[Discussion] PUBL.- M. Amineh & H. Houweling, Central Eurasia in Global Politics

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PUBL.- M. Amineh & H. Houweling, Central Eurasia in Global Politics

Amineh, Mehdi Parvizi & Henk Houweling
Central Eurasia in global politics: conflict, security and development
Leiden & Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2004
370 pp., Tables, Figures, Index
ISBN 9004128093 (paperback), Euro 49.-.

To order a copy of the book, please go to:
http://www.brill.nl/

Central Eurasia in global politics: conflict, security and development

This anthology brings together studies of post-colonial, post-Cold War
Central Eurasia. This part of the world is in transition from Soviet
institutions to independent statehood, nation building, resistance against
state expansion, cultural change and the release of market forces.  The
theoretical framework of the study is called 'critical geo-politics.' The
objective of the work is to better comprehend the nature of the
post-colonial 'geo-politics in a globalising world'.

The creation of legally independent states in Central Eurasia has changed
the geo-political and geo-economic landscape on the landmass of Eurasia.
The
newly independent governments are confronted with the simultaneous tasks to
extend state power into domestic society, to create viable nations, to
transit from inherited, decayed central planning systems towards a market
economy as well as to integrate into the world economy. The strains caused
by transformation process underway in the newly created countries provide
outsiders with multiple access points to come in and bent that process to
their own advantage.

The international context of the transformation processes underway
therefore
will shape its outcome. That context is characterised, firstly by America's
military supremacy. For the first time in the history of the Westphalian
state system, one country as achieved escalation dominance in all
regions of
the world simultaneously. At the end of World War II, the US shifted its
military border across the world's oceans- incorporating Western Europe and
offshore East Asia, later including South Korea, as its security-dependent
clients. In the post-cold war order, the US is creating a new leg to the
trans-oceanic, cold war, military border, extending it from Southern
Europe,
(Rumania) into the Caucasus , Iraq into the former Soviet Central Asia.
Accordingly, Russia, China and Iran have got the sole surviving military
superpower as their new neighbour on land-borders. This is the fossil fuel
rich area between integrating Europe, recovering Russia and industrialising
China. Secondly, the international structure now has three centres of
productive power: North America, with the US its centre, East Asia, with
Japan and China as its core and integrating and extending Western Europe.
Accordingly, the once united "West" is fragmenting in competing parts.
Multiple fragmentation of the one's united 'West' implies unrestricted
multiple competition for getting access to fossil fuel niche in which
state,
enterprises and households in this high-income part of the world thrives.

Table of Contents

Introduction by the editors. The crisis in IR- theory: towards a critical
geo-politics approach
Mehdi Parvizi Amineh and Henk Houweling

Part I: The policy of projecting power into vacuum areas

  - Chapter 1: Critical geo-politics and American practice
    Henk Houweling and Mehdi Parvizi Amineh
  - Chapter 2: Caspian oil and gas resources and the global market
    Mehdi Parvizi Amineh and Henk Houweling

Part II: Local dynamics

  - Chapter 3: Nation-state building in Central Asia: a lost case?
    Pinar Akcali
  - Chapter 4: Political processes in Post-Soviet Central Asia
    Shirin Akiner
  - Chapter 5: The economic and social impact of systemic transition in
    Central Asia and Azerbaijan
    Michael Kaser
  - Chapter 6: Gendered transitions: The impact of the post-Soviet
transition
    on women in Central Asia and the Caucasus
    Armine Ishkanian

Part III: Interactions between outsiders, neighbors and Central Eurasian
Republics

  - Chapter 7: Sino-Indian relations: security dilemma, ideological
    polarization, or Cooperation based on 'Comprehensive Security'?
    Kurt Radtke
  - Chapter 8: The US and the EU in CEA. Relations with regional powers
    Mehdi Parvizi Amineh and Henk Houweling
  - Chapter 9: Paradigms of Iranian policy in Central Eurasia and beyond.
    Eva Rakel

Part IV: Local conflicts

  - Chapter 10: Growing Tension and the Threat of War in the Southern
Caspian
    Sea: The Unsettled Division Dispute and Regional Rivalry
    Hooman Peimani
  - Chapter 11: The 'power of water' in a divided Central Asia
    Max Spoor and Anatoly Krutov
  - Chapter 12: A trans-national policy for conflict reduction and
prevention
    in the South Caucasus
    Robert M. Cutler
  - Chapter 13: Azerbaijan: International challenges and domestic
preferences
    in the post-Soviet transition process in Azerbaijan
    Ayca Ergun




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