Showing posts with label Kazakhstan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kazakhstan. Show all posts
16 December 2020
15 November 2020
The Red Line: Who Controls the Caspian Sea?
What was once considered a Soviet lake is now quickly becoming one of the most important strategic locations in the region, with Russia working hard to maintain its grip over the sea. The important part though may be what lies beneath its surface, that being enough gas to power Europe and blunt Russia's gas monopoly. So whoever controls the Caspian, will have major leverage over the European powers, but to discuss this further we turn to our expert panel. Eugene Chausovsky (Centre for Global Policy) Stanislav Printchin (ECED) Robert M Cutler (NATO Canada) For more info visit - www.theredlinepodcast.com Follow the show on @TheRedLinePod or Michael on @MikeHilliardAus
24 February 2020
UnHerd: How Kazakhstan’s multicultural dream turned sour
Kazakhstan has never witnessed ethnic violence on this scale before, but the turmoil evoked traumatic memories of intercommunal clashes in Kyrgyzstan in 2010 between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz which left hundreds dead. [...]
Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president who ruled Kazakhstan for three decades until his resignation last year, made ethnic harmony a pillar of the nation, partly to avoid antagonising his powerful neighbour Russia, always on the look-out for discrimination against Russians abroad (they are Kazakhstan’s largest ethnic minority, making up 40% of the population at independence and now just under 20%). [...]
Under Nazarbayev, ethnic tensions were a taboo topic. The government steadfastly denied any intercommunal element to such incidents, even flying in the face of evidence on the ground. This time, Tokayev, the president, initially dismissed the violence as a “group brawl”, before obliquely acknowledging an ethnic slant by condemning “criminals” acting under the guise of shouting “pseudo-patriotic slogans”.
24 January 2020
The Guardian: When Soviets met Stans: the tower blocks of central Asia – in pictures (3 May 2019)
Shares 544 Two Italian photographers, Roberto Conte and Stefano Perego, documented Soviet-era buildings in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan – and saw how Eastern characteristics crept into the brutal USSR designs.
23 January 2020
openDemocracy: The game's afoot: scenarios of power transition in Russia
The first piece of evidence is the timing. Why did it happen now, when 2024 is still far away? American political scientist Henry Hale writes that the political calendar is significant even under authoritarian regimes, where elections, formally competitive, are hollowed out and no longer guarantee change of power. Indeed, it is precisely around election dates that different elite groups orient their expectations and plans. This is why elections themselves often throw out unpleasant surprises for regimes, whether electorally or on the streets. Despite the apparently iron-clad consensus among Russian elites over Putin, they still have reason to be dissatisfied. [...]
The second question concerns the transition’s format. The Kremlin has several options: Belarusian (removal of limits on presidential terms and re-election of Putin as president), Kazakh (reserving Putin the post of head of a new institution with unlimited powers, which the Kazakh Security Council became after Nazarbayev joined it), and, finally, Russia-2008 (moving Putin to the post of Prime Minister and elections for his successor, perhaps with a straight repeat of 2008 - a shuffle with Medvedev). For the regime, each of these options has its advantages and shortcomings. [...]
Several analysts believe that Putin won’t take the risk and, despite initial impressions of his speech, Putin will choose the Belarusian scenario – a life presidency. As Kirill Rogov has noted, the post of president, according to Putin’s speech, will also receive additional powers – for example, the right to remove judges from the Constitutional and Supreme Courts (in agreement with the Federation Council – it will be impossible to talk about an independent judiciary even formally). We can’t rule out that these new powers will be given to Putin, rather than someone else, and that during the “popular vote” on the constitutional amendments a new paragraph will appear on removing the limit on presidential terms. Besides, as Putin has already stated, Russian citizens will vote on all the changes at once, in a “packet” of laws.
16 December 2019
8 June 2019
The Atlantic: An Aging Autocrat's Lesson for His Fellow Dictators
The most immediate ramifications of Kazakhstan’s experiment may be in Russia, where Vladimir Putin will need to decide on a path forward before 2024, when he finishes his second consecutive term as president, the maximum allowed by the constitution. According to Kendall-Taylor, Putin’s options are to choose a successor, amend the constitution, or abolish term limits altogether, like Chinese President Xi Jinping. Putin toyed with a division of power in 2008, when he and Dmitry Medvedev switched roles as prime minister and president. The key difference is that the upcoming decision may be Putin’s final play—the Russian leader will be in his 70s by the time his second term finishes. As two former Soviet countries with similar economies, comparable GDP per capita, and personalized political systems, Kazakhstan and Russia share a great deal, making the current transition an important test case for the Kremlin. [...]
