How the Neonomads will save the world. Alter-globalism edition. Daniyar Z Baidaralin

      I write these lines as I seat in a lockdown city of Almaty, Kazakhstan, hiding from the COVID-19 pandemic. The city is completely sealed by the joint forces of police, SOBR1, and National Guard. This is the second week of the quarantine caused by the virus that shook the world. The world as we know it seems to be less certain than ever, and the grim future scenarios that have been around in the mass culture of the past decades appears to be unfolding right before our eyes.

      We are not allowed to walk outside except for to buy food and medicine; while the schools, offices, malls – everything is shut down. Only the essential government services and food retailers are allowed to work, and the workers wear mask at all times. All of the work that could be performed from home has been switched to a distant online mode, otherwise the workers are on unpaid vacations or are being laid off.

      Limited to my four walls and only short runs to a local minimarket, I have no longer an excuse to postpone writing this book, the ideas for which were brewing in my mind for a while. The gloomy occasion is suitable, for I am aiming at nothing less than to offer a path to save the world from self-destruction, and the pandemic is the exact manifestation of the sickness that I want all of us to cure.

      Who am I and what are my qualifications? For more information about me read the Appendixes at the end of this book, but here I just want to give a brief.

      I come from a few major historical and cultural backgrounds. Underneath it all is my favorite, original, native, Eurasian Nomadic heritage, for I am a Kazakh man born and raised in Kazakhstan, the Heartland of the Nomadic Civilization that existed here for at least three millennia starting from the 2^nd millennium BC.

      On top of that, as a later addition that came about in the Middle Ages, I marginally represent the Central Asian Islamic realm. Skip forward, and my background is strongly influenced by the Russian Empire in the Modern Age and consequently the Soviet Empire in the 20^th century.

      Now, in the early 21^st century I spent almost ten years living in the United States of America, and this added one more dimension to my mentality. As of 2020 I reside in my native city of Almaty, the former capital of the now-independent state of the Republic of Kazakhstan, and where the COVID-2019 pandemic has caged me in my apartment.

      My educational background is in Fine Arts, Art History, and Architecture; all with a strong bias towards Eurasian Nomadic history, traditions and culture. My knowledge and skills are split between academic and practical. Most of my life I worked in a private sector of real economy: television, interior design, architecture, and construction.

      At the same time I wrote a book on traditional Kazakh horseback archery, and I am now self-employed as a practical historical reconstructor focusing on nomadic military and civil technologies. Today I spend my days researching about how the Eurasian Nomads made their armors, weapons, bows, arrows, clothes, shoes, horse equipment, and yurts; and then I build replicas and test them in field conditions to learn how it all worked back in the day.

      So why do I dare to write a book with such a loud and presumptuous name? I will make many bold statements in this book that might irritate, amuse, or raise eyebrows of my readers, but I ask you to bear with me. Thought I am not an accomplished academic or some guru, in my life I met many interesting, intelligent people of different backgrounds, and we had deep, wonderful, meaningful conversations that taught me a lot about the world we live in. We also partnered in some unique projects that helped me to advance my research and develop understanding of history, culture, religions, technology, and societies.

      I am not as well-read as I wanted to be, for I don’t have much time to read and my reading list is three-miles long and I am way behind. But I possess a unique combination of educational background, specific knowledge, unique hobbies, and life and work experience that is not too common even in today’s interesting world.

      Therefore, despite all of my shortages, I feel that I still have something to say to the world, and the time has come for it. Hence I wrote this book.