How can we understand the basic character of Central Asia's postcoloniality for international law purposes? What role have international institutions and international law scholarship played in clarifying or obfuscating this problem? The fall of the USSR 30 years ago brought an end to Russia’s direct political rule over the region. The arrival of formal independence, however, was not matched by the parallel decoupling of legal and institutional modalities and traditions. Something similar, of course, had happened decades earlier in the former British and French colonies. What distinguishes the Central Asian case, however, was both the vector of the formal shift—Central Asian states gained independence from the preeminent power of the Second World, not the First World—and the rather distinct character of the post-independence transition processes. In many cases, these processes, choreographed and coordinated through a network of international institutions not existent at the time of the previous wave of decolonization, came to be shaped not just by the local aspirations toward independence but also an intense external pressure to adopt a particular combination of Western-style legal and political reform packages. A large part of what accounts for the way this pressure was realized in practice was the rise of a certain kind of international law imaginary: a combination of sanctioned ignorance, a firm belief in ‘transition science’, and a postmodern version of ‘civilising mission’. The one crucial element that brought this ideological complex together was the consistent exoticization of Central Asia via the implicit denial of its postcolonial status. The structural shift that allowed this complex to turn into a practically active international law regime was the replacement of the classical modes of international coercion with modern-day techniques of ‘adverse publicity’. As one set of colonial forms and dynamics gave way to another, the question of Central Asia's postcoloniality, already made politically opaque by the ‘second-worldist’ origins of the Soviet empire, receded ever further into the background. What exacerbated this process even more at the theoretical level was the persistent failure on the part of the international law discourse to maintain any degree of interest in the region. As the task of determining how international law and its institutions should approach and understand Central Asia fell to non-lawyers, the resulting narratives about Central Asia and its place in the international legal arena took on increasingly neocolonialist overtones of the kind one would rarely see admitted in relation to other non-Western regions. The fact that the predominant mode of debating postcoloniality in international law in the post-Cold War era took on the form of ‘Third World Approaches to International Law’ certainly did not help either, as its inbuilt geographic imaginary of third-worldism implicitly relegated Central Asia even further beyond the limits of critical attention. This chapter is an attempt to push back against this trend. In critiquing the traditional international law conception of Central Asia that has emerged over the last thirty years and in rethinking the shape of Central Asia's legal postcoloniality, it offers reflections not only about the basic relationship between post-Sovietness and postcoloniality but also the broader challenge of conceptualizing decolonization, neocolonialism, and postcoloniality in contemporary international law.