Click here for the entire issue in PDF format
Editors' Note – Manas Airbase and U.S. Strategy in Central Asia
Nicklas Norling and Niklas Swanstrom
September 11 and the launch of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan heralded an unprecedented opportunity for the United States to assert a constructive influence in post-Soviet Central Asia. Eight years later the region appears to be a graveyard of unfulfilled American ambitions. As this issue goes to press, the Kyrgyz government has issued an eviction order to parliament threatening to expel the U.S. from the Manas airbase in Kyrgyzstan – the sole remaining airbase of the U.S. in the post-Soviet Central Asian region (...)
Foreign Policy in a Vulnerable State: Kyrgyzstan as Military Entrepot Between the Great Powers
Eugene Huskey
This article has two purposes: to explain why Kyrgyzstan developed into a military entrepot between the Great Powers and to assess the prospects for its relations with regional and world powers. Where Berlin served as a barometer of tension between East and West during the Cold War, Kyrgyzstan is emerging as an indicator of relations among the four great power centers in the early 21st century–Europe, the United States, Russia, and China (...)
Richard Pomfret
Turkmenistan has been much more diplomatically active in 2007 and 2008 following the death in December 2006 of President Saparmurat Niyazov, better known as Turkmenbashi the Great. Turkmenbashi pursued a foreign policy of neutrality, which was associated with an economic policy of increased national self-reliance. The President wished to preserve his autonomy to use the country’s resource wealth as he saw fit, but disastrous economic management brought the country to a parlous state by the end of the 1990s, and ironically to increased dependence on gas exports and on Russia as the controller of the gas pipelines (...)
Demographic Impact of HIV/AIDS in Russia: Projections, Analysis and Policy
Implications
Svetlana Ancker
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia has undergone major political, economic, social and cultural transformations. It has also been facing a number of serious health and demographic challenges. Today, despite its vast territory and abundant natural resources, stable economic growth and reclaimed international status, the country is losing it most precious resource – human capital – with a speed unparalleled in any other developed country (...)
Ghenghis Khan, Mongolia, and the Theory of Human Security
Robert E. Bedeski
Origins of the modern state system are often attributed to the Peace of Westphalia (1648), while evolution of the Western state itself traces a lineage from Greek and Roman precursors. The European tradition of discourse generally restricts itself to thinkers who addressed essential ideas of state formation and developments which contributed to its
emergence (...)
Breaking the Impasse in Afghanistan: Problems with Neighbors, Brothers and Guests
Samuel Chan
Although it is recognized that military action alone will not solve Afghanistan’s insurmountable problems, keeping the status quo is also not viable. Major cities are being rehabilitated but the rural majority reap only a portion of international aid. Physical security remains elusive with an insurgency in the southern and eastern provinces while warlords have re-established fiefdoms in the north. Afghanistan is the undisputed global producer of opiates, a predicament aggravated in part by malignant corruption within the government and strongmen who exploit the situation with impunity (...)
