Uzbekistan

Goodness gracious. I've been really interested in the events happening in Uzbekistan over the past few weeks, with groans of Democratic uprising and government crackdowns beginning to appear regularly in the main stream news, and constantly in the blogosphere. I have left it to the rest of the community to comment on these events.
If you are particularly interested in these events and the area of Central Asia you can check out Registan or GatewayPundit have the most information on what's going on. BelgraviaDispatch is also on top of it. Dan Darling has a long analysis post on what's going on there. As always his take is thought provoking.
In fact, if I were to recommend just one site it would be Registan, which seems to be all Uzbekistan-all the time. At least it is while this revolt and crackdown is going on.

But I want to broaden the topic a bit more and concentrate on the area as a whole. I began reading up a bit on Central Asia and was thoroughly entranced by what I read. This region is rich with culture and history, going back before the Hellenistic culture and Alexander's dominating campaigns.
The region is usually characterized as containing the present day countries of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Xinjiang (that portion of China). The peoples of this region share much of their ancestry with the Turkish peoples of Mongolia and present day Turkey. Many of the cultures of this region were nomadic until the last couple of centuries.
The area is about 7.5 million square kilometers, or about the size of Australia. It is dominated in size by Kazakhstan, which is about 2.7 million km, or about half of the region not including Xinjiang.
The climate is fairly dry, and the temperatures run from very cold in the winter to very hot in the summer, as it is in the middle of the largest continent on earth and has almost no moderating influence such as a sea or ocean. Once a region of endless grasslands, the area has dried out much since ancient times and there are significant arid regions. The Karakum desert is the 4th largest in the world. There are still significant grass lands extending to extremely high mountain ranges in the east. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are mostly mountainous, and have some of the tallest peaks in the world outside the Himalayas.
There are regions of agriculture as well. These generally follow the major river systems that drain into the Aral sea (which because of the over-irrigating of the Soviet period, has pretty much dried out the sea). Not much of the water flowing from central Asia makes it out to the oceans. The river systems are the Amu-Dar'ya and the Syr-Dar'ya, the Ural river in the west, the Ili river entering from China, and the Irtysh river system in northern Kazakhstan, which empties into the Arctic Ocean.
There are about 60 million people in Central Asia, not including about another 40 million in Xinjiang, so this is by no means an unpopulated wasteland. The peoples are a variety of Turkic ancestry, but there are significant Russian/European populations in northern Kazakhstan. In fact, if you look at the map I linked to there, the ethnic makeup crosses several boundary lines, giving you an idea of what the Soviets were up to. They carved up the region in order to prevent nationalistic ideas from cropping up among the different ethnic groups. It was thought that if some Uzbeks were in Kyrgyzstan and some were in Uzbekistan and some in Tajikistan then they wouldn't be able to rise up and separate from the Soviet Union, or even develop a sense of individual nationalism. That idea is causing grief now, as the mixed nature of countries causes some stress on internal politics of those countries. In truth, though, much of the ethnic conflict is between formerly sedentary cultures and nomadic cultures.

Historically, this is the region of the great Silk Road that transported goods from the Roman west and the middle east all the way to China and back. People didn't start making the entire journey until much later, but any trade between those far off civilizations occurred by traveling through central Asia.
Alexander the Great conquered the region around the Amu-Darya and Syr Darya and Hellenized the populations there, which started the split between the sedentary cultures of Uzbek and Tajik regions and the rest of nomadic central Asia.
Ghengis Khan centered his empire here, and his descendents influenced the cultural landscape significantly. Before and after that, Muslims conquered at various times and spread their culture here. It was once thought that Bukhara, in Uzbekistan, was the center of Muslim culture under the Samanids before the 1st millennium AD.
After the Russians and Soviets took over, the region was a major point of contention and conflict between the Russians and the British, who controlled India and Pakistan. Both imperialistic nations came together at the edges of their empires on the slopes of the Pamir and Hindu Cush ranges.
So you can see that this region deserves much more time and study than I am giving it right now. I'll be back with some more detail on the history of the region and perhaps some insights into current politics in the area.

For now you can keep watch on the Uzbekistan situation, or you can follow events for the whole region with news services such as EurasiaNet, the Times of Central Asia, or the Central Asia News Net.