Central Eurasia

"A decade after the demise of the Soviet Union, the newly independent states to Russia's south remain poor and remote from the developed world. Living standards have fallen throughout the region, while the energy wealth envisioned in the mid-1990s never materialised. Most governments have grown more corrupt and less stable. Responsibility for this state of affairs rests partly on an exaggerated and misplaced view, particularly popular among influential Western analysts, that the region is a natural, or even desirable, setting for imperial conflict. This view has skewed the policies of local…