Theme - digest

In August 2026, PSCRP analytical materials largely focused on developments in the South Caucasus, Central Asia, and Russia.

The PSCRP team provides an overview of the year that has passed since the joint declaration was signed in Washington between the leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia, potentially ending the long-lasting conflict between the countries. The authors accentuate the fact that this was the initiative of Baku, and that during this year, numerous economic opportunities were opened for cooperation between the two states, namely, “lifting restrictions on cargo shipments to Armenia, starting Azerbaijani petroleum exports across the border, and moving grain through territory that was, until recently, closed to Armenian trucks entirely.” Also, the establishment of the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity is underway. The authors claim that, to reach this stage of relationship, the conflict in Karabakh should have been resolved. They posit that Russian authorities might have regarded the Karabakh stalemate as leverage to influence and control the situation in the South Caucasus, and when this problem disappeared, the region might have become less controllable for Moscow.

In the same vein, the PSCRP team analyzes the role of the Middle Corridor, officially known as the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, in Azerbaijan’s contemporary efforts to strengthen its geopolitical position. The TITR is perceived as a potentially vital logistics route connecting East Asia and Europe that may solidify Baku’s role as the principal transit hub in cooperation with the regional states, the EU (interested in diversifying its energy supplies and building resilient trade routes), and the US (seeing the TITR as part of a broader open trade supporting strategy). However, achieving these goals remains contingent on developing and modernizing infrastructure at every operational level and on political stability in the regions concerned.

Gershon Kogan scrutinizes the recent political and cultural processes surrounding the choice of written scripts in the post-Soviet space, foregrounding the premise that an alphabet can be chosen as a “declared vector of civilization allegiance.” In 2024, the Common Turkic Alphabet project was approved by the Turkic Academy; in 2026, the Tajikistani Ministry of Education formed a working group to strengthen instruction in the traditional Perso-Arabic script. Placing these events within a broader framework, Kogan points to several mechanisms of influence employed by potential civilizational centers in the post-Soviet space. Turkey prefers to build infrastructure to make itself the center of the Turkic shared communicative space, including by means of spreading the Turkic Latin script. However, the latter contradicts the recent ideological turn towards re-Islamization and a bid for leadership in the Sunni Muslim world. Azerbaijan’s mechanisms accentuate agency and not a passive submission, positioning itself as the administrative hub of Turkic script integration; this also produces a reputation of an independently minded actor that is a more useful partner for outside actors than a satellite of another power center. Russia exploits the inertia of labor market dynamics, not directly pushing Cyrillic script but understanding its role for Central Asian labor migrants. Iran enjoys the strength of tradition and the abundance of heritage, which, however, is not translated into Tehran’s diplomatic leverage. Kogan concludes by predicting a “functionally stratified writing landscape”, where Latin script would be consolidated “as the medium of Turkic integration and digital modernity,” Cyrillic would persist wherever Russian-language labor markets and infrastructure remain most valuable, and Perso-Arabic script would be reserved for religion and classical literature. He concludes by noting that the decisive question would be which power “proves able to convert written heritage into a functioning instrument of statecraft.”

Providing a broader background to this issue, Gershon Kogan sheds light on Tehran’s alleged attempts to build a cultural, historical, or linguistic community with its neighboring countries. In 2026, the Iranian First Vice-President proposed building a “Union of Persian-Speaking Countries and Regions” with Tajikistan. This was not the first time such a proposal came to light; however, it was never implemented. To the impoverished linguistic club, the notion of a “Persianate world” might be juxtaposed, which would not exclude Turkey. However, since Tehran’s approach to Central Asia has remained non-ideological and strictly pragmatic, the IRI still has not organized its strategy around it. The author concludes that, “for four decades, the Islamic Republic constructed its foreign policy around what makes Iran part of a larger Islamic world. Confronted with a rising Turkic order it cannot out-compete on ideological terms, it may be discovering (…) what makes Iran a world of its own.”

Velvl Chernin overviews the transformation of Kazakhstan’s ethnic composition in the post-independence years, with significant growth of the share of an ethnically Kazakh population attributed to higher birth rates, emigration of Russian-speaking groups, and repatriation of ethnic Kazakhs from abroad, together with state-tailored measures aimed at the “re-Kazakhization” of northern regions. He specifically points to the ethnic Kazakh population in Russia’s regions bordering Kazakhstan – what he calls “Kazakh Irredenta,” with relatively large numbers of Kazakhs living in such regions as Astrakhan, Orenburg, Omsk, and Saratov oblasts, whose assimilation is prevented by the practice of Islam and physical differences with the Slavic population. He concludes that the Kazakhs in Russia remain a potentially significant source of ethnic Kazakh repatriation.

Vladimir Ze’ev Khanin provides a thorough overview of the development of Russian-Israeli relations since their restoration. He divides them into 3 main stages. The first, comprising Boris Yeltsin’s presidency and Vladimir Putin’s first presidential term, was rather restrained: Israeli actions were mostly confined to encouraging repatriation, arranging energy resource imports, and (attempts at) supporting Israeli business in Russia, and official visits were mostly tied to either urgent crisis management attempts or to the national elections. The second stage, comprising the 2nd and 3rd Putin’s presidential terms and his tenure as a Prime Minister, was characterized by noticeable improvement, growth in economic partnership, joint projects, expanding ties, and numerous mutual visits; it was also believed that Russia’s and Israel’s leaders had developed a “special personal relationship” based on mutual trust. De facto, it was rather a “tactical partnership based on overlapping interests.” The third stage started in February 2022, with the outbreak of full-scale military hostilities. Although Israel did not directly join the bloc of Western countries confronting Russia, all dimensions of cooperation have evidently declined, including not only economic ties but also shared narrative frameworks regarding World War II. This process was exacerbated after October 7th, when the Russian authorities sided with its long-standing strategic ally in Tehran and its proxies. Although no definite rupture has been in the bilateral ties, the author concludes that “Russian-Israeli relations today represent a combination of tactical clashes of interests on one level and fundamental uncertainty on another,” with the realistic “red lines” being seen by both sides as follows: “Israel does not participate directly in the war in Ukraine and does not provide it with large-scale military assistance, while Russia does not intervene in the Middle Eastern conflict on Iran’s side and does not directly assist the development of Iran’s nuclear program.”

Finally, Alexander Shpunt has prepared a monthly overview of several important academic publications concerning post-Soviet affairs.

In the upcoming months, the PSCR program will continue working on the analysis of the ongoing events in the post-Soviet space.

PSCRP-BESA Reports No 228 (August 31, 2026)

The “Access to Leadership Positions and Career Trajectories among Georgian and American Women in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries,”   authored by Salome Tcharbadze, PhD Student at the International Black Sea University in Tbilisi, Georgia, and Prof. Dr. Tamar Shioshvili, Professor at the same institution, offers a rigorous qualitative comparative examination of the institutional, organizational, and care-related mechanisms that condition women’s progression into managerial and senior leadership roles across two markedly different national settings. Drawing primarily upon peer-reviewed scholarship, official statistical publications, and institutional reports issued between 2020 and 2026, supplemented by selected foundational theoretical contributions, the study situates contemporary patterns within the longer historical arc of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Its analytical architecture rests upon five interrelated dimensions—organizational culture and promotion practices, caregiving responsibilities and care infrastructure, flexible work arrangements, intersectional inequalities, and structural access to professional development opportunities—while adopting a life-course perspective that traces cumulative disadvantage from educational attainment through labour-market entry, first promotion, family formation, mid-career advancement, and eventual senior leadership selection.

