A major scandal has broken out between China, on the one hand, and Tajikistan and Russia, on the other, regarding alleged Chinese claims on the Pamir region. This past month, official outlets of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) repeatedly republished an article by Chinese... MORE

What Will Come of Uzbek and Central Asian Militant Groups Fighting Alongside the Taliban? Brian M. Perkins As the United States has worked to finalize the peace deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan, persistent questions have lingered as to the degree to which the insurgency... MORE

Introduction On June 15, People’s Republic of China (PRC) Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng (乐玉成) held consultations via video with Turkmenistan’s Deputy Foreign Minister Vepa Hajiyev. During the meeting, two main topics were discussed: the first was reaffirming the strategic nature of bilateral ties between... MORE

The COVID-19 pandemic generated many challenges for trans-Eurasian transportation corridors as borders were shut down, factories closed, and supply chains thrown into disarray. The disease outbreak and subsequent quarantine conditions did, however, offer new opportunities to railway container transportation along the Trans-Caspian route, also known... MORE

China and Uzbekistan have opened a new transport corridor between one other, which could eventually form a key link in a much shorter inter-continental route connecting China to the Middle East and Europe. Tashkent trusts that the new corridor complements rather than competes with already-established... MORE

Analysts and policymakers dealing with the post-Soviet space frequently rely on frameworks that might have been appropriate a generation ago but no longer correspond to today’s realities. Nowhere is that truer than in the way outsiders, including Russians, view and interact with Central Asian countries.... MORE

In March 2019, Dmitry Zhelobov, a specialist on China at Russia’s Urals Federal University, warned that Beijing was shifting from relying on soft power in Central Asia to using hard power. If Russia did not take this threat seriously, he added, China might have its... MORE

The Russian Federation is strengthening its economic integration with several Central Asian states. At the beginning of April, the authorities of Uzbekistan and Russia agreed to set up an economic cooperation program in May that would take into account the influence of the novel coronavirus... MORE

In the early hours of  April 15, around 350 German law enforcement officials arrested four Tajik asylum seekers in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. According to the state prosecutor, the men, all between 24 and 32 years old and Tajik nationals, had formed a... MORE

Eastern Tajikistan’s Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region—comprising more than half of the historical mountainous region of Badakhshan, which it shares with northern Afghanistan—is one of the most isolated, impoverished and unsettled places in Central Asia. Gorno-Badakhshan was a center of resistance to Dushanbe during the civil war... MORE