Micro-Geopolitics of Central Asia: Uzbekistan Perspective

Strategic Analysis Vol. 35, No. 4, July 2011, 629–639

Micro-Geopolitics of Central Asia: A Uzbekistan Perspective Farkhod Tolipov Abstract: 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. However, contemporary geopolitics points to the necessity of revisiting the basis of classical geopolitical theory, which proved unable to explain and foresee the world political processes of that time, especially the collapse of the Soviet Union and geopolitical implications of that event. The NIS – members of the CIS – in their endeavour to take full advantage of independence often manoeuvre within both the CIS and the international system. As a result, Central Asia is facing the by-product of the ‘Great Game’, which can be called the ‘Small Game’ between and among five countries of Central Asia – a phenomenon peculiar to micro-geopolitics. The new strategy is required from Uzbekistan in such conditions implying: democratic geopolitics, a new security outlook and a region-building goal-setting.

Introduction lmost everything is geopolitical in Central Asia where the newly independent states (NIS) of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are located. In other words, all the major international political events in the region and most significant political developments in the region are saturated with a geopolitical essence. However, ‘geopolitical’ here does not mean at all what was meant by the late 19th and early 20th century political scientists such as Mackinder, Mahan, Spykman and others. Orthodox geopolitics was all about ‘sea power vs land power’, ‘heartland vs rimland’, Great Britain/US vs Russia/USSR, ‘unipolarity vs multipolarity’, etc. It was like black-and-white TV. Today it is more akin to colour TV or even digital TV. Overnight, between 7–8 December 1991 when the Soviet Union was liquidated and Central Asia reincarnated, the ‘Heartland of Eurasia’ was split into several heartlands, each in its own right. Since then, geopolitics is not only over but also of Central Asia.

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Democratic geopolitics ‘In considering geographical imaginations we are inevitably drawn into debates over national identity and the specification of the boundaries – conceptual and cartographic – of “the nation”’1 . This is the quintessence of the critical geopolitics that Farkhod Tolipov is the Director of the Tashkent branch of the Uzbek Association of International Law, Tashkent, Uzbekistan. ISSN 0970-0161 print/ISSN 1754-0054 online © 2011 Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses DOI: 10.1080/09700161.2011.576098 http://www.informaworld.com

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challenges the classical, orthodox geopolitics of the late 19th and 20th centuries. In general, contemporary geopolitics points to the necessity of revisiting the basis of classical geopolitical theory, which proved unable to explain and foresee the world political processes of the late 20th century. Some of these were:

• the revolution in military affairs, in particular, the development of strategic avi• • • • • • •

ation, creation of intercontinental ballistic missiles that changed the concept of controlling and influencing a certain territory; globalisation that changed the concept of land–sea dualism and the division of the world into spheres of influence and turned the planet into a ‘single territory’; acquisition by the thalassocracy (sea power) of the qualities of tellurocracy (land power) and vice versa by the end of the 20th century; disappearance of the Soviet superpower – the ‘keeper and ruler of the Heartland’, and appearance in its place of the NIS whose foreign policy behaviour can no longer be analysed by the old geopolitics; the regionalisation of international relations, emergence of integrationist structures (like the EU) that changed the established concept of state borders and identity of peoples; emergence and spread of non-state actors, transnational corporations (TNCs) and international organisations that changed the state-centric model of the world; partial loss of the ‘Heartland’s’ geopolitical status due to the rise of other regions (e.g. the Middle East, South-East Asia) i.e., the emergence of other heartlands; and the rise of new great and regional powers, the phenomenon that can be termed the ‘proliferation of great powers’. This, along with the increase in significance of the soft power tools of world politics, makes the rhetoric and concept of multipolarity vs uni-polarity/bipolarity irrelevant and obsolete.2