The research strategy is that of a structured comparative literature review and policy analysis rather than the generation of original survey or interview data. Sources were identified through keyword-driven searches, screened for relevance, methodological quality, and institutional credibility, and subjected to thematic coding that isolates both convergent patterns and context-specific mechanisms. Key concepts are carefully defined: career trajectories are understood as cumulative sequences of educational, occupational, and professional transitions; leadership access encompasses not merely formal titles but equal opportunity for authority, strategic decision-making, and advancement; caregiving responsibilities denote unpaid or underpaid activities of childcare, eldercare, and household management; flexible work arrangements comprise remote, hybrid, and alternative scheduling practices; and intersectional inequalities capture the interaction of gender with race, ethnicity, class, region, disability, and related social positions. Theoretical grounding is provided by gendered organization theory, role congruity theory, work-family conflict theory, and intersectionality, which together demonstrate that leadership inequality is embedded in routine organizational practices, stereotypical expectations, and the uneven distribution of unpaid care rather than in deficits of women’s qualifications or ambition.

In the United States, the analysis reveals measurable gains in women’s representation at senior corporate levels, alongside persistent fragility in the early pipeline, particularly at the first transition into management—the so-called “broken rung.” Unequal access to sponsorship, motherhood-related evaluation penalties, and racialized barriers continue to constrain cumulative career mobility even when formal anti-discrimination frameworks and extensive data infrastructures are present. Flexible and hybrid arrangements may sustain employment continuity yet risk diminishing visibility, informal mentoring, and promotion prospects when performance systems remain oriented toward physical presence. In Georgia, high levels of female educational attainment and formal legal equality coexist with substantial unpaid care burdens, occupational segregation, pronounced regional disparities between Tbilisi and rural municipalities, limited care infrastructure, and enduring patriarchal expectations that assign domestic labor disproportionately to women. Economic inactivity, informal employment, and restricted access to professional networks outside major urban centers further narrow the pool of women able to accumulate the continuous experience required for senior roles. Across both contexts, the study shows that relatively modest institutional disadvantages experienced early in the career trajectory compound over time, producing underrepresentation in leadership that cannot be explained by individual motivation or credentials alone.

The authors conclude that sustainable leadership equality demands institutional redesign rather than symbolic measures. Transparent promotion criteria, systematic sponsorship mechanisms, accessible and geographically distributed care services, gender-responsive labour policies, pay transparency, and explicit protections against flexibility-related stigma are identified as essential. Care infrastructure must be reconceived as part of the economic architecture that enables uninterrupted professional trajectories; flexible work must be governed by outcome-based evaluation rather than proximity bias; and leadership development must incorporate regional and digital inclusion so that gains are not confined to already privileged urban cohorts. The comparative perspective underscores that similar gendered outcomes may arise through divergent institutional histories—corporate pipeline dynamics and racialized evaluation in the United States, post-Soviet labour-market transition, family norms, and spatial inequality in Georgia—yet both cases illustrate the cumulative character of career disadvantage and the necessity of intervening before the executive level.

This comparative analysis of post-Soviet Georgian and American women’s leadership trajectories supplies Israeli scholarship and policy communities with transferable insights into institutional redesign that can inform gender-equality initiatives within multi-ethnic societies and regional cooperation frameworks across the post-Soviet space.

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The “Between Astana and Beijing: Russia’s Strategy to Build a New Economic Bloc in Eurasia,” is authored by Ahmed Al-Sayed Al-Haj, affiliated with advanced research institutions specializing in Eurasian geopolitical and economic processes. The research undertakes a systematic examination of the strategic implications of the Russian presidential visit to Kazakhstan from 27 to 29 May 2026, which followed directly upon high-level engagements in China. Through close analysis of official statements, bilateral agreements, and multilateral frameworks within the Eurasian Economic Union, the study reconstructs the contours of a coherent Russian policy aimed at consolidating an integrated continental economic architecture extending from Eastern Europe across Russia and Central Asia to China and the Asia-Pacific region. Particular attention is devoted to Kazakhstan’s pivotal geographic and economic position as the indispensable link connecting Russian industrial and resource capacities with Chinese markets and manufacturing hubs, while simultaneously serving as a key node in emerging transcontinental transport, energy, and logistics corridors.

The investigation proceeds by mapping the principal outcomes of the Astana summit, foremost among them the adoption of the Joint Statement on the Seven Pillars of Friendship and Good-Neighborliness in the Twenty-First Century and the conclusion of fifteen cooperation documents. These instruments establish a long-term institutional foundation grounded in mutual respect for sovereignty, strategic trust, expanded economic cooperation, cultural exchange, and the reinforcement of regional stability. Central to the agreements is the commitment to construct Kazakhstan’s first nuclear power plant under long-term financing and industrial partnership arrangements valued at approximately fifteen billion dollars, involving Rosatom and Kazatomprom and leveraging Kazakhstan’s possession of more than forty percent of global uranium reserves. Parallel advances are recorded in oil, gas, electricity, hydroelectric, and strategic mineral sectors, with explicit emphasis on moving beyond raw-material exports toward higher-value processing industries, battery production, and advanced technological applications. Financial and digital dimensions receive equal weight: central-bank memoranda on countering fraudulent transactions signal a shared orientation toward payment systems less dependent on external networks, while pilot projects in autonomous cross-border transport and coordinated modernization of customs and logistics infrastructures accelerate the operationalization of the International North–South Transport Corridor.

The research further situates these bilateral achievements within the broader Eurasian integration process. Discussions at the Eurasian Economic Forum and the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council prioritized technological innovation, logistical connectivity, and industrial project financing, underscoring Moscow’s pursuit of a networked economic space in which Kazakhstan functions as the principal geographic and institutional hinge. Complementary analysis of the emerging Russia–Kazakhstan–China triangle reveals mutually reinforcing roles: Russia contributes natural resources together with industrial and technological capabilities; China supplies the largest consumer market and global manufacturing base; and Kazakhstan furnishes the terrestrial corridors that bind the two. Concrete projects, including the proposed gas transit route capable of delivering up to thirty-five billion cubic meters annually through Kazakh territory, expanded oil shipments, and joint railway modernization led by Kazakhstan Temir Zholy and Russian Railways, illustrate the progressive densification of energy flows, transport networks, and industrial interdependence across the three states.

The authors conclude that the visits to Beijing and Astana constitute interconnected elements of a single strategic design whose cumulative effect will gradually reconfigure the economic geography of Eurasia. Realization of this design, however, remains contingent upon the capacity of Moscow and Astana to navigate residual geopolitical balances, secure sustainable project financing, manage competition among alternative trade corridors, and adapt to rapid technological change. Kazakhstan’s multi-vector foreign policy, while enhancing its international standing and investment attractiveness, simultaneously imposes calibrated limits on the depth of exclusive alignment with any single partner. Disparities among Eurasian Economic Union members and the parallel existence of competing regional initiatives further condition the pace of integration. Nevertheless, the practical system of energy, logistics, and industrial linkages already taking shape possesses the potential to generate durable mutual dependence and to redefine the long-term contours of continental economic space.

