Write a PREreview

This study examines the role of music education as an instrument of national identity construction in the five Central Asian states and analyses the consequences of this function for regional educational integration. Drawing on the theory of invented tradition (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983) and the concept of imagined communities (Anderson, 1983), the research analyses music curriculum content in the principal conservatories of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. The source material includes publicly available curriculum documents, programme descriptions, UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage nomination files, national education laws, and World Bank statistical data. The analysis maps the divergent national music canons that have been constructed through higher education curricula since independence in 1991. A pattern we term curricular nationalism emerges from this mapping: the deliberate use of music education curricula to construct nationally specific cultural identities by selecting canonical instruments, elevating particular musical genres to national heritage status, and incorporating specific musicians and composers into national pantheons. Each of the five states has built a distinct canon within its conservatory system. Kazakhstan has centred its curriculum on the dombra and the kuy tradition; Uzbekistan on the Shashmaqom classical system and the dutar; Kyrgyzstan on the komuz and the Manas epic tradition; Tajikistan on a reframing of the shared Shashmaqom heritage as distinctly Tajik; and Turkmenistan on the dutar and the bakhshi bardic tradition. These divergent canons are not accidental products of institutional development but purposeful constructions that serve to distinguish each newly independent state from its neighbours. The study identifies a structural paradox: the cultural proximity of the five states, including shared musical traditions, instruments, and performance practices that could in principle support regional cooperation, is precisely what drives curricular divergence, because shared traditions become objects of competitive national appropriation rather than a basis for integration. We suggest that this dynamic forms an identitarian barrier to regional music education integration that the structural mechanisms of the Bologna Process and the relational mechanisms of bilateral cooperation are largely unequipped to resolve, since the obstacle is not technical or institutional but political in nature.