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PONARS Eurasia
PONARS Eurasia
  • About
    • Contact
    • Membership
      • All Members
      • Core Members
      • Collegium Members
      • Associate Members
      • About Membership
    • Ukraine Experts
    • Executive Committee
  • Policy Memos
    • List of Policy Memos
    • Submissions
  • Podcasts
  • Online Academy
  • Events
    • Past Events
  • Recommended
  • Ukraine Experts
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Policy Perspectives

RECOMMENDED
  • Conflicts in the North Caucasus Since 1991 | PONARS Eurasia Online Academy

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  • Will Ukraine Wind Up Making Territorial Concessions to Russia? Foreign Affairs Asks the Experts

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  • Pro-Kremlin Propaganda’s Failure in Ukraine | New Voices on Eurasia with Aaron Erlich (Jan. 19)

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  • Kyiv-Washington Relations in Times of Colossal War: The Ultimate Test of a Strategic Partnership

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  • Russia’s war in Ukraine threatens students daily and forces teachers to improvise

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RSS PONARS Eurasia Podcast
  • The Putin-Xi Summit: What's New In Their Joint Communique ? February 23, 2022
    In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman speaks with Russian China experts Vita Spivak and Alexander Gabuev about the February meeting between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, and what it may tell us about where the Russian-Chinese relationship is headed.
  • Exploring the Russian Courts' Ruling to Liquidate the Memorial Society January 28, 2022
    In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with scholars Kelly Smith and Benjamin Nathans about the history, achievements, and impending shutdown of the Memorial Society, Russia's oldest and most venerable civic organization, and what its imminent liquidation portends for the Russian civil society.
  • Russia's 2021 census and the Kremlin's nationalities policy [Lipman Series 2021] December 9, 2021
    In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with social scientist Andrey Shcherbak about the quality of the data collected in the recent population census and the goals of Vladimir Putin's government's nationalities policy
  • Active citizens of any kind are under threat [Lipman Series 2021] November 5, 2021
    In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Alexander Verkhovsky about the Kremlin's ever expanding toolkit against political and civic activists, journalists, and other dissidents.
  • Russia's Legislative Elections followup [Lipman Series 2021] October 4, 2021
    In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Tanya Lokot and Nikolay Petrov about the results of Russia’s legislative elections and about what comes next.
  • Why Is the Kremlin Nervous? [Lipman Series 2021] September 14, 2021
    In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Ben Noble and Nikolay Petrov about Russia’s September 17-19 legislative elections, repressive measures against electoral challengers, and whether to expect anything other than preordained results.
  • Vaccine Hesitancy in Russia, France, and the United States [Lipman Series 2021] August 31, 2021
    In this week's PONARS Eurasia Podcast episode, Maria Lipman chats with Denis Volkov, Naira Davlashyan, and Peter Slevin about why COVID-19 vaccination rates are still so low across the globe, comparing vaccine hesitant constituencies across Russia, France, and the United States.  
  • Is Russia Becoming More Soviet? [Lipman Series 2021] July 26, 2021
      In a new PONARS Eurasia Podcast episode, Maria Lipman chats with Maxim Trudolyubov about the current tightening of the Russian political sphere, asking whether or not it’s helpful to draw comparisons to the late Soviet period.
  • The Evolution of Russia's Political Regime [Lipman Series 2021] June 21, 2021
    In this week's episode of the PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Grigory Golosov and Henry Hale about the evolution of Russia's political regime, and what to expect in the lead-up to September's Duma elections.
  • Volodymyr Zelensky: Year Two [Lipman Series 2021] May 24, 2021
    In this week's episode of the PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Sergiy Kudelia and Georgiy Kasianov about Ukrainian President Zelensky's second year in office, and how he has handled the political turbulence of the past year.
  • Policy Perspectives

Eurasian Visions: Integration and Geopolitics in Central Asia

  • September 18, 2015
  • PONARS Eurasia

The idea of regional integration in post-Soviet Eurasia is as old as the post-Soviet states themselves. From the moment the USSR collapsed, Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan spearheaded efforts to establish supranational links to replace the domestic ones they had sundered. The Commonwealth of Independent States that the leaders of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine founded in December 1991 served more as a protracted mechanism for divorce than a basis for new forms of integration. But more targeted efforts at security and economic integration, like the Collective Security Treaty Organization and the pre-EEU Customs Union, held more promise of success, even as questions concerning the practical functioning of their institutions and the distribution of benefits across their members remained.