For Israel, the consolidation of this Eurasian economic architecture carries direct relevance to strategic diversification of energy and transit partnerships, the monitoring of evolving Central Asian connectivity, and the calibration of diplomatic and economic engagement across a region of growing systemic importance.

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“Cosmopolitics as the Co-Production of Action” is a research article by anthropologists Olga Ulturgasheva (University of Manchester) and Barbara Bodenhorn (University of Cambridge), published on July 29, 2026, in the journal Frontiers in Climate.

This scholarly article presents a fundamental rethinking of how action, decision-making, and collective response become possible in contexts of radical environmental uncertainty and intensified governance pressures. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, oral histories, ceremonial narratives, and remembered accounts from Eveny reindeer herders in northeastern Siberia, Yup’ik communities in southwestern Alaska, Iñupiaq whalers on the North Slope of Alaska, and Coast Salish peoples of the Pacific Northwest, the authors develop a comparative analysis that challenges dominant frameworks of risk management, expert control, and technocratic governance. The research demonstrates that Indigenous cosmopolitan practices offer a sophisticated alternative to conventional approaches that privilege human authority, prediction, and mastery over environmental systems.

The study is grounded in extensive field research conducted over several decades, with Ulutargasheva’s work focusing particularly on Eveny communities in northeastern Siberia and Bodenhorn’s long-term engagement with Iñupiaq whaling communities in Arctic Alaska. The authors position their intervention within broader theoretical conversations concerning cosmopolitics, political ontology, multiple worlds theory, and Indigenous environmental relations, engaging with the work of Isabelle Stengers, Marisol de la Cadena, Mario Blaser, Annemarie Mol, and Bruno Latour while extending these frameworks through detailed ethnographic attention to Arctic and Sub-Arctic contexts.

The article’s central argument is that cosmopolitics should be understood not primarily as an abstract recognition of plural ontologies or as a philosophical acknowledgment of multiple worldviews, but rather as the practical co-production of action through relations among humans, animals, weather, ice, land, technologies, spirits, memories, and institutions. This represents a significant departure from conventional accounts of co-production, which typically focus on how differently positioned human actors jointly produce knowledge. The authors argue for a more demanding understanding: action itself is composed through heterogeneous relations, and the question is not only whose knowledge is recognized but how beings with different capacities for sensing, refusing, warning, moving, and withholding participate in what happens next.

Methodologically, the article proceeds through four cumulative propositions developed through different ethnographic fields. First, analysis of dog-team and reindeer herding accounts demonstrates how authority becomes redistributed under conditions where human judgement can fail, as exemplified by stories in which dogs refuse to proceed in blinding snowstorms and reindeer halt before thaw-softened ground that humans cannot perceive as dangerous. These cases show that hesitation, stopping, waiting, and yielding are not the opposites of action but practical modes through which safer action becomes possible. The Eveny concept of nyammin, translated as coordination of movement, shared rhythm, or collective effort, provides an analytic anchor for understanding how authority passes between humans, animals, and shifting environmental conditions.

Second, border-crossing narratives and Eveny cryospheric memory develop a politics of perception, demonstrating that sovereignty, kinship, and historical recognition are negotiated through atmospheric opacity, animal sensorium, light, cold, sound, and the uneven power to decide what counts as evidence. Stories of crossing the Bering Strait by dog sled during the Cold War show how snowstorms were strategically used to disrupt state surveillance, with dogs serving as co-leaders whose sensing recalibrated action in real time. The analysis of churilan, the time of ghosts during extreme winter cold, reveals how the cryosphere functions as both archive and agent, making historical violence perceptible through seasonal transformations of light, sound, and atmosphere.

Third, Iñupiaq whaling ethics demonstrate that cosmopolitical action is inseparable from the maintenance of conditions of welcome, requiring collective labour through which whales, humans, institutions, journalists, scientists, and regulators become mutually consequential. Whales are understood as participants in fields of deliberation and evaluation that reorganize what counts as good practice, making human action answerable to more-than-human judgement. The article shows how whaling ethics encompass both moral registers of sharing, restraint, and ceremonial practice and political registers of negotiating regulatory frameworks that often misrecognize the practice by reducing tradition to tools while missing the relational ethics that make whaling meaningful.

Fourth, Eagle/Wolf narratives and ceremonial accounts move the argument beyond human-centred reciprocity, showing collaboration as transformation across species, elements, and forms of life. Accounts from both Iñupiaq Messenger Feast traditions and Coast Salish storytelling present scenarios in which animals instruct, transform, and constrain action, sometimes with humans at the centre and sometimes at the margins, demonstrating that agency, instruction, and obligation can circulate in ways that do not take humans as the inevitable reference point.

The authors conclude that cosmopolitics names an operative practice for living with volatility rather than a theory of plural ontologies awaiting acknowledgement. They argue that preparedness lies not in prediction or control alone but in flexibility: the capacity to shift tactics, redistribute authority, and remain receptive to multiple forms of communication from more-than-human beings. Stengers’ concept of ralentissement, or slowing down, is given practical force through the Eveny concept of nyammin, showing that hesitation is not passivity but an active discipline of remaining answerable to signs, refusals, absences, and presences that dominant institutions often treat as background. The pause, halt, or refusal is not a delay before action but the very means through which safer action is produced.

This study offers significant methodological and theoretical contributions to understanding how diverse populations navigate intersecting pressures of environmental change, governance regimes, and historical legacies of colonialism. The research demonstrates that Indigenous knowledge practices are not stable archives of environmental wisdom but dynamic modes of flexible coordination under shifting conditions, requiring ongoing negotiation among human, animal, and environmental participants. The co-production of action framework provides an alternative to dominant technocratic approaches that privilege prediction, standardization, and expert control while discounting situated warnings embedded in human-animal-land relations.

Significance for Israel: The article’s framework of co-produced action and distributed authority offers valuable perspectives for understanding conflict resolution, environmental governance, and security challenges in contested regions, highlighting how inclusive and multi-actor approaches can inform strategic decision-making in complex geopolitical environments.

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“European Union for Armenia: Values, Confidence, Prosperity,” authored by Sergey Minasyan and published as a KAS Policy Paper in Yerevan in July 2026 under the auspices of the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, examines the evolving trajectory of Armenia’s partnership with the European Union in the period 2024–2026. The study situates this partnership within a broader analytical framework that integrates domestic political processes, institutional reform dynamics, security recalibrations, and economic structural constraints, while drawing comparative insights from the experiences of Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine as Eastern Partnership states that have advanced toward candidate status. Through a careful assessment of legislative, institutional, and societal dimensions, the research demonstrates that Armenia has attained an unprecedented level of engagement with European structures for a non-candidate country, marked by the implementation of the Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement, the deployment of civilian monitoring and partnership missions, the initiation of the visa liberalisation process, the adoption of a national EU Integration Act, and the formalisation of a bilateral Strategic Agenda. The analysis further incorporates the significance of the May 2026 European Political Community and EU–Armenia summits hosted in Yerevan, as well as the consolidation of a renewed reform mandate following the June 2026 parliamentary elections.