By-and-large, the new direction in geopolitical thought can be characterised not simply as ‘critical geopolitics’ but also ‘democratic geopolitics’ to point out that the old thought was imperial. Briefly, the difference between the two schools of geopolitics can be formulated as: imperial geopolitics is based on the premise that war is possible, while democratic geopolitics is founded on the conviction that peace is inevitable. Classical geopolitics a priori is the geopolitics of great powers. However, the geopolitics of today includes non-great powers, small states, failed states, interstate and non-state actors. Moreover, the ‘participation in geopolitics’ by Central Asian states, their reactive or proactive (responsive) behaviour on the international scene was not envisioned by classical geopolitics. Thus, the central notion of geopolitics – ‘control of territory’ – can be substituted by two more democratic ones – ‘accessibility of territory’ (for trade, cooperation, tourism, exchanges, transit, over-flights and free movement), and own functionality of a particular territory in a sense that any particular territory, especially fragments of the former Heartland, obtained independent geopolitical functions. From this point of view, one can talk about both the accessibility of the heartlands for great powers and accessibility of the world at large for heartlands. This accessibility implies co-presence of great powers on the territory of the former ‘Heartland’, and the tolerance of each other’s presence by those powers. This is the new principle of democratic geopolitics. The swift dissolution of the Soviet Union and Central Asia’s advent into world politics had a two-fold impact on geopolitical thought: on one hand, these events reinforced

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geopolitical narratives, contemplations, speculations; geopolitics became the ‘ultimate explanatory tool’ in the overall analyses of the post-Soviet transformation. On the other hand, there is a theoretical transformation underway within geopolitical studies themselves. These new circumstances created widespread confusion among political scientists dealing with Central Asia, as well as Central Asian politicians themselves whose attempts to pursue their own geopolitics – micro-geopolitics of heartlands – also modified the macro-geopolitics of great powers. Boris Yeltsin (1991): ‘Soviet Union as a geopolitical reality ceases its existence’ On the night of 7 December 1991 when the coup d’etat in the USSR occurred, the then Russian President Boris Yeltsin made the statement: We the Republic of Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine as founders of the Soviet Union and signatories of the Union Treaty of 1922 ascertain that the Soviet Union as a subject of International Law and geopolitical reality ceases its existence.3

It is not clear what he meant by ‘geopolitical reality’, nevertheless it was the first official use of this primarily academic concept. Moreover, given the fact that geopolitics was doomed to be ostracised as a ‘false science’ in the Soviet Union, this pronunciation of a geopolitical notion was not only surprising but vague in terms of the past, present and future status and fate of this vast geographical space. It was also paradoxical because if geopolitics was false science, what was then a geopolitical reality – the USSR that ceased to exist? By that decision of the presidents of three Slavic republics, the wholeness of this space, in the political sense, was condemned, as was the very concept of ‘Heartland’. Since then, what is called the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) has existed as an attempt at the reintegration of the former Soviet republics, and, surprisingly again, as an attempt for the restoration of the former ‘geopolitical reality’. Interestingly, however, five days after the proclamation of the CIS the presidents of five Central Asian republics met in Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, to proclaim their own Central Asian Commonwealth (CAC). At the same time, they announced their desire to join the CIS. Thereby, Central Asia found itself entangled and confused between full independence and new dependence. Central Asia was not ready for independence in a sense of just being outside any Union or Commonwealth. That’s why they were ready to sign a new Soviet Union Treaty planned for December 1991 but interrupted by the coup d’etat which led to the CIS. The Central Asian countries of 1991 had no option but to join the CIS while having their own integration structure on their background. Meanwhile, the question of the real international status of the CIS remains debatable. One can suppose that in general four international statuses can be envisioned with regard of the CIS: (1) CIS is an international conference (the analogue is the CSCE of 1970s). (2) CIS is an international organisation (the analogue is the EC of 1990s). (3) CIS is an ad hoc model for the re-integration of the former Soviet republics (no analogue). (4) CIS is an ad hoc model of the further disintegration of the former Soviet space (no analogue). The fourth model is most apt for the current situation.

