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 It has been centuries since the last discovery of a new continent. Yet something like this is happening today. Long before the voyages of exploration that began in the fifteenth century it was customary to speak of Europe and Asia as separate places divided from each other by a huge and forbidding territory.
This is now changing. Thanks to the collapse of the USSR, whose closed border stood like a wall across the heart of Eurasia, to China’s decision to open trade across its western border, and to the gradual return of Afghanistan to the community of nations, continental trade spanning the entire Eurasian land mass is again becoming possible.
Western Europe, China, Russia, the Middle East, and the Indian sub-continent can, in time, connect with one another and with the lands between by means of direct roads, railroads, and technologies for transporting gas, oil, and hydroelectric power. These “new Silk Roads” have enormous potential for the entire Eurasian continent, and especially for the countries of “Greater Central Asia” which they must traverse.
This book, with contributions by eminent scholars from sixteen countries, reviews the state of the links of transport and trade that are bringing about this fundamental change on the world’s largest continent. It explores the potential of such interchange for fifteen of the countries most directly affected by it. It identifies some of the many impediments to the full realization of this epochal project. And it suggests a few steps that might be taken to ameliorate or remove these impediments.
INTRODUCTION
It has been centuries since the last discovery of a new continent. Yet something like this is happening today. Long before the voyages of exploration that began in the fifteenth century it was customary to speak of Europe and Asia as separate places divided from each other by a huge and forbidding territory.
The camel caravans that traversed this middle zone were too few and too infrequent to provide a permanent economic link between them, let alone to enable Asians or Europeans to recognize their regions as complementary parts of a single land mass or continent. Even when seafarers discovered faster sea routes, geographers continued to speak of Europe and Asia as if they were separate continents.
This is now changing. Thanks to the collapse of the USSR, whose closed border stood like a wall across the heart of Eurasia, to China’s decision to open trade across its western border, and to the gradual return of Afghanistan to the community of nations, continental trade spanning the entire Eurasian land mass is again becoming possible. ...
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Edited by S. Frederick Starr
© 2007 Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program – A Joint Transatlantic Research and Policy Center
Johns Hopkins University-SAIS, 1619 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington, D.C. 20036; Uppsala University, Box 514, 75120 Uppsala, Sweden
www.silkroadstudies.org
Biographical Sketches of Participating Authors
Masood Aziz
Masood Aziz is a Counsellor at the Afghanistan Embassy in Washington. He is the founder and acting Executive Director of the Afghanistan Policy Council, a think tank providing a distinct voice to challenging policy issues pertaining to Afghanistan. Mr. Aziz has over 19 years of experience in executive management, international management consulting, banking and institutional investment management. He holds the French Baccalaureat, a Bachelor of Science degree and an MBA from the United States and is a frequent speaker and writer on economic and political matters related to Afghanistan and the greater Central Asia.
Vladimir Boyko
Dr. Vladimir Boyko is Director of the Center for Regional Studies and Associate Professor of Asian Studies at Barnaul State Pedagogical University in Barnaul, Russia. He obtained PhD from the Institute of Oriental Studies, USSR Academy of Sciences (Moscow), and has held fellowships at Harvard University, Ruhr University, and the London School of Economics. Dr Boyko is the author/co-author or editor of ten books on Afghanistan and Central Eurasia.
Dennis de Tray
Dennis de Tray serves as Vice President at the Center for Global Development (CGD). Before joining CGD, de Tray directed the World Bank's Mission for the five Central Asian republics from Almaty, Kazakhstan. Previously, he served as IMF senior representative to Vietnam in Hanoi, and as the World Bank's Director, Resident Staff and then Country Director in Jakarta, Indonesia. He earned his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1972.
Guljan Ermekbaeva
Guljan Ermekbaeva is a graduate of Kyrgyz State University and received an MBA from the International Academy of Management, Law, Finance, and Business. An expert on regulatory reform, Ms. Ermekbaeva is executive director of the Junior Achievement Kyrgyzstan Foundation.
Rafkat Hasanov
Rafkat Hasanov is executive director of “The Investment Round Table,” which gained renown for its contribution to economic reform in the Kyrgyz Republic. He carries out applied and policy-relevant research in the areas of fiscal reform, tax legislation, budgetary issues, macroeconomic modeling, revenue forecasting, foreign investment, deregulation, and poverty reduction.
Kemal Kaya
Dr. Kemal Kaya is co-founder of the East and West Institute in Ankara. An aeronautical engineer by training and with a Ph. D. from Istanbul Technical University, he has a decade-long experience in the Turkish defense industry and has coordinated numerous international defense projects for the Turkish government. Currently, he is a senior administrator/ manager in the Turkish Parliament.
Aftab Kazi
Dr. Aftab Kazi is professor of International and Comparative Politics, American University of Central Asia, Bishkek, the Kyrgyz Republic. He completed his doctoral degree in International Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the founder and first editor-in-chief of the Journal of Asian & African Affairs (1988-94), and his publications include the monographs Ethnicity and Education in Nation-Building: the Case of Pakistan and The Politics of Civil-Military Relations in Pakistan.