The central finding of the inquiry is that the primary constraints on Armenia’s European trajectory have shifted from external availability of engagement to domestic factors, including the quality of governance, the durability of democratic institutions, the credibility of reform implementation, and the capacity of political actors to sustain public trust across an uneven integration process. While regional security developments and the consequences of earlier crises accelerated Armenia’s orientation toward Europe, the long-term value of the partnership resides in its potential to strengthen institutions, improve governance standards, diversify economic relations, enhance societal resilience, and expand opportunities for citizens. The author underscores the necessity of calibrated expectations: the European Union does not function as a collective defence organisation and the existing partnership framework offers neither membership perspectives nor the full conditionality associated with association agreements. Comparative examination of the three Eastern Partnership cases reveals a recurrent gap between formal legislative approximation and actual institutional behaviour, illustrating that reform durability depends upon independent institutions, active civil society, and sustained domestic demand for accountability rather than external declarations alone.

In the domain of governance, the text identifies judicial independence, anti-corruption enforcement, and the closing of the gap between formal standards and everyday administrative practice as decisive tests of credibility. Public opinion data indicate broad yet relatively shallow support for closer European ties, accompanied by concerns that modernisation benefits may accrue unevenly. Strategic communication is presented as a structural rather than merely technical challenge, essential for converting symbolic association with European norms into durable societal consent. In the security sphere, the analysis provides an honest accounting of European instruments, emphasising their contribution to transparency, hybrid-threat resilience, and institutional capacity-building while clarifying the absence of collective defence guarantees. Economic assessment highlights opportunities in digital services, renewable energy, and connectivity under the Resilience and Growth Plan, tempered by the legal and structural constraints of Eurasian Economic Union membership, residual dependencies, and the need for carefully sequenced diversification that mitigates adjustment costs for households and regions outside the capital.

The author’s conclusions affirm that the partnership’s potential remains genuine, yet its outcome will be determined less by bilateral statements than by the quality of Armenian institutions, the management of regional frameworks, and the willingness of both sides to communicate realistic parameters to their respective publics. Four priorities are singled out for the coming decade: completion of visa liberalisation, meaningful judicial reform, continued energy diversification, and deeper integration into European digital and innovation ecosystems, all underpinned by more effective domestic communication. The study thus contributes a sober, multi-dimensional evaluation of post-Soviet European integration dynamics under conditions of incomplete institutional consolidation and competing external frameworks.

For Israeli strategic analysis, the text illuminates South Caucasus realignments and resilience-building mechanisms that bear upon regional stability, energy corridors, and the management of hybrid challenges relevant to Israel’s broader security environment.

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The article “Moralized Patriarchy in Kazakhstan” authored by Aigul Zabirova, Doctor of Sociological Sciences and Chief Research Fellow at the Kazakhstan Institute for Strategic Studies under the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan in Astana. The text appears in the Journal of International Women’s Studies, Volume 28, Issue 3, 2026, archived in the Virtual Commons of Bridgewater State University. Zabirova’s research profile focuses on gender, religiosity, values and post-Soviet social transformation in Central Asia, and for this study she designed the gender-related survey modules and conducted the analytical work, while field implementation was performed by the Center for Applied Research TALAP.

The research addresses the persistence and transformation of patriarchal norms in contemporary Kazakhstan against the background of prolonged formal gender equality promotion during the Soviet period and subsequent nation-building after independence. Empirically it draws on the 2024 national survey “Values and Identity in Kazakhstan” commissioned by the Kazakhstan Institute for Strategic Studies, with fieldwork between 11 May and 22 June 2024 among a probability sample of 8,101 adults aged eighteen and above covering all seventeen regions and the cities of Astana, Almaty and Shymkent. The study examines attitudes toward maternal employment, priorities in schooling for boys and girls, the principle of men’s priority in employment when jobs are scarce, and expectations concerning breadwinning and male headship. Analytically the author employs distribution analysis across four domains, cross-tabulation with association measures, and a binary logistic regression model using a dichotomized traditionalism index ranging from zero as egalitarian to one as traditional, derived from a broader zero to four scale capturing breadth of traditional orientations across domains. Ten sociodemographic predictors are tested, including sex, age, education, type of settlement, religiosity, income and region, with model fit significantly above the null and classification accuracy of seventy four percent, though with asymmetry in predicting egalitarian versus traditional responses.

The core theoretical innovation is the formulation of moralized patriarchy and the mechanism of moralized patriarchal compromise. Drawing on gender regime theory and the concepts of patriarchal bargain and moral economy, Zabirova argues that the Kazakhstani gender order represents a stable hybrid in which expansion of women’s education and labor market participation coexists with continued legitimation of men’s symbolic authority within the family. Hierarchy is not reproduced through open coercion but through an ethical vocabulary of duty, care, responsibility, virtue and family harmony. Women’s work, once framed as civic obligation in the Soviet era supported by nurseries and social services, is now justified as contribution to household well-being and cultural continuity, while men’s primacy is reframed as protective responsibility. The compromise absorbs modernization rather than resisting it, embedding women’s advancement within expectations that their public activity not unsettle men’s symbolic role as providers. Regional differences are pronounced, with odds of traditionalism two to three times higher in southern and western Kazakhstan than in northern and metropolitan areas, reflecting varied combinations of Islamic moral frames, Soviet employment legacy and contemporary official discourse on family values and spiritual revival.

Conclusions indicate that individuals are simultaneously traditional and modern, endorsing women’s education and employment while preserving belief in men’s economic priority and women’s responsibility for domestic cohesion. Traditional attitudes are more common among men, older cohorts, rural residents, highly religious respondents and populations in the south and west, whereas university education, urban residence and higher income reduce traditionalism, education being the strongest equalizing factor. The author contends that modernization does not necessarily weaken patriarchy but may reshape it, making inequality less visible institutionally and more rooted in everyday moral expectations that provide a sense of stability amid rapid change. Comparative discussion situates Kazakhstan alongside Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia, Poland and Hungary as examples of domesticated modernity where family remains the carrier of moral order and where modernization, religious revival and cultural nationalism occur simultaneously. Policy implications highlight the need to shift traditional values discourse toward responsible fatherhood and partnership, invest in childcare, care infrastructure and flexible work, and promote reciprocity in care and recognition of unpaid labor to align national practice with goals of gender equality and inclusive economic growth. For Israel, the study offers comparative lessons on balancing modernization, tradition and cohesion in diverse societies, relevant to family policy, social resilience and sustainable development.

In July 2026, the BESA PSCR program analyzed political developments in Ukraine, Russia, Central Asia, and the South Caucasus.

Velvl Chernin shares his perspective concerning the identity of the Ukrainian Jewry against the backdrop of the recent political developments in Ukraine. He points to the conflict of historical narratives that surrounds the contemporary relations between Ukrainian Jews and the Ukrainian state, specifically pointing to the recent far-right rally at the Independence Square in Kyiv, official Jerusalem’s reactions to the manifestations of Ukrainian nationalism and commemorations of controversial historical figures, and the counter-reactions in the Ukrainian social media. Special attention is paid to the problem of the classification of the Holodomor as the genocide of the Ukrainian people, which Israel does not recognize as such and which is accompanied by the official, and rather tendentious, list of perpetrators including a large share of people of Jewish and Latvian ethnic origin. Chernin underlines that the contemporary Ukrainian Jewish community is rather small and not represented by a universally recognized and influential secular organization; also, Israel is not listed among the countries whose citizenship Ukrainian nationals may legally hold alongside the Ukrainian one, and the linguistic aspect is still able to create tensions within the community, since most informal interactions within the post-Soviet Jewry continue to be held in Russian. The author concludes that it is not certain that, “when confronted with a clash of narratives, they [Ukrainian Jews] sincerely choose the Ukrainian national narrative over the Jewish one.”