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It is indeed a weakening structure nowadays for a number of objective and subjective reasons. Objectively, being the by-product of the coup d’etat makes it illegal and illegitimate; therefore the allegiance of member states towards the CIS has declined throughout the post-Soviet period. The very membership of the CIS was a matter of necessity but not that of choice. Subjectively, effectiveness and perspectives of the Commonwealth very often become a variable that depends on changeable perceptions and behaviour of political elites and heads of member states of the CIS. It is a common view among the CIS member countries that this organisation cannot efficiently bring together all ex-Soviet republics. Bilateral relations prevail over multilateral commitments within the commonwealth. There are four reasons that explain why centripetal tendencies prevail over centrifugal ones in the post-Soviet space: first, the civilisational divergence of peoples; second, the geopolitical divergence of the newly independent states; third, the economic diversification of the livelihood; fourth, the globally oriented divergence of the politically awakened people’s outlook. That is why it is not surprising that the NIS – members of the CIS – in their endeavour to take full advantage of independence often manoeuvre within both the CIS and the international system. This has been one aspect of the fundamental geopolitical transformation of Central Asia since 1991, in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Even with its indispensable membership of the CIS the region has been facing relentless geopolitical pressure from outside – the situation that is well described in the term the ‘Great Game’. However, even with its own CAC, the region is facing the by-product of the ‘Great Game’ that can be called the ‘Small Game’ between and among five countries of Central Asia – a phenomenon peculiar to microgeopolitics. The regime of geopolitics and the geopolitics of regimes In general, it can be seen that the geopolitical situation inside the region and geopolitical environment outside it are interrelated. One simple example: there is a certain cause-and-effect link between the strategic friction in Afghanistan and geopolitical reversal in Central Asia.4 The two mutually stipulate and exacerbate each other. The ambivalent character of geopolitical tendencies,5 apparently, relates to political will and the interests of political elites who are in power, and has little to do with laws of classical geopolitics. Actually, the so-called regime geopolitics emerged in Central Asia in a twofold manifestation: as the geopolitics of regimes, i.e. attempts towards the geopoliticisation of their status by the current political regimes of Central Asia, and as the regime of geopolitics, i.e. the ad hoc geopolitical regional order of relationships between and among states of the region. Such a course of development is perhaps normal, from the viewpoint of critical geopolitics. This is because the function of the ‘Heartland’, as stated above, is being irreversibly transformed in the aftermath of the dissolution of the USSR – its guardian. The ‘Heartland’ could not but turn into the zone where the regime geopolitics functions solely because it could not remain static – a part of the great power as was envisioned by the classical geopolitics. Now, in the ‘Heartland’ situation – better to say experiment – the NIS found themselves, by the will of history and geography, at the epicentre of the formation of the new world order. Thus, two macro-geopolitical paradigms – imperial and democratic – coexist and compete in this part of the world. The former endeavours to return the ‘Heartland’

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to its previous static status; the latter endeavours to make it dynamic on the basis of its functional openness. Between these two macro-geopolitical paradigms, the micro-geopolitics of the Central Asian countries hesitates like a pendulum, manifesting as the fluctuation of their foreign policies. According to the Azerbaijani analyst Eldar Ismailov the main function of the ‘Heartland’ in a new era shall be the provision of the land connection along the horizontal ‘East–West’ line and the vertical ‘North–South’ line, and thereby assisting in the geopolitical and economic linkage of major and relatively separated until now areas of the Eurasian continent.6 In other words, the function of the ‘Heartland’ implies that its countries have their own policies. Such a function was not envisioned in Mackinder’s famous formula of the ‘Heartland’. Meanwhile, today one can observe what can be called the geopolitics of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and other Central Asian countries respectively. This poses a serious challenge for the region’s future, in terms of regional integration, as the foreign policies of these states can be based either on the principle of negative diversification or on the principle of positive diversification. Many began to use the term ‘diversification’ to explain the process of the inevitable multiplicity of directions for the transportation of oil, gas and other resources of Central Asia to world markets. However, this term is applied not only with respect to the transportation of mineral resources of the Caspian region to world markets but also to indicate the foreign policy orientations of all five Central Asian countries. Negative diversification revitalises the classical balance of power in international relations and the zero-sum game between great powers at the expense of the Central Asians. Positive diversification avoids the zero-sum approach and is inclusive in character: it means not only the equal involvement of external powers but also, what is more important, the coordinated policy of Central Asian states themselves. Meanwhile, the regime geopolitics ‘over’ and ‘of’ Central Asia today has an ad-hoc character, since it is no longer imperial but not yet democratic. There are a number of variables and constants of the geopolitical formula that determine the specific and changeable foreign policies of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. One such variable is the context of the CIS – the quasi-geopolitical substitute of the former USSR from which they split in 1991. Another is the context of the post-bipolar new world order in which they are engaging with great powers. Yet another variable is the context of regionalism in Central Asia itself. I have already analysed the post-Soviet context. An analysis of Central Asian regionalism follows. Islam Karimov (1995): ‘Turkistan is our common home’; Islam Karimov (2005): ‘Strategic uncertainty remains in the region’ In 1995 the President of Uzbekistan Islam Karimov proclaimed that ‘Turkistan is our common home’. It was the announcement of a strategic choice and a geopolitical slogan. Attributed to him are other concepts such as: ‘Towards globalism through regionalism’ and ‘Uzbeks and Tajiks are one people speaking two languages’. However, these strategic, prioritising regional concepts remain mostly on paper simply as beautiful slogans. Indeed, Central Asia is traversing the big distance from ‘Soviet Union as a geopolitical reality that no longer exists’ to ‘Turkistan is our common home [and a new geopolitical reality]’. Between these two realities there is ‘strategic uncertainty’. This uncertainty itself is, in fact, an ad hoc geopolitical reality.

