Eurasia Program

Recently, the post-communist Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia region has witnessed an emergence of competing strategic interests and foreign policy orientations among its states, with some elements that are alarmingly predatory and opportunistic.  Unless effectively countered, these trends threaten to dismantle the post-Cold War order and to mutate the region’s cross-ethnic diversity into cross-ethnic violence, thus creating a new wave of change in the region likely to undermine Western interests.  The continued stoking of nationalism, irredentism and revanchism in Eurasia could erupt into large-scale conflict.   Transatlantic cooperation is essential to resolving these key challenges.

 

The Eurasia Program at FPRI is a successor of the Project on Democratic Transitions. It aims to analyze the ebb and flow of democratization in the post-communist states, but it will also focus more comprehensively on the geopolitical, economic, security and energy issues central to the overall dynamics of the region. 

 

The main geographic focus of the Eurasia Program will be on the “Eurasian Heartland” which, as sketched out by Halford Mackinder, is a landmass that occupies the vast geographic space between central and northern Europe, the Middle East, and eastern Asia.