Vladimir Ze’ev Khanin sheds light on the potential implications of Foreign Minister Saar’s initiative for a resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide, which was unanimously approved by the government in June 2026 and is waiting for the parliamentary vote. Numerous previous attempts to officially discuss this issue have failed, since an average Israeli is still not willing to equate other tragedies with the Holocaust, and because of the complex relationship with Turkey – the genocide discussions resurfaced whenever Turkish-Israeli relations were reaching a low level. The effectiveness of the recent resolution as a diplomatic move remains questionable, first of all because of the strategic relations Jerusalem has with Baku, where the issue of Armenian genocide recognition is still received painfully. Khanin contends that the Israeli government’s demarche may indeed damage this strategic partnership. Importantly, Azerbaijani Jewish communities have sent letters to the Knesset asking that the recognition resolution not be adopted in a parliamentary vote, and even the Armenian prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, has reacted rather indifferently, stating that the Armenian authorities “are not obliged to comment” on this move. Numerous commentators also warn that “advancing the Israeli foreign minister’s bill will strengthen Erdoğan’s standing among Islamist circles in Turkey, worsen the attitude of many Azerbaijanis toward Israel, and is unlikely to improve relations between Jerusalem and Yerevan.”

Gershon Kogan analyzes the same issue from a different but equally important perspective. He contends that in contemporary Iran, where the Armenian minority is among the oldest minority groups, legally recognized, and enjoying its own cultural institutions and two reserved seats in the parliament, the memory of the genocide is tolerated and acknowledged, but without any formal recognition. While Tehran actively denies the Holocaust, the Armenian grief is surrounded by “muted empathy” – not least because the IRI would not like to disrupt its functional relationship with Turkey. The official protest note from the Azerbaijani MFA, demanding reconsideration of the Israeli government’s decision, can be attributed to the pan-Turkic solidarity and the inseparability of any Armenian claims from the conflict in Karabakh. However, this position does not affect the ethnic Azerbaijanis historically living in Iran and deeply integrated into the Iranian society: for them, Armenians are not enemies but old neighbors.

Boris Ginzburg presents his practical analysis of the Azerbaijani-led mediation efforts between Israel and Turkey. For Azerbaijan, both are among the most important allies, but since October 7, 2023, Ankara has significantly hardened its rhetoric against the Jewish state. Baku has mostly provided for “ad hoc measures to de-escalate tensions between Jerusalem and Ankara, aiming to prevent them from spilling over into an open military conflict.” Notably, the talks largely take place directly through the presidential offices and the Prime Minister’s office (in Israel's case), demonstrating the significance the three parties attach to the current tensions between Ankara and Jerusalem, but, as it was throughout 2025, mostly do not involve any direct meetings. Ginzburg recommends that the Jewish state, at the same time, demonstrate its readiness to de-escalate the tensions and keep undertaking precautionary measures towards Turkey, with the latter including keeping the new Syrian regime, closely aligned with Ankara, out of Lebanon, and strengthening the “Hellenic Alliance” between Israel, Greece, and Cyprus (whose northern part has been occupied by Turkey since 1974). He further stresses the need to differentiate between Turkish domestic and international rhetoric and to involve national foreign ministries in the “crisis management,” since otherwise, an important opportunity to fortify the trust base between the two countries may be missed. Ginzburg additionally recommends including Germany as an additional pillar of support for Israeli-Turkish mediation, as an important ally of Israel and a home to the largest Turkish diaspora in the world. In doing so, Germany might strengthen its role as a peace facilitator, Azerbaijan may deepen its ties with the biggest economy in Europe, and Israel may solidify its ally’s position on the international stage.

Gershon Kogan sheds light on the context within which, in November 2025, the Turkish Ministry of Education replaced the term “Central Asia” (perceived as a Soviet-era geographic category) with “Turkestan” in the Turkish national history curriculum, calling this “correcting a historical injustice” that divided the Turkic world. This was done in the framework of the “Turkey’s Century” education model that has been realized under the patronage of Erdoğan since 2024. The term “Turkestan,” historically associated with the Russian Empire’s legacy, was redeployed with a pan-Turkic ideological charge, effectively “writing over a Persian palimpsest”. In the post-Soviet period, Iran had three instruments of cultural influence in Central Asia, namely, institutional (Saadi Foundation), diplomatic-ceremonial (Nowruz celebrations), and religious (Shia networks). Each of them has significantly degraded in recent years, leading to the “Persophonie” assuming a fragmented, defensive posture, which was accelerated by the 2026 war. Iranian cultural influence was now perceived through the lens of political Islam, with the “added weight of military defeat and internal repression”. Thus, Turkey chose to decisively engage in the cultural competition and cognitive warfare exactly when the instruments for Tehran’s response are degraded, and its regional reputation is damaged.

Alexander Shpunt provides a typological overview of the conflicts surrounding the status of indigenous small-numbered peoples (ISNP) in Russia. Based on the 2025-2026 empirics, he outlines the systemic conflict effects caused by the differentiated legal regime. These include: (1) normative uncertainty of compensatory mechanisms (when the very procedure for calculating losses to the traditional habitat, sometimes excluding key stakeholders from decision-making, is challenged); (2) unclear interpretation of liability for environmental damage; (3) recognition of territories of traditional nature use (especially if they might overlap with the existing production facilities); (4) criteria of belonging to the ISNP; (5) access to preferences associated with the status (with administrative barriers exacerbated by the contradictions between regional and federal approaches). Among the institutional root causes of these conflicts are (1) the multi-level nature of legal regulation; (2) a gap between declaratory norms and law enforcement practice; (3) the competition between industrial and traditional models of territorial development; (4) the bureaucratization of access to preferences. The situation is further aggravated by the clashes between special status and universal state obligations (such as military mobilization), and between national legislation and international commitments.

Last but not least, Alexander Shpunt has prepared his regular overview of several important academic publications that deal with post-Soviet political and economic development.

In the coming months, more analytic materials discussing the ever-changing political and ideological landscape in the post-Soviet space, are to be expected.

PSCRP-BESA Reports No 221 (July 28, 2026)

The key word in this issue of our monitoring, analyzing scientific publications and reports from June 2026, is «war». News reports have taught us that war is no longer a crisis, a brief storm between periods of peace, but the new norm. There is less and less research on war itself; more and more research on how war changes and transforms the everyday fabric of life. Israelis have known this for a long time, since the founding of our country. Now the rest of the world is feeling it along with us.

The article Political and social analysis of the impact of national identity and gender roles on national stability (in the context of Kazakhstan), authored by Nursulu Nurpeissova, Zhengisbek Tolen, Serikkhan Zhuzeyev, Makhpal Syzdykova, and Aigul Abdiramanova, represents a collaborative effort from Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, Turan University, and Korkyt Ata Kyzylorda University. Published  in Frontiers in Sociology in June 2026, this study offers a timely empirical investigation into the intertwined effects of national identity and gender roles on state stability in Kazakhstan. The central research question examines how the strengthening of national identity, alongside the conflict between traditional and modern gender roles, influences national stability in a post-Soviet context. The study’s scope is defined by a mixed-methods approach, integrating quantitative surveys with qualitative focus groups to capture both the statistical relationships and the nuanced social perceptions underlying them.

