Rising Powers and Conflict Management in Central Asia

• Start date: 01 September 2012
• End date: 31 August 2015

The project aims to explain the reasons for and the consequences of the failure of Western approaches to conflict management to gain traction in Post-Soviet Central Asia. It contrasts these approaches with those promoted by Russia and China, both bilaterally and through regional organisations, and looks at the effects of these rising powers on national conflict management strategies.

It focuses in particular on three significant outbreaks of violence in recent years:

• in Andijon, Uzbekistan, in 2005
• in the Rasht valley of Tajikistan in 2010-11
• in Osh, Kyrgyzstan in 2010.

 In each case the international responses were complex and partly divergent along traditional lines of geopolitical competition.

The project will conduct interviews in London, Beijing and Moscow with policy-makers, academics and NGOs, to assess the ways in which policymakers framed and understood these conflict situations. Fieldwork in Central Asia will assess local views in Osh and Rasht regions, both of the nature of the conflict, but also of the divergent international responses. It aims to encourage improved understandings of such divergent approaches to conflict management with the aim of more effective responses to conflict in the region, in the context of more cooperative relationships between Rising Powers and the West. Furthermore it will explore the effects of conflict management on the formation of states in Post-Soviet Central Asia.