The Crisis of Governance in Central Asia
VIEW EVENT DETAILSSince emerging as independent states from the ruins of the Soviet Union 20 years ago, the five Central Asian nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan have struggled with the fundamental question of statehood: how to govern their societies fairly and effectively.
Guided by autocrats, Central Asia has produced staggering amounts of corruption, human-rights abuses, conflict, and civil unrest, majorly contributing to the region’s instability. As evidenced by recent events in the Middle East and Northern Africa — and by Central Asia’s own rollercoaster of revolutions in Kyrgyzstan — seemingly unassailable dictatorships can crumble quickly, with unpredictable consequences.
Central Asia, with its vast natural resources, also occupies a strategically important neighborhood: between China, where the country's growing economic and geopolitical gravity is pulling the region into its orbit; Russia and its newly assertive foreign policy, which seeks to reclaim its economic and strategic supremacy in its old Central Asian dominion; and Afghanistan, where the West has spent nearly a decade waging war and where the military campaign has thrust the United States, and to a lesser extent Western Europe, deep into Central Asian affairs.
Within this geopolitical context, our speakers will discuss Central Asia's governance challenges, the region's strategic importance to its neighbors’ energy security, and its role in regional solutions to conflict in Afghanistan.
SPEAKERS:
Philip Shishkin is a correspondent at Reuters. He served as Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the Asia Society during 2011, writing the report Central Asia's Crisis of Governance. He spent 10 years as a staff reporter of The Wall Street Journal, running their Baghdad bureau in 2006 and 2007. He has written extensively about Central Asia, chronicling the turbulent nation-building process in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.
David Merkel is the Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs and the Former Director for Central Asia at the National Security Council.
Sean Roberts is Associate Professor of the Practice of International Affairs and Director of the International Development Studies Program at George Washington University’s Elliott School. In 1998–2000 and 2002–2006, he worked on democracy programs at USAID in Central Asia. He was also post-doctoral fellow in Central Asian Affairs at Georgetown University.
Justin Burke (moderator) is Managing Editor of EurasiaNet.org, a news website covering Central Asia and the Caucasus. Previously, he worked as a foreign correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, based in Russia and Germany. He was also a visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.
6:00-6:30 pm: Registration
6:30-8:00 pm: Discussion and Q & A
8:00-8:30 pm: Reception
Can't make it to this program? Tune into AsiaSociety.org/Live at 6:30 pm ET on 2/28 for a free live video webcast. Viewers are encouraged to submit questions to [email protected].
To read a related report written by Philip Shishkin, click here.