Research done by Kendall-Taylor and Erica Frantz, an assistant politics professor at Michigan State University, found that the scenario in which regimes were most likely to survive was for dictators to die in office. The same data showed that when dictators, especially in personalized regimes like Kazakhstan and Russia, left office by other means, the regime had a high likelihood of collapse. Nazarbayev’s hybrid model, where he has created a new position that allows him to pull the levers of power from the sidelines, is tough to categorize, but it hints at an eventual settled outcome. “My assumption is that this will look more like a death in office in practice,” Kendall-Taylor said. [...]
Beyond protecting his family’s future role, Nazarbayev, 78, is also motivated by securing his own place in history. As Kazakhstan’s first leader since it gained independence in 1991, he has painted himself as the country’s founding father and has often spoken of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s former prime minister who also stepped aside before his death, as a role model for a type of enlightened authoritarianism. While Kazakhstan remains distant from Singapore in nearly every key metric, cementing his legacy is clearly on his mind, Deirdre Tynan, a senior adviser at PACE Global Strategies and a longtime Central Asia watcher, told me: “Nazarbayev knows Kazakhstan must shake off its post-Soviet mantle, and the reputation of its neighbors, and have a succession process that is, at the very least, not embarrassing.”
5 June 2019
Bloomberg: Russia After Vladimir Putin
The Free Russia Foundation, a Washington-based think tank chaired by former Assistant Secretary of State David Kramer, has just published a 170-page report what the country might look like in 2030. The authors include some of the most insightful anti-Putin commentators today: political analyst Alexander Morozov, media expert Vasily Gatov, economists Vladimir Milov and Vladislav Inozemtsev, social anthropologist Denis Sokolov and energy expert Ilya Zaslavskiy. [...]
Russia will increasingly come under China’s sway. The alliance between the two countries will strengthen, with Russia supplying more raw materials and China industrial goods. The two countries’ extensive military cooperation may be bolstered by their increasing alignment against the U.S. In the most likely scenario discussed in the report, Russia will become a Chinese satellite, boosting its military power and gradually allowing its domestic market to be subsumed. Both Western sanctions and the U.S. confrontation with Beijing make this outcome likelier, despite the domestic unpopularity of such an alliance.
No high-cost military adventures, but watch Belarus and Kazakhstan. None of the authors expect Russia to make any militarily aggressive moves against the Baltic states, but Belarus could be an attractive, and domestically popular, target if Putin wanted to stay in power beyond 2024 as head of a unified state. Separately, the slow leadership succession in Kazakhstan is likely to pose a threat. If the neighboring state chooses to align itself more closely with China or Turkey, it would strip Russia of one of its vaunted security buffers. Thus the report's authors see Belarus and Kazakhstan as more likely targets for Russian meddling than any other country, if only because they are uncertain about Moscow’s true military strength and the potential domestic popularity of armed aggression. Recent victories in Ukraine and Syria were against only weak adversaries. The military remains underfunded, and any losses would likely be extremely unpopular.
19 March 2019
BBC4 Thinking Allowed: Spectacular Cities
Spectacular urbanisation: The world’s tallest building is in Dubai and the 2022 World Cup in soccer will be played in fabulous Qatar facilities. But what role do the sensational cities of the Arabian Peninsula play in urban development across the Earth? Laurie Taylor talks to Harvey Molotch, Professor of Sociology at New York University and to Davide Ponzini , Associate Professor of Urban Planning at Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Also, Natalie Koch, Associate Professor of Geography at Syracuse University, asks why autocrats in resource rich nations build spectacular new capital cities.
5 November 2018
Scientific American: Abortion Is a Problem to Be Solved, Not a Moral Issue (September 1, 2018)
Abstinence would obviate abortions just as starvation would forestall obesity. There is a reason no one has proposed chastity as a solution to overpopulation. Sexual asceticism doesn't work, because physical desire is nearly as fundamental as food to our survival and flourishing. A 2008 study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health entitled “Abstinence-Only and Comprehensive Sex Education and the Initiation of Sexual Activity and Teen Pregnancy” found that among American adolescents ages 15 to 19, “abstinence-only education did not reduce the likelihood of engaging in vaginal intercourse” and that “adolescents who received comprehensive sex education had a lower risk of pregnancy than adolescents who received abstinence-only or no sex education.” A 2011 PLOS ONE paper analyzing “Abstinence-Only Education and Teen Pregnancy Rates” in 48 U.S. states concluded that “increasing emphasis on abstinence education is positively correlated with teenage pregnancy and birth rates,” controlling for socioeconomic status, educational attainment and ethnicity.
