Central Asian Security Trends: Views from Europe and Russia - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

On January 25-26, 2010, SSI organized a conference entitled, “Contemporary issues in International Security,” at the Finnish embassy in Washington, DC. This was the second in what we hoped will be annual conferences bringing together U.S., European, and Russian scholars and experts to discuss such issues in an open forum. The importance of such regular dialogues among experts is well known, and the benefits of these discussions are considerable. Just as we published the papers of the 2008 conference in 2009 (Stephen J. Blank, ed., Prospects for U.S.-Russian Security Cooperation, Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2009), we are doing so now. However, in this case, we are publishing the papers on a panel-by-panel basis. The papers collected in this volume pertain to Central Asia. Indeed, they offer us two foreign views of the strategic situation evolving there—a Russian and a French analysis. For obvious reasons: the war in Afghanistan, proximity to major global actors, large energy holdings, and for less obvious reason, i.e., the possibility that domestic instability in one or more of these states could spread to other Muslim states as we now see in the Arab revolutions of 2011, Central Asia is an increasingly important and interesting strategic region. As such, it merits sustained critical attention and analysis of the sort we are presenting here and that we have presented in the past. We also intend to continue doing so in the future. Yet for all of Central Asia’s growing importance, it is a hard area to grasp analytically. To nonspecialists, it is likely to be something of a terra incognita, an unknown region, whose landmarks impart a sense of unfamiliarity, even unease, to those coming from the outside to try and understand it. Yet, at the same time, even for specialists, its reality is elusive and debates abound as to the nature of its domestic politics in both individual states and across the region. Moreover, the question of the stability of either individual states or of the region, a key question for foreign policymakers and analysts, is one of the most contested of the questions currently being debated. Many analysts have accepted what has become a paradigm: that these states are fundamentally precarious due to internal cleavages between social and ethnic groups, face potentially devastating environmental and economic hazards, are fundamentally misgoverned autocracies that will inevitably explode sooner or later, and carry within them the threat of Islamic fundamentalist and terrorist forces coming to power as a result of pervasive misrule. However, more recently it has become clear that Central Asian governments (not surprisingly) resent this characterization of their efforts and point to 20 years of stability—often against all predictions—as testimony for their capacity for growth and stability. Obviously, we cannot give a definitive answer to these questions in the space of a single collection of essays. But the point of these essays, and of the panel from which they have sprung, is to encourage our readers to take a more lively interest in this region whose strategic future is increasingly entangled with U.S. interests and those of key allies and other major international actors. As September 11, 2001, showed, threats originating here can reach out and touch the United States. Certainly they can also reach out to Europe as subsequent terror attacks show. For this reason, we hope that the essays presented here, as well as our previous efforts to understand trends in this region and what will be future publications along this line, will help to enlighten policymakers and planners, as well as specialists and other readers about the growing importance of the region and the increased necessity of obtaining a deeper understanding of its evolution.

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