Turkmenistan’s President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow visited the Caspian shore, on May 2, to inaugurate the Turkmenbashi International Seaport. The new $1.5 billion facility, Berdimuhamedow told attendees, is important not only for Turkmenistan but the wider region as well. It promises to become an important link in... MORE

Uzbekistani President Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s first foreign trip, in March 2017, nearly seven months after coming to power, took him to Turkmenistan. The salient point of the visit was the opening of a mile-long rail-and-car bridge connecting both countries over the Amudarya river and the signing... MORE

Since 1991, two key questions have dominated discussions of the fate of the Caspian Sea: First, how will it be divided now that there are five littoral states rather than two, as was the case in Soviet times? And second, will this landlocked body of... MORE

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani paid an official visit to Baku, Azerbaijan, on March 28. During the visit, Azerbaijan and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding on joint development of offshore hydrocarbon fields in the Caspian Sea (President.az, March 28). Remarkably, the names of the fields... MORE

Turkmenistan’s President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow visited the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait in mid-March as part of a campaign to revive a long-stalled natural gas pipeline from his country to Pakistan and India (Neftegaz.ru, March 16). The visit occurred three weeks after a February 23 groundbreaking... MORE

According to President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, 2011 was the last time the leadership of the five Central Asian countries all sat together at the same table to discuss regional issues (Tengrinews, March 15). On March 15, 2018, Nazarbayev, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev of Uzbekistan, President... MORE

Since becoming independent in 1991, the countries of Central Asia, both individually and collectively, have been viewed by many outsiders and even some of their own people as the inevitable objects of politics rather than as potential subjects. The region is widely considered one of... MORE

The foreign ministers of the five littoral Caspian states—Azerbaijan, Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Iran—met in Moscow, on December 5, 2017, to try to finalize an agreement on the legal status of the Caspian Sea. After the talks, the Azerbaijani and Russian representatives, Elmar Mammadyarov and... 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