

• Aserbaidschan: Rammbock der USA gegen den Iran?, in: INAMO 50 (2007).