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The President of Uzbekistan stated in 2005: Realistically assessing the current situation in our region we have to recognise that side by side with the ongoing positive processes of stabilisation and the reconstruction of Afghanistan strategic uncertainty remains in the region. Geostrategic interests of major world powers and our neighbouring countries concentrate and sometime collide in this part of the world. Threats of international terrorism, extremism, drug traffic and other transnational threats to regional security continue to exist.

There are two other factors that go beyond the great power rivalry perception. First, strategic uncertainty emerged among Central Asian states due to their misperception and undermining of the centrality of the region for their foreign policy and mismanagement of the 1991 integration policy. Second, strategic uncertainty emerges from the way in which the Central Asian states cooperate with international organisations. These three uncertainties have the same roots, namely the misperception of the nature and system of contemporary international relations. The foreign policies of Central Asian states, as NIS, are immature to the extent that they still perceive the international system to be anarchical and based on the balance of the power principle, which has been the only available, understandable and, therefore, the only one accepted by political leaders and even scholars across all of Central Asia. It has to be pointed out that modern concepts and approaches to world politics and international security contain a much richer spectrum of ideas and proposals than the orthodox geopolitics and realist school. This has coincided with the reconsideration of the concepts of security and threat. The old school of security studies have been state-centric; the new one is more human-centric. Barry Buzan notes: ‘the security of individuals is locked into an unbreakable paradox in which it is partly dependent on and partly threatened by the state’.7 In response, critical security studies (CSS) emphasise an approach that goes beyond what they call strategic action, prioritises the security of the state, and offers what is called communicative action i.e., diplomatic efforts to accommodate equally legitimate strategic interests and negotiate mutually acceptable levels of security and insecurity. In the era of the Cold War and the balance of power system, communicative action had remained in the shadow of strategic action: The collapse of bipolarity did not release potentials for greater communicative action from the constraints of superpower rivalry but unleashed new and more violent forms of strategic action spearheaded by aggressively nationalistic movements in various parts of the former socialist bloc.8

Central Asia is not an exception to this observation. The very recent (June 2010) tragedy in the southern Kyrgyz town of Osh where the massacre of Uzbeks occurred is convincing proof of this thesis. In the wake of that tragedy many analysts, observers, mass media and local people began to talk about ethnic cleansing in Osh – about half of the population of which are Uzbeks. Another major example of over-nationalistic moods and sentiments in Central Asia, which also acquired geopolitical dimensions, took place between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Since their independence Tajik nationalists periodically raise the issue of Samarkand and Bukhara, claiming that these two cities that are in the territory of Uzbekistan historically belong to Tajikistan. They insist that they are the centres of Tajik culture and should be returned to Tajikistan. Moreover, Tajik nationalism is the reason for Tajikistan’s reluctance to strengthen the regional integration in Central