Most telling, a 2013 paper entitled “Like a Virgin (Mother): Analysis of Data from a Longitudinal, US Population Representative Sample Survey,” published in BMJ reported that 45 of the 7,870 American women studied between 1995 and 2009 said they become pregnant without sex. Who were these immaculately conceiving parthenogenetic Marys? They were twice as likely as other pregnant women to have signed a chastity pledge, and they were significantly more likely to report that their parents had difficulties discussing sex or birth control with them.
When women are educated and have access to birth-control technologies, pregnancies and, eventually, abortions decrease. A 2003 study on the “Relationships between Contraception and Abortion,” published in International Family Planning Perspectives, concluded that abortion rates declined as contraceptive use increased in seven countries (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Bulgaria, Turkey, Tunisia and Switzerland). In six other nations (Cuba, Denmark, the Netherlands, Singapore, South Korea and the U.S.), contraceptive use and abortion rates rose simultaneously, but overall levels of fertility were falling during the period studied. After fertility levels stabilized, contraceptive use continued to increase, and abortion rates fell.
24 September 2018
The Calvert Journal: Empire state of mind: projecting power in post-Soviet architecture
The 12-storey house with a tower of 18 stories connects seamlessly to the monumental buildings of the Stalin era. “It is terrible to say it” — Belov hesitates for a moment — “but it is still true: Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler’s chief architect, Albert Speer, simply had good taste.” Belov also has at the ready the politically correct superstructure for his empire project. He says it is about “de-Stalinising neoclassicism.” In lieu of the enormous Imperial Palace, a playful “House of the Avant-Garde” had originally been planned, with individual wings conceived according to motifs from the painters Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Alexander Rodchenko. It would have been Moscow’s version of the Friedensreich Hundertwasser House. [...]
On the other hand, the photographs include futuristic-looking structures, like the government ministry buildings in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan; the “Zeppelin” high-rise in Moscow; the headquarters of the Russian Railways, also in Moscow; or the chess centre in the oil town of Khanty-Mansiysk in far northern Russia. The point is always to shine with a particular geometric form. [...]
In Moscow City, the symbol of Russian turbo-capitalism, communism seems light-years away. But capitalism and communism have one thing in common: the human being is small, and always just an object. Herfort’s photographs illustrate this as well. When people can be seen at all, they are tiny in comparison to the buildings photographed.
9 August 2018
Nautilus Magazine: When Climate Change Starts Wars
This has been the situation in this borderland since March, when Uzbek troops cut off the road to the town of Ala-Buka, near the reservoir. This move was sparked after Kyrgyz authorities denied an Uzbek request to repair the reservoir in Kyrgyz territory using Uzbek engineers. The security situation escalated from there and culminated in August with the seizure of a Kyrgyz communications relay tower on a disputed mountaintop by helicopter-borne Uzbek police, who detained a number of Kyrgyz technicians. [...]
But this is all in flux. Climate change will continue to increase the area’s “environmental insecurity,” with the densely populated Fergana Valley being the most vulnerable, reads a 2014 report by the World Bank, which is funding economic research into how climate change will alter how people live around the world. Some 22 million people in the valley depend on irrigation for their livelihoods, and shortfalls in water—due to increased evaporation caused by higher temperatures and because glaciers are disappearing—are predicted to become a bigger problem. [...]
“We keep telling these guys about climate change,” Kadyrov, the USAID agricultural specialist, said. “There are some good farmers who understand they need to worry about it, but they do nothing.” Because their plots are small, most farmers in the Fergana do not have the money to invest in new equipment or infrastructure, and they are not trained in water conservation. [...]
Besides ethnicity, evaporation, misuse, population, and poverty, the issue of water is further complicated by the borders in the region. Before the Soviet Union’s breakup, water ran through a united country. Now the water courses through independent countries, crossing disputed borders. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan control most of the sources, while Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan have to either accept what their upstream neighbors give them, pay, negotiate, or try to take it.
16 February 2018
Bloomberg: How to Fix the Eastern Ukraine Problem
The operation would be modeled on a largely forgotten initiative in the Yugoslav wars -- the UN transitional administration in Eastern Slavonia, a Serb-held region of eastern Croatia. A force of 5,000 blue helmets secured the area and the border with Serbia, an election was organized, a managed transition to Croatian control followed -- all in the space of two years from 1996 to 1998. The region retained a soft border with Serbia; thousands of refugees returned to their homes, although some residents of eastern Slavonia moved to Serbia as UNTAES wrapped up. [...]
