A thousand poles are blooming as new international blocs like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS Development Bank emerge to challenge Western economic and military hegemony.
As it considers whether to back a controversial dam in Tajikistan, the World Bank needs to revisit its criteria for funding projects that displace people from their homes.
Damning stat: according to the World Bank, in 2011 remittances from abroad constituted a whopping 47% of Tajikstan’s GDP.
I delivered the following remarks at an anti-NATO conference held in Moscow on May 15, 2012. I was the only North American speaker at an all-day conference, having been invited in connection with the appearance into Russian of my book Drugs, Oil, and War. As a former diplomat worried about peace I was happy to attend: as far as I can tell there may be less serious dialogue today between Russian and American intellectuals than there was at the height of the Cold War. Yet the danger of war involving the two leading nuclear powers has hardly disappeared.
For much of the 1990s Boris Shikhmuradov was the most acceptable public face of Turkmenistan’s dictatorial regime, traveling the world as Foreign Minister. An Armenian by birth and a former journalist, the suave and jovial Shikhmuradov spoke English fluently. He made a sharp contrast to his dour boss, President Saparmyrat Niyazov, who goes by Turkmenbashi the Great (Father of all Turkmen) and presides over an extreme Soveit-style personality cult. Shikhmuradov countered this bizarre image of Central Asian governance. Now–like other former elites–he is opposing it.