Registan’s Kazakhstan News & Analysis Archive

Kazakhstan is the most vibrant economy of Central Asia and increasingly important in international politics. It is perhaps because of Kazakhstan’s success in transitioning toward becoming a country with a vibrant economy and generally responsive — though not democratic — government that it has received comparatively less attention at Registan. However, as public expectations begin to outpace the capability of the government to keep society satisfied and violent extremist groups being to operate in the country, Kazakhstan demands attention to determine whether or not its path continues to diverge from the rest of Central Asia or begins finally to converge.

Registan’s analysts have lived, worked, and studied in Kazakhstan and have between them decades of experience in academia, government, and private industry dealing with topics related to Kazakhstan. We use that experience and expertise to report on, contextualize, and analyze current events in Kazakhstan. Registan puts that experience to work to offer research, analysis, and training services tailored to your individual needs. For more information on how we can help you and your organization better understand Kazakhstan and Central Asia, visit our services page.

With Two Kazakhs Arrested After Boston, Eyes Now Turn, Unfortunately, to Kazakhstan

by Casey_Michel

On Tuesday morning, just before Dias Kadyrbayev and Azamat Tazhayakov were set to learn the charges they would face stemming from their actions surrounding the Boston bombings, The Economist published a pair of graphs summarizing the Pew Research Center’s survey on the overlap of religion and law within Muslim-majority nations. The entire survey, of course, [...]

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About the Central Asian Link to those Boston Bombers

by Casey_Michel

  This might be a bit redundant, seeing as the readership at Registan – unlike, say, those who work in front of the camera at CNN – are among those able to differentiate between Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, but I thought it might be worth a quick run-down of how a substantial Chechen population came to [...]

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Kazakhstan’s Gilded Cage

by Joshua Foust

For Foreign Policy, I asked why Kazakhstan, which is in the process of oppressing its civil society in a way it never did in the 90s, is getting such good PR. The international respectability has come, too, if a little more slowly. In 2010, Kazahkstan chairedthe Organization for Stability and Cooperation in Europe — the first post-Soviet state [...]

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Freedom and Fear in Central Asia: How the Security Assistance Debate is Asking the Wrong Questions

by Noah Tucker
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The terrorist threat against Central Asia is real and not in dispute. Groups like the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and its offshoot the Islamic Jihad Union (IJU) have demonstrated the capability to conduct small-scale operations inside Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and as the US

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Central Asia Security Workshop, March 25-26 at George Washington University

by Noah Tucker
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If you’re in the DC area, please join me and a bunch of other Registan contributors at this fantastic workshop put together by Marlene Laruelle and the Central Asia Program at GW. From the website: “NATO members are exiting from

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Kazakhstan’s long quest for nuclear power relevance

by Joshua Foust
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The former Soviet states in Central Asia are often derided as backwaters. But Kazakhstan, the largest, is also taking a leading role in global nuclear security. The same country where Moscow once exploded hundreds of nuclear weapons has spent the last half-decade aggressively expanding its uranium mining industry… and just this week, negotiations over Iran’s [...]

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A lazy, ridiculous slur

by Joshua Foust

Washington Free Beacon writer Adam Kredo thinks I’m somehow connected to Chuck Hagel and Chevron and Kazakhstan and… oh well, just read it. When Kazakhstan’s riot police slaughtered dozens of striking oil field workers last year, Atlantic Council affiliate Joshua Foust rushed to discredit the reports. Foust, a member of the Atlantic Council’s Young Atlanticist [...]

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Advocating for a Better Central Asia

by Nathan Hamm
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When I saw that OSI had published a policy brief arguing that “the degree to which the United States holds countries in Eurasia publicly accountable for respecting human rights and democracy depends on each country’s relative strategic importance to the United States, not the human rights conditions in each country,” I anticipated writing a long [...]

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Post-2014 Terrorist Threat in Central Asia: Keeping it Real

by Guest
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Contributed by Nathan Barrick Is there a terrorist threat to Central Asia after the ISAF drawdown in Afghanistan in 2014? In recent publications, the warnings range from an imminent FATA-like region of militant-dominated, ungoverned space in the Ferghana Valley to the “these are not the terrorists you’re looking for” Jedi mind trick “2014 Central Asia [...]

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Central Asia in 2013: What Not to Look For

by Myles G. Smith

Change seems to come slowly to Central Asia. January is the time of year that people like us brashly predict the developments that will reshape country X and fundamentally alter the course of world events. If we worked at Stratfor, we’d even be paid to have the brass to do so. I think we’ve gotten [...]

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