February 2014 Newsletter

On February 14, 2014, The Jamestown Foundation held a conference on “Russia and the North Caucasus After the Sochi Olympics” in the Root Room at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The conference featured keynote speaker Mikheil Saakashvili, the former President of the Republic of Georgia. President Saakashvili spoke at length about the Euro-Maidan revolution in Ukraine and its consequences for the rest of the post-Soviet space. In discussing the future of Russia and the region, he underscored that the “world of empires is over,” and that “the role of empires in [Georgia’s] part of the world is not sustainable.”

The conference included two panels of speakers who focused on the impact of the Sochi Olympics on the future of Russia and on the North Caucasus as well as the radicalization of jihadists in the North Caucasus. Jamestown Non-Resident Senior Fellow Valery Dzutsev spoke on Russia’s Sochi Olympics policies and their destabilizing regional impact. Russian analyst Andrei Piontkovsky questioned the Russian nation’s commitment to holding onto the North Caucasus in the long term. Whereas Janusz Bugajski, a long-time expert on the post-Soviet Bloc, compared the bloody turmoil in Russia’s south with the inter-ethnic Balkan wars of the 1990s.

The second panel featured Jamestown Non-Resident Senior Fellow Mairbek Vatchagaev, who discussed the link between the North Caucasus insurgency and the jihadist fighters in Syria. Circassian activist Ibrahim Yaganov spoke about his people’s grievances of being disregarded by Moscow during the Sochi Olympic Games, while Merabi Chukhua explored Georgia’s soft power overtures toward the Circassians. Despite an inopportune snowstorm, nearly 100 people came to watch the conference and participated in lively question-and-answer periods with the speakers.

To watch President Mikheil Saakashvili’s remarks during the conference, please click here

China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) will begin its annual meeting next week on March 5. Since it is the first meeting of the Chinese legislature since President Xi Jinping revealed reform plans at the Third Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee, it is unlikely to yield major new information about Chinese economic policy. While China does not have an independent legislature, and meetings of the NPC are tightly stage-managed by the Party, the endorsement of new laws is a major step on the road to enacting policy, and the results of the meeting will be a major indication of whether and how fast Xi’s plans are proceeding.

Check China Brief online on March 6 to read Jamestown Senior Fellow Willy Lam’s readout on the first day of the NPC, including Prime Minister Li Keqiang’s work report, and for analysis of the declining power of China’s pre-eminent central planning authority, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC).