[Discussion] PUBL.- Central Eurasia in Global Politics, 2nd Edition, April 2005

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

PUBL.- Central Eurasia in Global Politics, 2nd Edition, April 2005

Amineh, Mehdi Parvizi & Henk Houweling
Central Eurasia in global politics: conflict, security and development
Leiden & Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2005 2nd Edition
370 pp., Tables, Figures, Index
ISBN 90-04-14439-0 (paperback), Euro 61.-.

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

We are pleased to inform you that the Second Edition of the book Central
Eurasia in global politics: conflict, security and development will be
published in April 2005.

Central Eurasia in global politics: conflict, security and development

The creation of legally independent states in Central Eurasia has
changed the geo-political and geo-economic landscape on the landmass of
Eurasia. This anthology has the objective to contribute to the scholarly
literature analyzing the changing position of that part of the world in
the upcoming multi-polar world system. The theoretical framework of the
study is called 'critical geo-politics.'

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 law-based market economy as well as to integrate into the
world economy. The strains caused by these transformation processes 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 their outcome. That context is characterized,
firstly by America's military supremacy. For the first time in the
history of the Westphalian state system, one country has achieved
absolute 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 a militarized bi-polar order.

In the post-cold war order, the US is creating a new leg to its
trans-oceanic, maritime-based 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 neighbor on land-
borders. This is the fossil fuel rich area between integrating Europe,
recovering Russia and industrializing China.

Secondly, the international structure now has three centers of
productive power: North America, with the US as its centre, East Asia,
with Japan and China as its core and integrating and extending Western
Europe. US post-war planners in the Truman Administration had objected
to 'general industrialization.' Their first preference was to produce an
integrated world economy with the US at the top. The cold war setting,
however, was conducive to upward mobility of the war-devastated
countries in the Pacific and Atlantic Rim.

After Soviet systems got extinct, the once united "West" is fragmenting
in the variable of  "identity." America is reverting to its redeemer-
role in the world. In continental Europe, elites cannot, unlike their
Anglo-Saxon counterparts, avoid looking into the abyss of world wars and
industrial destruction of millions of people. In America, the political
culture of being the redeemer of the world, has induced a holocaust
memorial sub-culture, conveniently overlooking the millions of death
involved at home and abroad in America's rise to greatness.

However, due to the transition from fordist mass production, with some
arms-length trans-Atlantic trade, to the neo-liberalism of cross-border
investments, the economies in the Atlantic area got more integrated in
the 1990's. Atlantic elites therefore share a common position at the top
of the global economy, sharing a preference for maintaining it.

The geo-political approach to the study of major power politics erases
at the level of theory the barrier between domestic and foreign policy
and aims at integrating into that approach the variable 'identity.'

The units of analysis are institutionalized state- society/economy -
military relations of state-incorporated domestic society. These units
are brought into contact through foreign policies of projecting power
beyond legal state borders. One rationale of the geo-political approach
is that since the onset of industrialization, state elites in domestic
society thrive in one and the same fossil fuel niche. The circular flow
of income and expenditure in industrial capitalism is, instead of being
autonomous and self-regulating, rooted in extracting resource wealth
created by nature, and putting the excrement into the global
environment. That implies competition between state elites for getting
access to input resources as well as competition in the regulation of
environmental pollution.


Table of Contents:

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

Part I: The policy of projecting power into vacuum areas

Chapter 1: Critical geo-politics and American practice
Mehdi Parvizi Amineh & Henk Houweling

Chapter 2: Caspian oil and gas resources and the global market
Mehdi Parvizi Amineh & 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 & 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

Dr. M. Parvizi Amineh
Senior Research Fellow
International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS)
P.O. Box 9515,
2300 RA Leiden,
The Netherlands
E-mail: m.p.amineh@uva.nl

Amsterdam School for Social Science Research (ASSR)
University of Amsterdam,
O.Z.Achterburgwal 237
1012 DL, Amsterdam
The Netherlands,
Fax: 0031 20 525 3658
Tel.: 0031 20 525 4567
E-mail: m.p.amineh@uva.nl



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