Then, in October 2011, Vladimir Putin declared Russia’s ambition to “go beyond” existing levels of post-Soviet integration by building a Eurasian Union that would become “one of the poles in the modern world” and serve as a “bridge between Europe and the dynamic Asia-Pacific region.” Many observers dismissed the Eurasian Union as campaign rhetoric in advance of Putin’s return to the Russian presidency. But just over three years later, in January 2015, the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) came into being, uniting the Russian Federation, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Armenia, and later Kyrgyzstan into a regional trade bloc with a set of EU-imitating administrative institutions. 

The timing of the EEU’s inception could not have been worse. In the months before, Russia had engulfed Ukraine in conflict over the ousting of Ukraine’s ex-president Viktor Yanukovych. The birth of the EEU thus became entangled with the specter of a new Russian “gathering of lands,” by which Moscow would force countries into ever closer integration and threaten to tear off Russian-populated chunks of those that resisted. The juxtaposition of the Ukraine conflict and the EEU’s inception highlighted tensions in Russian foreign policy: between multinational integration and ethnic unification; geopolitical ambition and economic rationality; respect for territorial integrity and the fomenting of secession and annexation.

These tensions have been acutely felt by Russia’s neighbors and not only by those that have distanced themselves from Russia’s integration ambitions. Other EEU members have sought to balance their Russia-oriented integration efforts by cultivating close economic and, occasionally, security relationships with other powers, in the West but also with China. These powers have eagerly reciprocated. In Central Asia, they have engaged in parallel bids for influence, promoting alternative visions of “New Silk Roads” that would embed the region into Southern-oriented or Eastern-oriented trade and investment networks to complement (or, in the extreme, replace) established linkages with the North.

This collection, Eurasian Visions: Integration and Geopolitics in Central Asia, explores a number of these themes. Marlene Laruelle, Andrey Makarychev, Viatcheslav Morozov, and Alexandra Yatsyk examine the tensions between the differing ideologies underpinning Russia’s regional foreign policy and their consequences for actual foreign and domestic policymaking. Serghei Golunov, Caress Schenk, and Nicu Popescu shift from ideology to practice, analyzing the impact of Russian economic policy on EEU trade, the tension between EEU freedom of movement and members’ own labor and migration policies, and the challenges of aligning EEU economic and political objectives. Eric McGlinchey, George Gavrilis, Sean Roberts, and Elizabeth Wishnick assess Eurasian geopolitics at a time when the states of Central Asia are navigating among multiple centers of influence, and Russia and China are reassessing their political relations. Sebastien Peyrouse, Anar Valiyev, Alexander Cooley, and Vladimir Popov take a closer look at the viability of new economic projects across Eurasia, including the “New Silk Road” that the United States has promoted, China’s “Silk Road Economic Belt,” and Russia’s efforts to reorient its economy toward China and the East. Finally, Natalie Koch, Anar Valiyev, and Scott Radnitz investigate two puzzles of Central Asian politics: the logic of spectacular construction projects and mega-events and the various possibilities for succession politics after the departure of this generation of leaders.

The 17 policy memos included here are based on the proceedings of Security and Regional Integration in Eurasia, a June 2015 workshop of the George Washington University’s Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia (PONARS Eurasia), held at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan, and co-sponsored by Nazarbayev University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The memos were originally published online, together with a number of others on different topics, from June-September 2015 and are reprinted here in their original form. 

We know you will find these policy perspectives informative and thought-provoking. Many individuals were instrumental in the production of this volume, as well as the organization of the workshop that generated it. In addition to all the authors and conference participants, we would like to especially thank our colleagues and co-sponsors at Nazarbayev University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in particular Charles Sullivan and Yoshiko Herrera; PONARS Eurasia Managing Editor Alexander Schmemann; former Program Coordinator Olga Novikova; Program Assistants Matthew McDonald and Eileen Jorns; Senior Research Associate Sufian Zhemukhov; Research Assistant George Terry; IERES Operations Manager Evan Alterman; and IERES Director Peter Rollberg.

PONARS Eurasia is an international network of scholars advancing new policy approaches to research and security in Russia and Eurasia. Its core missions are to connect scholarship to policy on and in Russia and Eurasia and to foster an international community, especially of mid-career and rising scholars, committed to developing policy-relevant and collaborative research. 

PONARS Eurasia, together with the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES), expresses its appreciation to Carnegie Corporation of New York for its support.

The papers in this volume are based on a PONARS Eurasia policy workshop held at Nazarbayev University, Astana, Kazakhstan, in June 2015 and co-sponsored by Nazarbayev University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

 

PDF File:
Eurasian Visions_PONARS Eurasia_Astana 2015.pdf
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Related Topics
  • Central Asia
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