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Asian on the pretext that this small Farsi speaking country can lose its independence and identity among other four Turkic speaking Central Asian nations. Such uncertainties about the prospect of regional cooperation together with the uncertainties of great power rivalry over the region has resulted in the controversial and erratic behaviour of the NIS of Central Asia within international governmental and non-governmental organisations, especially when with regard to security issues. The proliferation of different IGOs and INGOs in the region yielded what can be called ‘a market of security services’. Such organisations as the CIS, NATO, SCO, CSTO, OSCE, EAEC (Eurasian Economic Community), CACO (Central Asian Cooperation Organisation) have different agendas in Central Asia. For example, the existence of the CSTO and the SCO is regarded as not always being mutually compatible. Some experts point out that the effect of this co-existence on the Russian goal is negative. The dual existence of these organisations solidly benefits Russia’s regional strategic goal of maintaining existing pro-Russian regimes. However, though the SCO can play a role in removing the United States from the region it runs the danger of increasing Chinese power at the expense of Russia.9 Similar contradictions exist between the CSTO and NATO, as well as between SCO and NATO. On the other hand, the membership of Central Asian countries in the OSCE also does not appear to be harmonious because of their non-compliance with the OSCE standards. A deeper analysis of this phenomenon reveals one more issue that creates a divide between national goals and international obligations. The actuality of and the appeal to multilateral forums for addressing contemporary challenges the world is facing coincided with the actuality of and appeal to nationalism in the newly independent states of Central Asia. Therefore, international organisations with their international agendas encountered the movement of Central Asia nations in the opposite direction. The national agendas of Central Asian countries have not yet been satisfied, but they are forced by contemporary international compulsions to satisfy international (and regional) agendas. The concept of the special responsibility of Uzbekistan The ‘special responsibility of Uzbekistan’ towards regional affairs can be analysed by applying the above mentioned critical/democratic geopolitics (CDG) and critical security studies (CSS). As was said above, the CSS school goes beyond the realist school of international relations by stating that the latter school is solution oriented. The distinction between problem solving and critical theory is as follows: the former takes the existing social order and political relations and institutions as the starting point for analysis, and then sees how the problems arising from these can be solved or ameliorated; the latter enquires into how these given relationships and institutions came into existence and how they might be changed.10 Because the CSS is a humancentric theory, it focuses on the emancipation and moral dimension. Emancipation is defined as: . . . [the]freeing of people (as individuals and groups) from the physical and human constraints which stop them from carrying out what they would freely choose to do. War and the threat of war is one of those constraints, together with poverty, poor education, political oppression and so on. Security and emancipation are two sides of the same coin. Emancipation, not power or order, produces true security.11

It insists that all viewpoints involve normative commitments.12

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The short history of independence of Uzbekistan provides both the assets and reversals of its regional strategic behaviour that has had implications for the whole region. A few are enumerated below: Assets • Creation of the International Logistical Centre in Navoi city13 and new logistical centre ‘Tashkent’. • Constructing the railroad Andijan-Osh-Irkishta. • Building the gas pipeline Turkmenistan–Uzbekistan–Kazakhstan–China. • Constructing the railroad Termez–Mazar-i-Sharif. • Creation of the CACO. • Participation in the Central Asian Battalion. • Establishment of the Interstate Commission for Water Management and International Fund for the Aral Sea. Reversals • Railroad blockage of Tajikistan as a tool of influencing it on the Rogun dam and other matters. • Water disputes with Kyrgyzstan. • Border disputes with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan; unilateral mining of some sectors of the border with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. • The limited, self-restraining approach to Osh events. • Merger of the CACO with EAEC. • Establishing trade barriers and visa regimes with neighbouring countries. As one can see the positives appear outward (regionally) oriented but the negatives are inward (nationally) oriented. The two examples of border and water conflicts in this list illustrate well all the complexities of Central Asian geopolitical and strategic realities. Analysing the border disputes between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, Nick Megoran writes: Paasi’s contention that an international boundary is not merely a border line between two states or social systems, but an object of a continuing cultural struggle and ideological signification between different social forces. Newman contends that boundaries and borders constitute, ‘both spatial and social constructs at one and the same time.’14

