Nearly two weeks ago, twenty-two individuals (twelve citizens of Russia and ten ethnic-Russian citizens of Kazakhstan) were arrested in Ust-Kamenogorsk in East Kazakhstan province. They were charged with planning an uprising to seize political power in the province and proclaim … Continue reading →
This commentary provides background on Javakhetia, the ethnically Armenian region in southern Georgia, in order to establish that is not the next Karabakh and not another Abkhazia, and therefore neither flashpoint nor bottleneck for oil pipelines crossing the Caucasus from the Caspian to the Black Sea. Stability in Javakhetia is likely to continue, although in the long term there is a wild card: the Meskhetian Turks, a people deported by Stalin whose has been mandated to their homeland, which lies west of Javakhetia proper and east of Ajaria.
Continue reading →The signing of the Istanbul Protocol on the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline at the recent OSCE meeting was highly important politically to the leaders who signed it. But the project will in the long run be more important to the peoples of … Continue reading →
The military operations in the Balkans affect the calculations concerning export routes, via Kosovo Caspian energy. The near-term regional effect of the hostilities in Kosovo is to make the Baku-Ceyhan line slightly more likely. This is not to deny the … Continue reading →
The new year has already established two new trends in Caspian Sea geo-economics and BTC pipeline politics as well as confirmed an old one. Two important new trends are an improvement in Turkmenistan’s finances and the refusal of BTC pipeline … Continue reading →
[This page renders a post from the legacy blog from the legacy academic website, first published in Независимая газета, 16 January 1998, page 7.] … Continue reading →
One periodically encounters critical evaluations of the CIS, but a more nuanced analysis is motivated by bringing into the open some hidden assumptions and by shedding light on some blind spots in Western analysts’ predictions of the CIS’s imminent demise. … Continue reading →
With the dismantlement of the inherited Soviet nuclear arsenal now under way, it is the apparent lack of well defined long-term goals (apart from “stability”) that largely account for Washington’s inability to clarify the nature of its engagement in Central Asia, leading it to deal with immediate issues (such as the Tajikistan situation) on a piecemeal basis. There are, however, at least two key areas of central Asian concern (not counting the burgeoning drug trade or the Tajikistan civil war) that directly engage “vital” U.S. interests. These areas are nuclear nonproliferation and energy security.
Continue reading →Paper Presented to the International Society for Sociology of Religion, Twenty-third Congress, Quebec City, 26–30 June 1995. Abstract Despite a large literature in Occidental behavioural science, prior to the collapse of the USSR in 1991, on the “Islamic factor” in … Continue reading →
This article surveys existing concepts of Soviet dissent and opposition and clarifies their implications for the definition of the Soviet political system. It defines the Soviet political system to comprise elite, regime, and community sectors; specifies the political roles composing … Continue reading →