Eurasia on the Edge

Eurasia, wherever one draws the boundaries, is very much at the center of discussions about today’s world. This book enables readers to achieve a better understanding of key security threats in the Eurasian region.

Eurasia, wherever one draws the boundaries, is very much at the centre of discussions about today’s world. Security across Eurasia is a global concern and has been subject to a range of discussions and debate. However, the current tensions over security and world order, with the growing challenges from Eurasia and Asia, require more intense scrutiny. The goals of the book are to explore the challenges facing the region and to assess how to achieve economic, social and political stability in the Eurasian core.

The book’s chapters are written by prominent experts in the field, and together contribute to the continuing debate by providing policy advice for managing crises in the region. Conflicts inevitably arise in the Eurasian space as global powers, regional powers and individual states jockey for positions and influence. These conflicts need not reach a crisis state provided the foundations of conflict, and the surrounding frameworks, can be better understood. To do this, it is necessary to examine the issue of security in Eurasia from a multi-dimensional perspective that challenges any and all assumptions about Eurasia and global order.

This volume has two overarching goals. The first is to come to a better understanding of key security threats in the Eurasian region from a multi-dimensional – social, political, economic and institutional - perspective. The second is to discuss policies directed to increase mutual security in and around the Eurasian core. Although the crisis of security affects the whole continent, the area covered by the former Soviet Union and its neighborhood is at the epicenter of the current crisis. On the one side, the Atlantic community is consolidating and extending. On the other, various ‘greater Asia’ ideas are in the making. All of Eurasia is in danger of becoming an extended shatter zone, a vast new, shaky ‘borderland’ trapped between two great systems of power and world order.

1Introduction

Richard Burchill and Fyodor Lukyanov

2Strategic Security in Eurasia

Nikolai Silaev and Andrei Sushentsov

3 Regional Arrangements and Eurasian Security

Richard Burchill & Ruta Karpauskaite

4 Eurasian Integration and its Institutions: Possible Contributions to Security in Eurasia

Evgeny Vinokurov & Alexander Libman

5 Eurasian Security Constructs and Institutional Capacity

Leah Sherwood

6 Russia’s Eurasia Moment: Politics, Economics, Business

Timofei Bordachev

7Eurasia: A View from China’s Security Perspective

Zhao Huasheng

8 The European Union and Eurasia: Europe on the Edge

Vincent Della Sala

9. China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Eurasian Security

Yong Wang

10 Security Issues in Eurasia

Richard Weitz

11Economic Security in the Eurasian Economic Union

Leonid Grigoryev

12Central Asian Regimes: Stability and Reform

Ivan Safranchuk

13 Interstate Relations in Central Asia

Andrei Kazantsev

14 Managing Eurasia’s Borders: The European Union and International Organizations in Russia’s ‘Near Abroad’

Martin Geiger

15Borders and Waters: Compartmentalized Security in the Eurasian Heartland

Viktoria Akchurina

16Sino-Russia Strategic Understanding and the Changing International System

Alexander Lukin

17 Conclusion: Security in Eurasia – Further or Closer to the Edge?

Piotr Dutkiewicz and Richard Sakwa