The theoretical framework of the research is grounded in the constructivist paradigm of nation-building, drawing on the foundational works of Anderson, Hobsbawm, and Gellner, while also engaging with the ethno-symbolic approach of Smith. The authors situate Kazakhstan within the broader discourse on civic versus ethnic nationalism, emphasizing that post-Soviet identity formation is shaped by state policies aimed at reviving historical memory and promoting inter-ethnic harmony. The study explicitly critiques the traditional dichotomy between civic and ethnic nationalism, aligning with scholars who argue that these forms are deeply interconnected in transitional societies. Methodologically, the research employs a sequential mixed-method design. The quantitative phase surveyed 284 respondents, predominantly urban youth, using a structured questionnaire with scales measuring national identity, attitudes toward gender equality, national stability, and a combined construct of «uniqueness and gender integration». Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation, multiple linear regression, and factor analysis. The qualitative phase consisted of three focus group interviews with participants from diverse social backgrounds, which served to contextualize and explain the statistical findings. This methodological integration allows the authors to move beyond mere correlation and explore the latent social mechanisms at play.

The principal findings of the study reveal a complex and non-linear relationship between the variables. The strongest predictor of national stability was the variable «uniqueness and gender integration». which demonstrated a significant positive effect. National identity itself also exhibited a positive and statistically significant influence on stability. However, the variable measuring attitudes toward gender roles in isolation did not show a direct statistically significant effect. The Pearson correlation analysis confirmed this pattern, indicating no significant direct relationship between gender role attitudes and national stability. Qualitative data from focus groups provide a compelling explanation for this phenomenon. Participants expressed that gender equality, when perceived as a foreign or imposed discourse, is seen as separate from national stability, which is more closely tied to national unity and traditional values. There is a societal rejection of pure egalitarian modernization as a guarantee of state security, coupled with a latent resistance to Western gender discourses that are isolated from the national context. The factor analysis further supports this interpretation, demonstrating that national identity and gender integration form a single latent construct, while gender roles alone constitute a separate dimension. The authors interpret these findings as evidence that political stability in Kazakhstan is not achieved through the simple imposition of gender equality, but rather through its organic integration as a natural part of the national historical code.

The scholarly contribution of this publication lies in its empirical bridge between two often disparate fields: the study of national identity and the analysis of gender roles. The research addresses a significant gap in the literature by demonstrating that the intersection of these factors, rather than their isolated effects, is decisive for state stability in transitional societies. The article advances the theoretical discourse by challenging both conservative neo-traditionalism and uncontextualized Western modernization, proposing that a hybrid model of social cohesion is more effective. The study’s novelty is underscored by its empirical evidence that the integration of gender equality into the national narrative serves as a more powerful predictor of stability than national identity alone. For an Israeli academic readership interested in post-Soviet affairs, this study offers valuable insights into the complexities of nation-building in a multi-ethnic, transitional state. It highlights the delicate balance that post-Soviet regimes must strike between preserving cultural heritage and adapting to global egalitarian norms, a challenge that resonates with broader studies of nationalism, identity politics, and state legitimacy. The findings are particularly relevant for scholars examining the role of ideology, the politics of memory, and the social dimensions of security in the post-Soviet space. The study’s emphasis on a communication paradigm that integrates gender equality into the national narrative provides a concrete framework for understanding how ideological policies can be crafted to enhance social wellbeing and national security without provoking societal polarization.

We presented the policy paper “Between Russia and Europe, between War and Peace? What is at Stake in Armenia’s Upcoming Election?” by Mikayel Zolyan, published by the French Institute of International Relations on June 5, 2026. Zolyan, a former member of the Armenian Parliament, offers a detailed examination of the pivotal parliamentary elections scheduled for June 7, 2026, framing them not as a routine political event but as a critical referendum on the foreign and security policy trajectory set by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. The study’s core focus is the contest between the incumbent government’s strategy of diversifying Armenia’s foreign policy away from Russia and a pro-Russian opposition seeking to restore the traditional alliance with Moscow. The primary research question explores which orientation will prevail and what the implications are for the fragile peace in the South Caucasus and Armenia’s internal political development.

The author adopts a political analysis framework, grounding his assessment in an interpretation of Armenia’s recent geopolitical shifts, domestic political dynamics, and public opinion trends. The analytical approach is largely descriptive and predictive, combining a review of the key contenders, their platforms, and the external pressures shaping the electoral environment. Zolyan’s conceptual assumptions rest on the idea that Armenia is at a crossroads, with its foreign policy no longer being a settled matter of Russian allegiance but a subject of intense national debate. The methodology is implicit, drawing on available opinion polls, political observations, and an insider’s understanding of the political landscape to project plausible post-election scenarios. The central argument posits that the election results will be decisive for the future of Pashinyan’s «peace agenda» with Azerbaijan and Turkey, which is contingent upon his policy of «diversification» and reducing dependence on Moscow.

The paper’s principal findings detail a highly polarized electorate and a fragile lead for Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party, which is currently polling at around 32 percent. The analysis underscores the three main pro-Russian opposition forces: Samvel Karapetyan’s «Strong Armenia». Robert Kocharyan’s «Armenia alliance». and Gagik Tsarukyan’s «Prosperous Armenia». Karapetyan, a Russian-Armenian billionaire with Kremlin support, emerges as the primary challenger. The empirical evidence Zolyan presents includes poll results, the history of Moscow’s passivity during crises for Armenia, and the specific elements of Pashinyan’s policy platform, such as the recognition of Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity and the downplaying of the Genocide recognition issue in foreign policy. He notes that this pragmatic approach, while fueling economic growth, has also provoked a strong emotional backlash from those who see it as a betrayal of national identity. The author concludes that the most likely outcome is another term for Pashinyan, which would see a continuation of his delicate balancing act—moving closer to Europe and the United States while attempting to avoid a complete rupture with Russia. A victory for the pro-Russian opposition, though deemed unlikely, is presented as a scenario that could undermine the Washington Accords and the broader peace process, potentially leading to a return to conflict with Azerbaijan.

The paper’s originality is evident in its detailed portrayal of the actors involved, particularly the role of Kremlin-linked businessmen in opposition politics, and its assessment of the fragile state of Armenia’s democratic institutions. For an Israeli academic audience, this publication is significant for several reasons. It provides a case study in the complex navigation of regional conflicts by small states caught between rival powers, a theme with clear parallels to Israel’s own strategic environment. The analysis of how memory politics and identity shape foreign policy choices is relevant to understanding nationalist movements and irredentist claims in the post-Soviet space. Furthermore, the paper’s focus on the stability of the South Caucasus, a region of strategic importance, offers insights into broader Eurasian security dynamics and the potential for external interference to alter the trajectory of regional peace, which is of interest to scholars of security studies and international relations.

