Karimov’s reelection has been followed by announcement a program of economic liberalization and privatization. Absence of full convertibility of the Uzbek som has been one of the the greatest roadblocks to development of the Central Asian Union.
Continue reading →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 problem the AIOC has in the short term is the opposite of the one that everyone has been talking about in the long term. In the long term, the general opinion is that there will be a problem is … Continue reading →
Transit of oil through the Baku-Novorossiisk pipeline continues to be a problematic affair. Since the beginning of the month, the pipeline has been shut down three times. The reasons given are the age of the Russian section of the pipeline … 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 →