Home › Books & Reviews › Capsule Reviews › Central Asian Security: The New International Context; Jihadi Groups, Nuclear Pakistan, and the New Great Game

Central Asian Security: The New International Context; Jihadi Groups, Nuclear Pakistan, and the New Great Game

Edited by Roy Allison and Lena Johnson
M. Ehsan Ahrari
Reviewed by By L. Carl Brown
January/February 2002
Print Email
Login or Register to leave a comment.

Sign-up for free weekly updates from ForeignAffairs.com.
Edited by Roy Allison and Lena Johnson
Brookings Institution Press
2001
279 pp.
0815701055
$22.95
M. Ehsan Ahrari
Strategic Studies Institute
2001
45 pp.

Many Americans are still seeking to get straight the "stans" of Central Asia. The Brookings report helps to situate that region as an arena in international politics. Although it offers less focus on Central Asia and its five separate states as such -- aside from an overview of common legacies and conflicts, Islam, and water rights -- the book's major contribution is a treatment of the Central Asia policies of Russia, the United States, China, Iran, and Turkey. The conclusion wrestles with scenarios projecting how regional stability might be achieved, given these many interested parties.

Meanwhile, Ahrari provides useful sketches of the different Islamist radical groups in the region. The strength of his little book is its balanced account of all the many different state and nonstate actors, including not just the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamists in Pakistan, but groups to their north as well.

Related

Essay, Summer 1992
Central Asia's Catapult to Independence
Martha Brill Olcott

Few peoples of the world have ever been forced to become independent nations. Yet that is precisely what happened to the five Central Asian republics after Russia, Belarus and Ukraine—the three original signatories of the U.S.S.R.’s founding 1922 constitution—met in Minsk on December 8, 1991, and created a new Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

Read
Snapshot, August 20, 2010
Reimagining Eurasia
Samuel Charap and Alexandros Petersen

The United States may have reset its Russia policy, but the U.S. approach to the other states in the region is in dire need of a conceptual revolution.

Read
Essay, Nov/Dec 1998
OPEC as Omen
Jahangir Amuzegar

The next great oil boom is on: four former Soviet republics on the Caspian Sea are sitting atop an economic bonanza. But they should remember the fate of OPEC, whose members squandered their 1970s windfall. Where did all the money go? The state took on too dominant an economic role and wasted the wealth at home in a rash of boondoggle projects and military buildups. All OPEC members came down with "quick-money fever." They became addicted to supposedly limitless oil revenues even as boom turned to bust. The Caspian states, too, risk going from riches to rags if they do not resist the temptations of petromania.

Read