International Security in the Post-Soviet Space
Little attention is being paid to the region that once was the Soviet Union. Instead,
the outside world focuses on fragments. Sometimes these fragments are indisputably
important, as in the case of Caspian Sea oil and gas, or "loose nukes," or developments
in Russia itself, but they are fragments nonetheless. Although the post-Soviet area
is disintegrating space–in the sense that countries and subregions are drifting
in various directions–in important respects, security trends in this part of the
world pose overarching challenges for the larger international setting and, in particular,
for the critical European and Asian theaters that abut it. For the most part, these
challenges have gone unrecognized.
The four volumes in this project are intended to begin filling this gap. Each addresses
an important dimension of the link between security in the post-Soviet space and
the broader international security environment. The first volume, Thinking Strategically: The Major Powers,
Kazakhstan, and the Central Asian Nexus (2003), assesses the evolving
stakes of the major powers–the United States, the E.U., China, Japan, and Russia–in
Central Asia, with a special emphasis on Kazakhstan. The second volume, Swords and Sustenance: The Economics
of Security in Belarus and Ukraine (2004), compares the impact of economic
factors on the national security policies of Ukraine and Belarus. The third volume,
The Russian Military:
Power and Policy (2004), provides a profile of contemporary Russia as
a military actor, covering everything from evolving national security policy to
the use of force to military reform. The fourth volume,
Statehood and Security: Georgia after the Rose Revolution (2005), considers
the complex impact of external and internal forces on countries faced with the harshest
security challenges, and uses Georgia as the case in point. A forerunner to the
books in the series, Belarus
at the Crossroads (1999), shares the same conception and examines what
kinds of security issues are overlooked when the complex challenges raised by the
larger post-Soviet space are reduced to single dimensions, such as Russia's relationship
with the West.
MIT Press published the books as part of the
American Academy Studies in Global Security Series . For Russian versions,
click the titles:
Swords and Sustenance,
Thinking Strategically,
The Russian Military, and
Statehood and Security. The project was funded by a generous grant from
the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
Return to Science, Technology, and Global Security
|