Zhanat Zakiyeva (National Academy of Sciences of Kazakhstan in Almaty), explores the dynamics of female participation in academic and policy-oriented research in her article “The role of women of central asia in political science: the case of Kazakhstan”, published  in the International Journal of Research in Education Humanities and Commerce, Volume 07, Issue 03, May-June 2026. The study centers on the “female presence” in political science within research institutes and think tanks across Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, comparing the late Soviet period from 1980 to 1992 with the era of independence. Zakiyeva addresses the origins and consequences of the third wave of feminization in Soviet science, persistent gender asymmetry especially in senior positions, and the barriers and prospects for advancing women researchers in shaping regional scientific and policy discourses.

The author adopts a mixed qualitative and quantitative methodology grounded in comparative analysis of the five Central Asian states, supplemented by content analysis of official documents, government publications, and media materials, alongside case studies of women’s engagement on international platforms such as the UN and UNESCO. This framework draws on legal documents, national and international statistics including UN Women, OSCE, and ADB reports, academic scholarship, interviews, and public speeches, combining historical, systemic, institutional, statistical, and analytical approaches without relying on new primary fieldwork.

Zakiyeva argues that Soviet policies enabled substantial female involvement in science, with women reaching parity or surpassing men in overall researcher numbers by the 1980s, particularly in humanities, social sciences, biology, and medicine, though political science, security, and economics remained male-dominated. Post-independence, patriarchal attitudes, institutional barriers, family responsibilities, and reduced scientific funding led to sharp declines in women’s leadership roles across the region, with women occupying only 10 to 20 percent of senior positions by 2025. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan show relatively higher representation—54 percent and 52 percent of scientists respectively, with targeted gender strategies—while Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan lag significantly, with women at 31 percent or lower in scientific workforces and minimal leadership presence. The text emphasizes that women researchers contribute soft power potential as mediators and experts in areas like sustainable development and water diplomacy, yet remain underrepresented as authors, panelists, and decision-makers in political science due to stereotypes, limited mentoring, and professional networks. Positive trends include gradual increases in educational attainment and state initiatives in Kazakhstan such as Bolashak and Nazarbayev University programs, alongside symbolic appointments like a woman heading the National Academy of Sciences. The study concludes that while gender empowering shows advancement, cultural and structural obstacles persist, recommending national strategies for STEM and political science education, expanded international cooperation, monitoring mechanisms, transparent recruitment, and integration of gender lenses into policy to foster inclusive scientific communities.

This publication contributes to regional scholarship by offering a comparative overview of women in Central Asian political science that highlights both Soviet legacies and post-Soviet divergences, filling noted gaps in empirical focus on this specific sphere and aligning with broader UN Sustainable Development Goals on gender equality. For Israeli scholars examining post-Soviet political development, ethnicity, nationalism, and international relations in Central Asia, the analysis illuminates institutional evolutions in think tanks and expert communities that influence foreign policy formation, regional cooperation, and responses to geopolitical pressures, providing a gender-informed lens on human capital and soft power dynamics in neighboring post-Soviet states.

The article “The Concept and Legal Framework of Local Public Administration Powers in the Republic of Moldova: Foundations and Practical Challenges,”  published in Public Policies.bg, Volume 17, Number 3 (June 2026), is authored by Sergey Dimitrioglo, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Public Administration at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski.” The study examines the legal and conceptual foundations of local public administration powers in the Republic of Moldova and situates this issue within the broader context of post-Soviet democratic transformation, decentralization, and European integration. The author seeks to clarify how local government competences have been defined, institutionalized, and implemented since the adoption of the Moldovan Constitution of 1994, while also identifying structural weaknesses that continue to affect the functioning of local self-government.

The article is grounded in doctrinal legal analysis supplemented by limited comparative analysis. Its primary sources include constitutional provisions, legislation regulating local public administration and administrative decentralization, legal acts concerning the Autonomous Territorial Unit of Gagauzia, and relevant international norms, especially the European Charter of Local Self-Government. Rather than focusing on empirical outcomes, the study concentrates on the conceptual content and normative architecture of local authority powers. Comparative references to Romania, Georgia, and Ukraine are employed to place the Moldovan experience within a wider regional framework of post-communist administrative reform.

A central argument of the article is that Moldova possesses a formally developed legal framework for local autonomy that broadly reflects European standards, yet significant tensions persist between constitutional guarantees and practical implementation. The author traces the evolution of the concept of local public administration and demonstrates that Moldovan law combines a commitment to local autonomy with a system in which competences remain heavily dependent on statutory regulation. Particular attention is devoted to the distinction between competences and powers. Competence is defined as the overall sphere of authority assigned to a public body, whereas powers constitute the specific rights and duties through which that authority is exercised. According to the author, inconsistent use of these concepts in legislation has contributed to interpretive uncertainty and administrative difficulties.

The study analyzes the two-tier structure of local governance established by the key decentralization laws adopted in 2006. First-level authorities are entrusted with functions relating to local property, taxation, infrastructure, social services, environmental management, and local regulation, while second-level authorities perform coordinating and strategic functions. The author emphasizes the legal distinction between own, shared, and delegated competences, arguing that the absence of sufficiently precise criteria for delimiting these categories remains one of the principal weaknesses of the existing framework. This ambiguity, in the author’s assessment, often enables central authorities to retain substantial influence over areas formally assigned to local government.

A major theme of the article is the gap between normative commitments and institutional realities. Although Moldovan legislation requires delegated responsibilities to be accompanied by adequate financial resources, the author argues that this principle has not been consistently implemented. Fiscal dependence on transfers from the central government limits the effective exercise of local autonomy and weakens the practical significance of formally assigned competences. The discussion of subsidiarity further reinforces this point. While subsidiarity is embedded in both European and national policy frameworks, the transfer of meaningful decision-making authority has remained incomplete, partly because of concerns regarding the limited administrative and financial capacities of many local units.

The article devotes special attention to Gagauzia, whose autonomous status introduces an additional layer of complexity into Moldova’s territorial organization. The coexistence of a general local government regime and a special autonomy regime creates legal ambiguities concerning competence allocation and institutional authority. The author argues that Gagauzia’s broader self-governing powers, distinct budgetary arrangements, and legislative prerogatives require a separate analytical framework and continue to generate unresolved jurisdictional questions.

The study’s contribution lies in its systematic synthesis of the conceptual and legal dimensions of local public administration powers in Moldova. By connecting constitutional principles, legislative provisions, and broader debates on decentralization, it highlights the relationship between legal design and democratic governance. The article concludes that meaningful local autonomy requires not only clearer legislation but also stronger fiscal foundations, improved administrative capacity, and greater commitment to the principle of subsidiarity. For Israeli scholars interested in post-Soviet political development, governance reform, regional autonomy, and state-building, the study offers a detailed examination of how decentralization and territorial diversity shape institutional development in a transitional state.

“Conscription, Scaling-up and Regional Defence: Perspectives from the Baltic Sea States”  is a policy-oriented report prepared by Fredrik Weibull of the Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki and Karl Ydén of the Swedish Armed Forces for the Geopolitics and Security Studies Center (GSSC) in Vilnius and published on 19 May 2026. The study examines how Lithuania, Sweden, Finland, Poland, and Germany are responding to changing security conditions in Europe through reforms of military manpower systems, with particular attention to compulsory military service and the challenge of expanding defence capabilities.

