The New 'Great Game': state & non-state competition

[Jedburgh]

FIIA, 15 Dec 10: Controlling Borderlands? New Perspectives on State Peripheries in Southern Central Asia and Northern Afghanistan

As its premise, this report supports the notion that life in a state’s border region is closely entwined with life within the two neighbouring states simultaneously rather than just one state: networks snake back and forth across borders, economic exchange makes use of a borderline, neighbouring political systems influence domestic policy, and local political negotiation employs the presence of an international boundary in sometimes surprising ways. Thus, for example, we are able to appreciate the ways in which political upheaval in Kyrgyzstan fundamentally affects the socio-economic opportunities of ethnic Kyrgyz in neighbouring Tajikistan; or how the ‘pacification’ of Afghanistan influences the new connectivity of the Pamir region. In other words, a state’s border policy never takes place in a socio-political vacuum. Borderlanders, that is, those groups living in the vicinity of a border, do not simply accept rhetorics of control by a state and reorientate their lives along permissible avenues of exchange. They can adapt to or struggle against this rhetoric, but their social networks transcend official categories demarcating states and administrative units. Locally held cognitive maps of borderlanders and their inhabitants as well as actually practised boundary crossings will take the officially demarcated boundary into consideration, but will also ignore it where this is deemed beneficial locally.....

[Jedburgh]

ICG, 3 Feb 11: Central Asia: Decay and Decline

Quietly but steadily Central Asia’s basic human and physical infrastructure – the roads, power plants, hospitals and schools and the last generation of Soviet-trained specialists who have kept this all running – is disappearing. The equipment is wearing out, the personnel retiring or dying. Post-independence regimes made little effort to maintain or replace either, and funds allocated for this purpose have largely been eaten up by corruption. This collapse has already sparked protests and contributed to the overthrow of a government....

...The consequences of this neglect are too dire to ignore. The rapid deterioration of infrastructure will deepen poverty and alienation from the state. The disappearance of basic services will provide Islamic radicals, already a serious force in many Central Asian states, with further ammunition against regional leaders and openings to establish influential support networks. Economic development and poverty reduction will become a distant dream; the poorest states will become ever more dependent on the export of labour. Anger over a sharp decline in basic services played a significant role in the unrest that led to the overthrow of Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev in April 2010. It could well play a similar role in other countries, notably Tajikistan, in the not too distant future....

[davidbfpo]

I have reviewed the threads in this forum and created this new larger, mainly historical thread to cover the little reported, rarely watched by SWC competition in Central Asia, the 'stans, between external powers and within between crime, Islam and the state(s). The catalyst being what follows.

matters Afghan are excluded from this thread and appear elsewhere!

[davidbfpo]

A pair of China-based analysts on a trek around Central Asia report:http://raffaellopantucci.com/2012/09...wn-kazakhstan/

If you check the author's website there are a series of articles on the region.

[davidbfpo]

This blog examines China's evolving influence and role in Central Asia.

Link:http://chinaincentralasia.com/about/