06.03.08
Understanding regional co-operation in Central Asia 1991-2004.
Oxford, University of Oxford, Department of Politics and International Relations | 396 pages
DPhil thesis (University of Oxford, 2008) assesses regional co-operation in the spheres of trade, water and security and looks at the relevance of state weakness for foreign policy making.
>> Summary
This thesis analyses regional co-operation in Central Asia and asks why the Central Asian states so often failed to co-operate effectively in the period 1991-2004. The thesis assesses the usefulness of international relations theories in accounting for this pattern, and finds that theories stressing conflicting national interest among the local states offer, on the whole, a plausible account for why regional co-operation failed. It is, nevertheless, essential also to pay attention to two important features of the Central Asian states – authoritarian rule and state weakness – in order to provide a full understanding of why and how regional co-operation proved unsuccessful.
The exploration of failed regional co-operation in Central Asia also sheds light on a number of related questions. The thesis offer insights on the nature of Russian hegemony in the post-Soviet area and also illustrates the ways in which the character of post-Soviet states mattered for the kind of inter-state politics that unfolded in the post-Soviet space. With regards to international relations theory, the thesis highlights the possible implications of state-weakness for foreign policy. Lastly, the thesis offers new insight on Central Asia: it encourages a move away from Great Game analysis and introduces instead the concept of ‘patchwork geopolitics’. The thesis also argues that rather than forming part of an ‘arc of instability’, the intra-regional relations of 3 Central Asian states embodied many typical regime-like features: while regional cooperation failed, the states nevertheless interacted in predictable and rule-bound ways.
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