BY SADA AKSARTOVA Throughout the 1990s, the most ambitious American efforts to promote market and democracy were directed at Russia and other post-Soviet states. The enormity—physical and symbolic—of the Soviet Union, the rapidity of its collapse and the sheer scale of the economic and political transformation in its successor states presented Western policy makers with [...]
BY SANDRA I. CHELDELIN AND SUSAN F. HIRSCH In 2004, in collaboration with a local NGO in Dushanbe, our faculty at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution launched a multiyear project to increase conflict resolution capacities of local actors in Tajikistan. We worked with government, religious and academic leaders, created a conflict resolution resource [...]
BY MARK N. KATZ Saparmurat Niyazov ruled Turkmenistan from its December 1991 independence that resulted from the collapse of the Soviet Union until his death in December 2006. Although Turkmenistan has enormous natural gas reserves, Niyazov—who styled himself “Turkmenbashi” (leader of the Turkmen)—kept most of his citizens impoverished, uneducated and in fear of his security [...]
BY ERIC MCGLINCHEY Some efforts of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in the former Soviet Union have proven more successful than others. Why do some assistance schemes pursued by USAID’s two central political party assistance implementers, the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) yield positive results while other strategies [...]
BY AGNIESZKA PACZYNSKA As the victorious great powers surveyed the devastation brought on by World War II and faced the crumbling of old colonial empires two issues came to dominate the international agenda: the reconstruction of countries devastated by the war and the economic and political development of the newly independent states of Africa and Asia. [...]
BY HAZEL M. MCFERSON The history of interaction in the United States between Asians and African-Americans is far more nuanced than either the view that most interaction has been positive, or the more common, opposing view that what interaction has taken place has been uniformly negative. Certainly, in contemporary times there is a widespread impression, [...]
BY MARCEL KITISSOU China has forged extensive political, economic and military ties with most of the fifty-four African countries, in part to secure a stable oil supply. However, the implications of “petro politics” for the stability of the African countries concerned may not always be positive. China’s trade with the continent has tripled since 2000, [...]
BY LISA PAWLOSKI Obesity is increasingly becoming an epidemic in industrialized nations, particularly in the United States, where one out of every three adults is obese. We are not alone in this emerging public health crisis. In Europe, rates of obesity among adults are as high as 25 percent in the United Kingdom and Germany, [...]