Josh Kucera, Diplomat
Deirdre Tynan, Global Public Square
Louise Arbour, Foreign Policy
Ilan Greenberg, National Interest
M.K. Bhadrakumar, Asia Times

Could efforts by Russia and America in Central Asia exacerbate tensions and make matters worse?...(full article)

China is spending billions of dollars in Central Asia, and is hoping for two things in return. The first is natural resources measured in cubic meters of gas, barrels of oil and me...(full article)

Every year, around the world, old conflicts worsen, new ones emerge and, occasionally, some situations improve. There is no shortage of storm clouds looming over 2013: Once ...(full article)

Across the five post-Soviet countries, state decision-making is walled inside presidential palaces. While the heads of state range from outright dictators (Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan...(full article)

A period of intense high-level exchange is commencing this week between Russia and its Central Asian allies - and Pakistan. What characterizes the Russian strategy is a robust atte...(full article)
Since 9/11, America's priority in Central Asia has been to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan. But as the United States and NATO pull out, there is a new danger: that the West could...
Sino-Turkmen energy cooperation gives Beijing greater maneuverability in navigating the treacherous geopolitics of the region....
Why China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan have yet to take new members....
As relations worsen between Pakistan and the United States, which has by far the largest troop deployment in the mission, Nato is looking at an exit strategy that does not depend...
Eurasia is crucially important for Russia’s policy not due to its past but primarily because of issues of the present. Can Russia, with its estimated three million ethnic A...
If the Middle East is your yardstick, the countries of Central Asia ought to be on the verge of revolution. But don't hold your breath....
In the midst of a relatively calm election season, we have been travelling to Kyrgyzstan’s cities, villages and border posts to track the rise of China in Central Asia. The atmos...
The "New Silk Road," I think, has a common intellectual pedigree with other programs from the mid-oughts to unite South and Central Asia, like the effort to tie together the elec...
During the Cold War, Russia held sway over an empire. Today, it seeks to court through diplomacy what it once often held through force....
Pundits and politicians have offered no shortage of explanations as to what inspired the Arab Spring.Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi setting himself on fire in December to ...
Despite its growing military and economic power, Russia doesn't see China as a threat. The potential chaos in Central Asia is another matter....
When Kyrgyzstan President Roza Otunbayeva announced last month that the country would be building two ‘counter-terror training centres’ in the south of the country &n...
When an angry mob overthrew Kyrgyzstan’s autocratic president Kurmanbeck Bakiyev last April, one of the complaints heard most often on the streets of Bishkek, the country’s cap...
While China is seizing the spotlight in East and Southeast Asia with its widening economic footprint and muscular diplomacy, it is also quietly making its presence felt on its west...
Kyrgyzstan has been trying for many years to implement a successful parliamentary democracy, a system that does not exist in Central Asia....
China, it seems, is becoming so powerful that it is in a position to exert pressure on almost all countries to do its bidding....
In its decade-long slog to secure Afghanistan, the United States has juggled contradictory foreign policies in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, the fragile Central Asian states with key ...
The international community is expecting a new Kyrgyz government to provide the leadership to bring the current situation under control....
Unrest, corruption and nepotism are gradually pushing democracy out of Central Asia. Don't expect change for generations....
As Kyrgyzstan plunges into crisis and the threat of a second Afghanistan in Central Asia looms large, the situation in the “Big Caucasus” seems less pressing and thus o...
In the aftermath of the October 10 elections, Kyrgyzstan continues to make "teetering steppes" towards democracy, defying expectations that the poll would be manifestly fraudulent ...
The man tells me that the severed head is Kyrgyz. The video, relayed to me on the small screen of his mobile phone, is blurry and the sound quality is poor. But I can nonetheless...
The sun is high in the sky, directly above the Taht-I-Suleiman, a giant rock in the middle of the city where the Biblical King Solomon was once said to have preached. In fact,...
Washington's willingness to defer to Russia in the land of Kipling may mark the beginning of something larger: a new era in which the Great Powers attempt to tread more gingerly i...
Working together, the United States and China need to target the bottom billion for pre-emptive nation-building....
President Barack Obama's decision to hold a meeting with Kyrgyz President Rosa Otunbayeva, whose country has a mere 5 million people, reflects Kyrgyzstan's strategic location at th...
Rife with corruption and nepotism, Central Asian nations look to have put back the prospects for real democracy by decades....
From Kashmir to Kurdistan, a non-interventionist stance from the major powers is of no help to the world's trouble spots....
The reset of the relationship of the United States with Russia is being put to the test for the first time. Kyrgyzstan poses a tough challenge: can the reset really work in a hi...
Beset by mounting casualties on the battlefield and deepening disquiet at home over the United States' longest war, President Obama's Afghan policy now faces another big headache...
The most disturbing and dangerous consequence of the violence is that the central government has now lost de facto control of the south....
Two months after ethnic riots rocked southern Kyrgyzstan, the Central Asian nation that hosts an important U.S. air base, tensions between minority Uzbeks and Kyrgyz remain tense...
Stark differences have emerged in how the Kyrgyz media have covered the origins and aftermath of the interethnic violence that erupted the Central Asian country in mid-June....
This Central Asian country just adopted the most liberal constitution in the region. Will Moscow let it live?...
The tragic events in Kyrgyzstan remind us of the most unfortunate chapters of Eurasia's recent history, when the news from the former Soviet Union was dominated by stories of co...
Kyrgyzstan's south, which is a known haven for drug traffickers, has long been difficult for authorities in Bishkek to control....
Promoting the idea that Russia can and will topple Georgia's government simply encourages conspiracy theorizing and paranoia in Tbilisi....
At the height of the slaughter in Osh in southern Kyrgyzstan, Federal Drug Control Service chief Viktor Ivanov’s only comment was that a Russian military base may be establishe...
How much do we really know about the Taliban?...
Indian discourse on regional security has traditionally paid scant attention to the country's extended neighbourhood of Central Asia. No discourse on the Afghan problem will be c...
OSH, Kyrgyzstan - Just two weeks after deadly ethnic violence swept through Osh in a firestorm of rage that left Kyrgyzstan's second city devastated, people ...
If the Central Asian state of Kyrgyzstan were to be the litmus test, the United States' "reset" of ties with Russia appears only selectively genuine. ...
There's still time to prevent the worst....
Kyrgyzstan's interim president, Roza Otunbayeva, has been struggling to deal with ethnic violence in her country. In a SPIEGEL interview, she claims that supporters of her predeces...
Diplomats in many corners of the world are puzzled by what appears to be a fundamental shift in Russia's foreign policies in recent months, from a strategy based on threat and in...