Gowan's proposals for eastern Ukraine are based on a simple logic. The Minsk agreements require a local election before Russia restores control of the border to Ukraine. Elections won't take place without an external catalyst and wouldn't be fairly conducted without international administration and policing. Ergo, something close to a full international takeover of eastern Ukraine is desirable. It's also the only way to alleviate Russian President Vladimir Putin's stated concerns for the safety of the pro-Russian population if Ukrainians were allowed to re-establish control, a risk that Gowan acknowledges. The international administration would also serve as a buffer for non-combatants who have worked for the "people's republics" -- such as teachers or public servants -- to transition to a peaceful life in which they aren't persecuted by a vindictive Ukrainian government. [...]
"In peacekeeping as in war, no plan survives first contact with reality," Gowan concedes. It's important, however, to start with a clear understanding of the strategic political goals and then fit the means to them, and Gowan does just that. His proposal gives the Kremlin a way to end the conflict without surrendering the rebels to Kiev's vengeance and to maintain cultural and economic times with eastern Ukraine; and it provides the Kiev government with a way to getting its territories back and the border with Russia under its control again.
10 February 2018
The Washington Post: Putin’s Silk Road gamble
Another blow was the loss of Ukraine as a potential participant in Russian-led integration arrangements. Without Ukraine, the second-largest post-Soviet economy and a market of about 44 million people, Moscow’s hopes to create an integrated bloc that would be on par with the European Union and other centers of global economic power were essentially dashed. Lacking a market of sufficient size to create its own viable geo-economic area, Russia was left with the only option of moving into another nation’s economic orbit. [...]
Still, while praising the Belt and Road plan, Moscow is keen to prevent Beijing’s geopolitical domination of continental Eurasia. Instead of wholeheartedly subscribing to China’s scheme, the Kremlin promotes its own vision of “a larger Eurasian partnership” or “Greater Eurasia,” a network of existing and emerging “integration formats.” Beijing’s Belt and Road would be just one element, alongside the Eurasian Economic Union, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and potentially even the European Union. [...]
Russia aspires to be the main security and diplomatic broker in Eurasia while leaving China with the role of the economic leader. As one observer put it, “China would be the bank, and Russia would be the big gun.” Such an arrangement might harken back to the history of the European Community, when France acted as the political leader while West Germany was the economic engine. Moscow’s preference for a new Eurasian order is reflected in its diplomatic activism, such as its leading role in securing the admission of India and Pakistan into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and in advocacy for the future membership of Iran.
11 June 2017
openDemocracy: Kazakhstan: a showcase for shrinking civic space
Little noticed by the international community, Kazakhstan has become a model case for the global double trend of rising authoritarianism and shrinking civic space. While state pressure has grown continuously since the mid-1990s, the crackdown on civil society has intensified over the last year amid mounting economic hardship.
Like other post-Soviet regimes, the Kazakh leadership uses a myriad combination of tools to squeeze civil society. Legal and practical forms of repression are compounded by increasing restrictions to independent funding, gradually suffocating independent thinking and activism in Kazakh society. The west should open its eyes to the shrinking space in Kazakhstan and do more to support independent civil society as a counter-weight to the increasing state monopolisation of power. [...]
According to estimates by the human rights NGO International Legal Initiative Public Foundation, more than 1,000 people were arrested in the biggest city, Almaty, with hundreds more in the capital Astana and many more across the rest of the country. Citizens were protesting not only the new changes to the Land Code, which would allow the sale of land to foreigners, but deep-rooted social and economic problems – unemployment, lack of housing, lack of quality education and poor access to healthcare and medicines. Underlying all these issues is a growing distrust of state power and fear among the population that Kazakhstan’s independence could be lost to systemic corruption. [...]
One symptom of consistent state monopolisation in all spheres is the continual absence of a free market economy. Today, 80% of Kazakhstan’s economy is under state control in various forms (state-owned enterprises, quasi-public sector holdings, joint-stock companies, private companies reliant on the public sector for tenders and contracts etc.). At the same time, corruption has become systemic and is threatening the national interests of the country. The crisis that hit the Kazakh economy with the fall in oil prices has intensified protest moods in a society where 28%, or 2.5m people, are either self-employed or lack stable jobs and incomes. [...]
Beyond organisational restrictions, in the criminal sphere, leaders of public associations are treated on a par with leaders of criminal groups under Kazakh laws intended to address terrorism and extremism. The minimum term of punishment under such law is 10 years imprisonment. Crimes deemed to be “extremist” in nature extends to vague activity such as “the incitement of social discord”. In the absence of a clear definition, the premise of “social discord” allows the judicial system to punish public figures and activists merely for criticising the authorities.
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