Since the fall of the Soviet Union - and indeed, among certain specialist a full 50 years earlier - a large section of the largest continent on Earth has been divided into political units terminating with the suffix, "-stan," a (cognate) term in Persian that roughly means "place of." To the casual observer, for whom the region has little international relevance, the countries that have adopted this naming convention to describe their national identity are often lumped together under the umbrella term "The Stans." This informal geographic categorization assumes a certain political, cultural and linguistic similarity which is not entirely accurate. However, more formal delineations of the region - as Central Asia, the Greater Middle East, Eurasia, West Asia, etc. - also demonstrate obvious failures to identify the salient borders of a mid-continental, non-oceanic region.
Let us consider, then, a new conceptualization of this broad, geographically diverse landscape; let us start over from the naive innocence of name recognition, and apply ourselves to evaluating those countries, sub-national provinces, and macro-national regions that lay claim to a shared heritage. While existing formal definitions like Central Asia, et al fail to capture the interconnectedness of the region as a whole, an alternative conceptualization may present itself if we're willing to... Meet the Stans.
