In June 2011, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), an influential Eurasian regional grouping consisting of Russia, China and four Central Asian Republics (CARs)—Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan—formally approved a ‘memorandum of obligation’, which will now enable non-member countries to apply for SCO membership. India is an observer in the SCO and has expressed its desire to play a larger and more meaningful role as a full member of the organisation.
This article develops the message that the artificially introduced administrative borders during the Soviet era, which were subject to the processes of re-delimitation after 1991, whether for reasons of security, administration, mutual distrust or the population's ethnic attachment, have become results and means of political manipulation and pressurisation. This has resulted in further pushing regional states to follow mutually exclusive policies.
This article examines the strategic importance of Turkmenistan for India in respect of: energy resources; transit potential; and proximity to Afghanistan and Iran. It argues that India's economic potential, its liberal-democratic values, its pluralistic structure, secular fabric, military strength, strong financial, scientific and technological capabilities make it the most desirable partner for all the five Central Asian republics.
Everything is geopolitical in Central Asia where the newly independent state (NIS) Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are located. In other words, the major international political events in the region and most fateful political turns in regional developments bear, or are saturated with, geopolitical essence.
We must prove to the world community that a new political culture takes root in Kyrgyzstan and a new political strategy supported by people will have a future. A return to the past will imminently lead to the restoration of totalitarianism and a clannish government. We must learn a lesson from the past. Life will show how suitable the parliamentary system is for our community. Our people had lived in the conditions of a nomadic democracy for thousands of years, preserving their traditions and values in difficult times of history.
The energy sector since the mid-2000s has acquired top priority in Russian state affairs, but since late 2008 it has also become the epicentre of the economic disaster that still continues to affect Russia. President Medvedev has effectively discarded the notion of Russia as an 'energy super-power' and is now focusing on 'modernisation' for Russia's development. But coherence of this course is problematic because the bulk of new investments must go into the energy sector in order to sustain the high revenues.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's visit to India on March 11–12, 2010 signifies the beginning of a new phase in Indo-Russian friendship. In fact, this visit needs to be viewed in the context of the changing geopolitical and geo-economic realities in the international system.
The expiry of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty-1 (START-1) in 2009 and an urgent need to conclude a new US-Russian agreement on strategic nuclear weapons so that the oldest and biggest nuclear powers demonstrate some progress in implementing Article 6 of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in proximity of the 2010 NPT Review Conference has drawn international attention to the interface between the progress/crisis in nuclear disarmament and strengthening/weakening of the NPT regime.
The overall post-Soviet and post-Cold War transformation of the five Central Asian countries is multifaceted and complicated. New geopolitics has penetrated into almost all critically important spheres of post-Soviet transformation. Geopolitics even influences spheres such as national self-identification, which is traditionally regarded as having nothing to do with geopolitics. That is why one can assume that geopolitics stipulates regional integration as well.
Geopolitics has always had a global dimension even since the time of H.J. Mackinder. In the current context, understanding of a region like Central Asia would be incomplete without comprehending the global military and political transformations that are taking place.