Sanat Kushkumbayev
Dr. Sanat Kushkumbayev is First Deputy Director at the Kazakhstan Institute of Strategic Studies. He holds a Doctorate degree from al-Farabi Kazakh State University and specializes in political studies. His publications include a monograph Central Asia on the Way of Integration: Geopolitics, Ethnicity and Security (2002), and more than 70 articles in Kazakhstan and foreign research-analytical journals.
Abbas Maleki
Abbas Maleki completed his undergraduate and master’s degrees at the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, where he holds the post of assistant professor. With a PhD in strategic management, he has taught courses on Iranian foreign policy, the Islamic revolution, and Iran and its neighbors. In 1985-89 he was Director General of the Institute for Political and International Studies at the Foreign Ministry of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and then Deputy Foreign Minister for Research and Education, in Iran's Foreign Ministry, to 1997. Since 1997 he has served as Director General of the Institute for Caspian Studies in Teheran and in other senior advisory capacities.
Djoomart Otorbaev
After working in various Kyrgyz research institutes, Djoomart Otorbaev became a visiting professor at Eindhoven University, The Netherlands, 1992-1996. In 2001 he was appointed as a special representative of the President of the Kyrgyz Republic for foreign investments, and at the same time he founded the Investment Round Table. Between 2002 and 2005 he served as a Vice-Prime-Minister of the Kyrgyz Republic with responsibility for economic development. From April 2006 Djoomart Otorbaev has served at the EBRD’s London headquarters as Senior Advisor for the Caucasus and Central Asia.
Martin Raiser
Martin Raiser holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Kiel, Germany, and a master’s degree in Economics and Development Studies from the London School of Economics. Until 2003 he worked at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development as lead economist for Central Asia. He then served as country manager for the World Bank in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, before being named to the World Bank's regional office for Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine in Kiev. Mr. Raiser is on the editorial board of the Journal of Comparative Economics.
Dinara Rakhmanova
Dinara Rakhmanova heads the International Relations Unit of the Kyrgyz Republic’s National Agency on Corruption Prevention. Holding a master's degree in public administration, she earlier worked in international development organizations, mainly in the area of good governance and public administration reform. She also served with the United Nations development Program in Afghanistan and in her native Kyrgyzstan.
Gulshan Sachdeva
Dr. Gulshan Sachdeva, who holds a PhD degree from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, is Associate Professor at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. His expertise includes transition economies, European economic integration, regional economic cooperation and India’s Northeast. Presently he is in Kabul working in the ADB-funded capacity building project on regional cooperation at the Afghanistan Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He is the author of The Economy of North-East: Policy, Present Conditions and Future Possibilities (2000) and many articles, and is on the editorial board of the journal International Studies.
Sergey Slepchenko
Sergey Slepchenko directs the analytical consortium “Perspective” in Bishkek, the Kyrgyz Republic, having participated earlier in research for the United Nations Development Program and various World Bank projects. Working in Kazakhstan, Russia, France, and Tajikistan, as well as Kyrgyzstan, he specializes on regional development and trade, technologies of communication, and processes of decision making.
S. Frederick Starr
S. Frederick Starr is Chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute and Silk Road Studies Program. Starr holds a Ph.D. in History from Princeton University, an MA from King's College, Cambridge University, and a BA from Yale University.
Niklas Swanström
Niklas Swanström is Program Director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute and Silk Road Studies Program. He is Editor of the China and Eurasia Forum Quarterly. He holds a Ph.D. from Uppsala University, and a MALD degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University.
Murat Suyunbaev
Dr. Murat Suyunbaev is Vice-Principal of the Diplomacy Academy under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Kazakhstan. After completing his doctorate he worked for fifteen years he in various research organizations, where he specialized in strategic planning, development, and geopolitics. In this capacity he drafted concept papers for the government of Kazakhstan on cultural policy, foreign policy, national security, and sustainable human development.
Khojamahmad Umarov
Professor Khojamahmad Umarov is head of the Macroeconomic Studies Department of the Institute of Economic Studies, Ministry of Economy and Trade, in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. The author of thirty books, his areas of expertise include regional and continental trade, infrastructure, logistics, and transit; strategies of economic and social development; and social issues. A Tajik by nationality, he hails from the Aini district of Tajikistan.
Zhang Li
Zhang Li is Research Professor of International Relations at the Centre for Asian Studies, Sichuan University, in China. He is has been a visiting scholar at Oxford University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and the University of Hong Kong.
Taleh Ziyadov
Taleh Ziyadov is Deputy Executive Director of the U.S.-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce in Washington. He holds a Master’s degree in Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. His analytical articles appeared in Analysis of Current Events, the Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst, the Turkish Policy Quarterly, the Moscow Times and the Eurasia Daily Monitor.
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