The Secretariat of the Collective Security Treaty Organization’s (CSTO) Parliamentary Assembly is currently examining a bill on private military and security organizations (Private Military Companies—PMC) (RIA Novosti, February 5). If adopted inside the Moscow-led alliance, the individual CSTO member states will then be tasked with... MORE

Perhaps few places on earth are as wrapped in mystery and intrigue as the northern reaches of Afghanistan, where, 150 years ago, Russia and the United Kingdom played the great game against one another and where, most recently, Moscow and the West were locked in... MORE

In the last month alone, local authorities closed almost 100 mosques in the northern part of Tajikistan, the latest effort by Dushanbe to control Islam in the most fervently Muslim country in Central Asia. Yet, this campaign is exceedingly likely to backfire by driving both... MORE

From one perspective, China has enormous “soft power” in Central Asia, the ability, as Joseph Nye defined it (Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power, New York, 1990), “to persuade others to do what it wants without force or coercion.” It can and... MORE

When Uzbekistanis elected Shavkat Mirziyoyev as their president on December 4, 2016, they entered 2017 with a healthy dose of skepticism that real change would follow. Indeed, during his first public address as the interim head of state, Mirziyoyev, previous president Islam Karimov’s prime minister... MORE

Central Asia in 2017 recalls Charles Dickens’ observation in A Tale of Two Cities: it was truly the best of times, if far from perfect, and the worst of times, if far from disastrous. And depending on whether one focuses on the problems the five... MORE

After gaining their independence a quarter century ago, all of the countries of the post-Soviet space have had to delimit their borders with each other. Most have had conflicts, but all but a few of those have since been resolved. One of the most serious... MORE

The president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, paid an official visit to Uzbekistan in mid-September, highlighting improving relations between Central Asia’s two largest states. There, he met with his Uzbekistani counterpart, Shavkat Mirziyaev, for the sixth time since the latter took office last December, following the... MORE

In early September, six million mobile phone users in Tajikistan received text messages telling them to “respect traditional clothes” and “make it a tradition to wear traditional clothes.” The messages, sent at the behest of the State Committee on Women’s and Family Affairs, are the... MORE

As Russia’s Armed Forces await the details and specific implications of the new State Armaments Program to 2025 (Gosudarstvennaya Programma Vooruzheniya—GPV), there is widespread expectation that the military will receive more high-precision strike systems to complement its efforts to develop greater operational capabilities (Utro.ru, June... MORE