Megoran concludes: However, it is insufficient to explain the Kyrgyzstan–Uzbekistan Ferghana Valley ‘border dispute’ in 1999 and 2000 as merely the product of topography, the Soviet border legacy, the imperative of independence, or the pursuit of diverging macro-economic policies. This paper has argued that in 1999–2000 different political factions in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, in material conditions of political power struggle, sought to articulate notions of ‘the border’ that both envisioned their concept of the nation in the contested terrain of post-Soviet geopolitical space, and sought to legitimise their claims to exercise power over it. The particular configuration of issues politicised as ‘the border question’, was the product of the interaction of these struggles.15

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The ‘geopolitical visions’16 of the relationship between territory and identity in the international scene articulated in these disputes created and policed moral boundaries of belonging to and exclusion from the nation state. This illustrates the central insight of critical geopolitics: that the geography of the world is not a product of nature but a product of the histories of struggle between competing authorities over the power to organise, occupy and administer space.17 The recent tragic events in Osh in June 2010 fully confirm these theoretical arguments. Uzbeks living in the Kyrgyzstan city of Osh for centuries found themselves alien in Kyrgyzstan and feared being expelled from what they always have known as their motherland. It seems that both sides – Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan – have overlooked the relativism of the boundaries, especially in the Central Asian context, and have been preoccupied with the search for the absolute meaning and status of those boundaries. This has put them in a delicate situation between the regional integrationist agenda and disintegrationist policy. A similar analysis can be made regarding the water disputes between and among Central Asian countries, especially Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, as well as between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. For example, Tajikistan decided to build the Rogun hydro-power station, which Tashkent considered as harmful to the trans-boundary Amu-Darya water flow through Uzbekistan. Moreover, Tashkent may perceive the Rogun project as leverage in the hands of Dushanbe, which can use it to exert influence on Tashkent and potentially divert more water from the Wahsh River – the source of the Rogun – for Tajikistan’s agriculture, thus damaging their interests downstream.18 Timur Dadabaev analysed the overall water management issue in Central Asia, and came to the conclusion that the regional approach should prevail over the national approach with regard to border, water and other transnational issues in Central Asia. He pointed out that in the sphere of water management Central Asians are faced with the dilemma of ‘institutionalisation vs eco-egoism’.19 These two cases are telling in terms of the implications of Uzbekistan’s policy for regional development. In the case of the Kyrgyzstan massacre of Uzbeks, Uzbekistan refrained from interfering, whereas some form of interference might have had an effect on Kyrgyz nationalists. In the case of Tajikistan’s insistence on building the Rogun hydro-power station, Uzbekistan took suppressive, unilateral actions against Tajikistan, when a more communicative, soft power policy was needed. By and large, Uzbekistan has been constantly facing the ‘unilateralism versus five-lateralism’ dilemma with regard to its neighbours. These and many other examples all tell us that Uzbekistan bears special responsibility for regional affairs. Indeed, 19 years of independence show that the self-isolation of Uzbekistan from regional affairs impedes the overall integration process in Central Asia; a more active role played by Uzbekistan gives new impetus to this process. It will be no exaggeration to argue that it is Uzbekistan’s historical and moral mission to be the locomotive for Central Asian regional integration. Peace or conflict, security or danger, prosperity or stagnation, independence or dependence – all depend to a great extent on Uzbekistan’s regional and international behaviour. Conclusion E. Rumer noted: ‘Central Asia neither offers major opportunities (like early post-Cold War Russia) nor ranks as a rising peer competitor (like China); it is neither an ally

