JOURNAL OF CENTRAL EURASIA STUDIES
Year:2015 | Volume:8 | Issue:1|Papers Count:9

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the newly formed independent states believed that their economic problems are rooted from the communist economic policies. Thus, they leaned towards free market economic system. The movement of such nations during the economic transition period has a close relationship with globalization. Globalization itself has close ties with players in the international economic arena. Countries that have the highest potential for attracting these players can make the most profit during this process. In this essay, we examine the indices of foreign direct investment, foreign trade, labor remittance, and social development in Kazakhstan. By studying Kazakhstan Qualitative and quantitative statistics, we concluded that Kazakhstan was more successful in attaining the indexes of globalization and these indexes had greater effect on the social development of this country compared with other countries in Central Asia. With greater economic freedom, Kazakhstan has experienced great social-economic development.

In the past twenty-five years, the Russian government has been faced with widespread corruption and despite many efforts it hasn’t been able to control that. According to Transparency International report in 2013, this country was the 127th among 177 countries. This essay tries to analyze the role of administrative oligarchy and continuity of corruption in Russia. The main question of this article is that why the Russian government programs to prevent the corruption has been ineffectiveness? The hypothesis is that the power of administrative oligarchy is the main barrier preventing the effectiveness of the anticorruption programs of Russian government. To examine this hypothesis, we discuss about the concept of oligarchy and its indications, the formation of oligarchy in Russia and its relations with corruption, and impact of power of administrative oligarchy on the ineffectiveness of anti-corruption programs.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, until the rise of Putin in the Russia, the West Asia and North Africa have no place in foreign policy of this country. This was because of the West-centric approach in the foreign policy. With Putin, Russia renewed interest in this region. The purpose of this study is to examine the foreign policy of Russia in this period. The state make its efforts to participate in this strategic area, because of implications for the revival of Russia as a superpower that can compete with America with the goal to establish a permanent presence and play a role in regional developments, sale weapons and military equipment to the region, combat the spread of terrorism and extremism from West Asia and North Africa to Muslim south areas, and finally have trade of goods and services in these countries. In this period, Russia attempted to develop relations with Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia in countries such as Egypt, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Palestine and Israel as the sphere of influence of USSR.

Historically, Central Asia and the Caucasus has been the source of important developments in the regional and global level. The whole geopolitical theories in the 20th and 21st century paid special attention to this area. Geopolitical status of the region has posed challenges for residents and even neighbors of the region. These challenges can be described as the divergence factors. Therefore, this study tries to investigate the fragile and divergent geopolitical factors in this region. The methodology of this research is analytical-descriptive. The basic question is that what and how geopolitical factors prevent the formation of regional integration in Central Asia and the Caucasus? It seems that geopolitical factors such as Geo-economy, enclosed position and inadequate access, placement in the marginal and the reciprocity of interests, identities and ideologies made the region fragile in stability and regional relations. Hence, there has been no convergence in the Caucasus and Central Asia.

The fall of the Soviet Union caused a vacancy of hegemony between current powers in the former territory of the empire and in the whole of Europe. This also caused many wars. Events such as the collapse of Yugoslavia and Karabakh war affected by this fall and led to concerns in international society. Karabakh war between Armenia and Azerbaijan was initiated while the Soviet government was stable and it reached a peak after falling of the government. This war led to OSCE to draw this conflict. Thus, the main concern of the authors is response to this question that what factors made OSEC unable to be successful in solving the conflict. Accordingly, the hypothesis is that: "shifting the competition of superpowers from United Nations to Security Council has caused the poor performance of OSCE on Karabakh crisis. In this paper by using the descriptive – analytical method we examine this issue based on the theory of collective security. Results of the study show that the OSCE has failed to reach its purpose and to end the conflict after 20 years. This failure led to continuity of "no war, no peace" situation in Karabakh.

This study aims to investigate the changes in Turkey's Security Discourse in process of Turkey's accession to European Union. It seems that Europeanization of Turkey is one of the most important factors in the change of its security discourse. Turkey's political and security language has been changed and, in this country, we are witnessing a new political and social contract that leads to a normalization process. Among other reasons, process of desecuritization is the result of the European Union accession process and concomitant events, a transformation of the political landscape, and the Compliance with EU norms. Within this process of desecuritization formerly securitized issues have perceived as normal political issues. To test this hypothesis, the authors with use of Europeanization literature compared with the security discourse in Turkey before and after the start of the new millennium, try to evaluate the normalization of Armenian issue and Turkey-Armenia relations in the framework of this discursive change.

The concept of energy security has been changed into one of the key and controversial concepts in international relations and energy economy in the recent years. The literature of this concept has more developed in Europe. Because, European countries supply their major needs by imports. Hence, Russia as one of the main energy suppliers of Europe Union uses leveraging energy for closer to Europe. In this regard, one of the main purposes of European Union is to decrease dependency to Russia in the field of energy and finding alternative ways. These European attempts have been unable to obtain successfully so far. The main question of this study is that: in the relationship with European countries, Russia is faced with what opportunities? The main hypothesis: the strategy of Russia energy constantly is that, Russia as an oil empire is able to play geopolitical role in energy and it tries to use Russian energy supplies and pipeline monopoly for supplying its interests in Eurasia, especially in the relation with European Union for more dependency to itself.

In August 1991 Ukraine gained its independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It has experienced many ups and downs over the years until today. During 2014, once again, Ukraine has been the scene of many conflicts. Many observers believe the roots of these tensions are the internal problems of ethnic groups in the country and some others say Ukraine is the confrontation scene of trans-regional powers such as United States of America and European Union with Russia. In some cases even this conflict is interpreted as the "new cold war". In this study, the main question is that what are the effects of Ukraine Crisis on the relations of United States and Russia? The research hypothesis is that this crisis –with intensification of tensions between the two countries in short and medium-term – won’t have a profound impact on the nature of the relations between the two countries. That is because geopolitical and geo-economics considerations in this region impede major powers from serious conflicts.