Despite popular misperceptions of religiosity in general and Islam in particular flourishing most strongly in poor rural areas, the Islamist revival of the last 30 years has been primarily an urban phenomenon. This has been the result of the loss of familial ties by those... MORE

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

The security forces of Kazakhstan carried out a special operation on February 16, and detained 29 members of a criminal gang, which included customs officials as well as law enforcement officers. Among those arrested was Damirbek Asylbek ulu, a deputy of the parliament of neighboring... MORE

Since becoming president of Uzbekistan in September 2016, following the death of longtime authoritarian leader Islam Karimov, Shavkat Mirziyoyev has taken steps to dramatically improve relations with his country’s neighbors and to eliminate some of the most noxious and repressive policies of his predecessor at... MORE

Kazakhstan’s parliament introduced new legislation, on January 24, 2018, pertaining to the National Security Council (KNSC) (Abctv.kz, January 24). The legislation notably follows last year’s adoption of a new military strategy, which focuses on ways to strengthen national security and domestic stability (see EDM, October... MORE

Rustam Inoyatov, until recently the head of Uzbekistan’s National Security Service (NSS), the local successor of the Soviet KGB, is possibly the second most durable senior official in Tashkent, giving way only to the late president Islam Karimov himself. Many other senior officials were promoted... 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

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

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