Ukraine has been “coerced to peace” by Russia after five months of hostilities, as Georgia was in 2008 after five days. Russia’s hybrid war methods, rehearsed already against Georgia and deployed fully against Ukraine, proved indecisive, until Russia escalated to the level of conventional war... MORE

Following deadly attacks in Beijing, Kunming and Urumqi over the last year, the Xinjiang government has intensified its efforts to regulate Uyghur religious activities. The provincial government has once again reinforced its ban on Ramadan fasting for Uyghur civil servants and students in 2014, as... MORE

Since 2013, increasing numbers of Uyghurs from Xinjiang Province have attempted to migrate illegally through China’s South Asian neighbors—Burma, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia—to Thailand and then Malaysia, often with the hope of flying to Turkey. This trend marks a change from the 1990s and mid-2000s,... MORE

In March 2013, China passed legislation integrating four of its five maritime law enforcement (MLE) agencies into the newly-created China Coast Guard, under the State Oceanic Administration (SOA) (see also China Brief, March 28, 2013). [1] This decision, long called for by people both in... MORE

Russian President Vladimir Putin undoubtedly timed the coordinated effort to initiate a ceasefire in southeastern Ukraine to coincide with both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) September 4-5 summit in Newport, Wales, and the European Union’s threat of additional sanctions against his country. However, due... MORE

On June 29, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) declared the emergence of an Islamic caliphate and renamed itself the Islamic State (IS). The organisation proclaimed that all existing Muslim states should support and provide their allegiances to the Caliphate, which according to... MORE

The Ukrainian crisis has overshadowed the continuing low-level insurgency in Russia’s North Caucasus. Besides shifting public attention, the conflict in Ukraine is evidently shifting Russian forces from the volatile region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. For years, the best combat-ready Russian forces... MORE

Mariupol illustrates the failure of Russia’s Novorossiya’s project to attract popular support in southeastern Ukraine. That project might have been expected to meet with success in many large cities, including Mariupol. This city of 500,000 (second-largest in the Donetsk province) is thoroughly Russified linguistically, closely... MORE

Russia opened its second front against Ukraine in late August on the Azov Sea coast, threatening to capture the port city of Mariupol (Donetsk region’s outlet to the sea), and potentially to link up with Crimea. The opening of this second front, coordinated with Russia’s... MORE

August 2014 turned out to be an ordinary month for the North Caucasus as there was no change in the fighting between the government and the insurgency. The insurgents staged attacks in Dagestan, Chechens fought in the ranks of the jihadists in Syria and Iraq.... MORE