Special Reports

  DISCLAIMER: The dialogue discussed in this report was sponsored by the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency and their Strategic Trends Research Initiative (STRI) program. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect...

Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan: The Poorest Countries in Central Asia Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are probably the most dependent on Russia of all the Central Asian states. Some 1.1 million migrant laborers from Kyrgyzstan and 1.6 million from Tajikistan worked abroad...

  Note: Research for this analysis was completed on October 13, 2022. The text does not reflect events since that date. Executive Summary Russia’s war on Ukraine is poised to bring into being a new European security order. Although...

The existence of the Republic of China in Taiwan as a separate entity from the People’s Republic of China in Beijing is the single largest threat to the survival of the Chinese Communist Party. For years, Beijing has pursued...

In response to the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine, the European Union is moving to wean itself off Russian natural gas. While the move makes sound geopolitical sense, cutting off Russian gas supplies has already caused economic pain. Before the...

  Despite the attention in Washington currently paid to developments in Ukraine and the Taiwan Strait, terrorism remains a threat to US national security. The recent counterterrorism strike against Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul highlights that the fight against al-Qaeda,...

Introduction On May 2–3 2022, the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung Syria/Iraq Office and the Foreign Policy Research Institute convened a panel of foreign policy experts for a dialogue on security challenges present in the Eastern Mediterranean. The first day addressed state fragility...

  Russian war aims have contracted from conquering Ukraine to simply expanding the territory of the statelets it supposedly went to war to protect. By contrast, Ukraine’s war aims have grown from survival to the recovery of all territory...

In January, everything changed in Kazakhstan. A series of demonstrations rocked the country, spreading from its oil-rich west to the commercial and cultural capital, Almaty. The protests exploded out of long-simmering demands for a fairer distribution of Kazakhstan’s wealth...

The United States and its allies in the West have been unable to use the threat of military force to coerce Russia into stopping its war in Ukraine. In part, this is because the West is more concerned about...