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(like Europe or Japan) nor an adversary (like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Iran)’.20 This is true. However, thinking strategically, one should go beyond such static statements. Uncertainties mentioned above together with the vague perspective of the CIS can accumulate over time and fully confuse the foreign policies of Central Asian states in terms of their relations with great powers and regionally with each other. This argument is reinforced by the conclusion from this analysis that geopolitics became a matter of identity and identity became a matter of geopolitics in this part of the world. From this one can see that it is the static, frozen, realist vision of the international system, and that of its Central Asian sub-system, as anarchic and based on the balance of power principle that became the main mental and functional constraint determining Central Asian scholarship and political status-quo. The narrow, state-centric strategies of Central Asian NIS should be broadened and supplemented with positive thinking and normative commitments that look beyond the short-term perspective. Otherwise, they will risk losing their independence once again. Indeed, though their Small Game/micro-geopolitics was the by-product of the Great Game/macro-geopolitics, now the latter can again be reinforced by the former. The Kazakh president, N. Nazarbaev, stated on 9 April 2007: The best way would be the Union of Central Asian States . . . God demands us to unite: we have 55 million population, no linguistic barriers, mutually supplementary economies, a single space, and transport and energy links. This region can provide itself with foods, energy and so on. Even the market would be self-sufficient. What else do we need?

This will however require democratic geopolitics, a new security outlook and a regionbuilding goal-setting.

Notes 1. Gearoid O. Tuathail, ‘Geopolitical Structures and Cultures: Towards Conceptual Clarity in the Critical Study of Geopolitics’, in Lasha Tchantouridze (ed.), Geopolitics: Global Problems and Regional Concerns, Centre for Defence and Security Studies, Winnipeg, Manitoba, 2004, p. 84. 2. Farkhod Tolipov, ‘Towards a New Paradigm of International Relations: The Implications of Central Asian Geopolitics’, in Anita Sengupta and Suchandana Chatterjee (eds.), Eurasian Perspectives: In Search of Alternatives, MAKAIAS, Kolkata, 2010, pp. 15–28. 3. E. Moiseev, The Legal Status of the CIS, Yurist, Moscow, 1995, p. 111. 4. Farkhod Tolipov, ‘Strategic Friction in Afghanistan and Geopolitical Reversal in Central Asia’, in Central Asia and Caucasus, No. 2, 2009. 5. Ibid. 6. E. Ismailov, ‘On Geopolitical Function of ‘Central Eurasia’ in 21-century’, in Central Asia and Caucasus, 2, 2008. 7. B. Buzan, People, States and Fear: An Agenda for International Security Studies in the PostCold War Era, Lynne Rienner Publishers, Boulder, CO, 1991, pp. 363–364. 8. A. Linklater, ‘Political Community and Human Security’, in Ken Booth (ed.), Critical Security Studies and World Politics, Viva Books Ltd., New Delhi, 2005, p. 117. 9. See for details A. Frost, ‘The Collective Security Treaty Organization, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and Russia’s Strategic Goals in Central Asia’, China and Eurasia Forum Quarterly, 7(3), 2009, pp. 83–102. 10. S. Smith, ‘The Contested Concept of Security’, in Ken Booth, note 8, pp. 40–41. 11. Ken Booth, ‘Security and Emancipation’, Review of International Studies, 17(4), 1991, pp. 313–326. 12. S. Smith, note 10, p. 46.

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13. Due to its modern facilities the Navoi airport is supposed to become a centre of cargo transportation across Asia and Europe. 14. N. Megoran, The Critical Geopolitics of Uzbekistan–Kyrgyzstan Fergana Valley Boundary Dispute, 1999–2000, Political Geography, 23, 2004 p. 753. 15. Ibid., pp. 731–764. 16. G. Dijkink, National Identity and Geopolitical Visions: Maps of Pride and Pain, Routledge, London, 1996. 17. Gearoid O.Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space, Routledge, London, 1996, p. 1. 18. T. Dadabaev, Towards Post-Soviet Central Asian Regional Integration: A Scheme for Transitional States, Akashi Shoten, Tokyo, 2004, p. 187. 19. Ibid., p. 175. 20. E. Rumer, ‘United States and Central Asia’, in Eugene Rumer, Dmitri Trenin, and Huasheng Zhao (eds.), Central Asia: Views from Washington, Moscow, and Beijing, M.E. Sharpe, New York, 2007, p. 23.