The report is driven by a central research question: which models of conscript training can be adapted by European states seeking to increase the volume of trained personnel. Rather than offering a comprehensive survey of regional security, the authors focus on regional defence understood as the practical organization and management of military capabilities. Their approach combines historical analysis, comparative policy examination, and institutional assessment. Particular emphasis is placed on Sweden and Finland, whose experiences provide the richest empirical material and contrasting examples of military recruitment systems. The study employs a selective comparative framework that investigates military service policies, recruitment structures, training systems, reserve forces, demographic constraints, and political-cultural factors shaping defence reforms.

A significant part of the report situates contemporary debates within a broader historical and conceptual context. The authors trace the evolution of conscription from early modern European state-building and the “reason of state” tradition through the rise and decline of mass armies in the twentieth century. They argue that the post-Cold War predominance of all-volunteer forces reflected changing geopolitical conditions, technological developments, and market-oriented approaches to military recruitment. In their interpretation, recent developments in Europe have revived interest in conscription and national service as states reconsider the relationship between sovereignty, territorial defence, and military preparedness.

The country studies reveal distinct trajectories. Lithuania reintroduced conscription in 2015 and is gradually expanding a system that combines volunteers with lottery-based selection. Sweden reinstated conscription in 2017 after a period of reliance on an all-volunteer force but continues to face limitations related to infrastructure, equipment, and training capacity. Finland stands out as the most consistent example of a large-scale mobilization model, having maintained conscription throughout the post-Cold War period while continuously adapting training methods and reserve structures. Poland has pursued rapid military expansion through voluntary service and reserve-building rather than renewed conscription. Germany, meanwhile, is engaged in an ongoing debate over the future of military service as it confronts recruitment difficulties and broader questions regarding defence policy.

The principal conclusion of the report is that the Finnish system offers the most useful model for states seeking to expand military manpower efficiently. The authors highlight Finland’s ability to process large cohorts, maintain extensive reserves, and organize overlapping training cycles that maximize personnel throughput. Building on this example, they recommend shorter and more focused training periods, greater use of reservists and non-regular personnel as instructors, increased training intensity, and closer cooperation between military institutions and technological education. The report also examines gender-neutral conscription, demographic decline, casualty sensitivity, technological specialization, and the future of mass armies, arguing that contemporary defence systems increasingly require highly skilled personnel rather than merely large numbers of recruits.

The study’s contribution lies in linking historical debates about conscription with current policy challenges in the Baltic Sea region. By comparing diverse national experiences and focusing on practical mechanisms of military expansion, it provides a framework for understanding how states can adapt manpower systems under conditions of strategic uncertainty. For an Israeli academic audience interested in security studies, military sociology, state capacity, and comparative defence policy, the report offers a detailed examination of how European states balance recruitment, training, reserves, and societal legitimacy while attempting to strengthen territorial defence in a changing regional environment.

PSCRP-BESA Reports No 221 (July 28, 2026)

The key word in this issue of our monitoring, analyzing scientific publications and reports from June 2026, is «war». News reports have taught us that war is no longer a crisis, a brief storm between periods of peace, but the new norm. There is less and less research on war itself; more and more research on how war changes and transforms the everyday fabric of life. Israelis have known this for a long time, since the founding of our country. Now the rest of the world is feeling it along with us.

The article Political and social analysis of the impact of national identity and gender roles on national stability (in the context of Kazakhstan), authored by Nursulu Nurpeissova, Zhengisbek Tolen, Serikkhan Zhuzeyev, Makhpal Syzdykova, and Aigul Abdiramanova, represents a collaborative effort from Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, Turan University, and Korkyt Ata Kyzylorda University. Published  in Frontiers in Sociology in June 2026, this study offers a timely empirical investigation into the intertwined effects of national identity and gender roles on state stability in Kazakhstan. The central research question examines how the strengthening of national identity, alongside the conflict between traditional and modern gender roles, influences national stability in a post-Soviet context. The study’s scope is defined by a mixed-methods approach, integrating quantitative surveys with qualitative focus groups to capture both the statistical relationships and the nuanced social perceptions underlying them.

The theoretical framework of the research is grounded in the constructivist paradigm of nation-building, drawing on the foundational works of Anderson, Hobsbawm, and Gellner, while also engaging with the ethno-symbolic approach of Smith. The authors situate Kazakhstan within the broader discourse on civic versus ethnic nationalism, emphasizing that post-Soviet identity formation is shaped by state policies aimed at reviving historical memory and promoting inter-ethnic harmony. The study explicitly critiques the traditional dichotomy between civic and ethnic nationalism, aligning with scholars who argue that these forms are deeply interconnected in transitional societies. Methodologically, the research employs a sequential mixed-method design. The quantitative phase surveyed 284 respondents, predominantly urban youth, using a structured questionnaire with scales measuring national identity, attitudes toward gender equality, national stability, and a combined construct of «uniqueness and gender integration». Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation, multiple linear regression, and factor analysis. The qualitative phase consisted of three focus group interviews with participants from diverse social backgrounds, which served to contextualize and explain the statistical findings. This methodological integration allows the authors to move beyond mere correlation and explore the latent social mechanisms at play.

The principal findings of the study reveal a complex and non-linear relationship between the variables. The strongest predictor of national stability was the variable «uniqueness and gender integration». which demonstrated a significant positive effect. National identity itself also exhibited a positive and statistically significant influence on stability. However, the variable measuring attitudes toward gender roles in isolation did not show a direct statistically significant effect. The Pearson correlation analysis confirmed this pattern, indicating no significant direct relationship between gender role attitudes and national stability. Qualitative data from focus groups provide a compelling explanation for this phenomenon. Participants expressed that gender equality, when perceived as a foreign or imposed discourse, is seen as separate from national stability, which is more closely tied to national unity and traditional values. There is a societal rejection of pure egalitarian modernization as a guarantee of state security, coupled with a latent resistance to Western gender discourses that are isolated from the national context. The factor analysis further supports this interpretation, demonstrating that national identity and gender integration form a single latent construct, while gender roles alone constitute a separate dimension. The authors interpret these findings as evidence that political stability in Kazakhstan is not achieved through the simple imposition of gender equality, but rather through its organic integration as a natural part of the national historical code.

The scholarly contribution of this publication lies in its empirical bridge between two often disparate fields: the study of national identity and the analysis of gender roles. The research addresses a significant gap in the literature by demonstrating that the intersection of these factors, rather than their isolated effects, is decisive for state stability in transitional societies. The article advances the theoretical discourse by challenging both conservative neo-traditionalism and uncontextualized Western modernization, proposing that a hybrid model of social cohesion is more effective. The study’s novelty is underscored by its empirical evidence that the integration of gender equality into the national narrative serves as a more powerful predictor of stability than national identity alone. For an Israeli academic readership interested in post-Soviet affairs, this study offers valuable insights into the complexities of nation-building in a multi-ethnic, transitional state. It highlights the delicate balance that post-Soviet regimes must strike between preserving cultural heritage and adapting to global egalitarian norms, a challenge that resonates with broader studies of nationalism, identity politics, and state legitimacy. The findings are particularly relevant for scholars examining the role of ideology, the politics of memory, and the social dimensions of security in the post-Soviet space. The study’s emphasis on a communication paradigm that integrates gender equality into the national narrative provides a concrete framework for understanding how ideological policies can be crafted to enhance social wellbeing and national security without provoking societal polarization.

We presented the policy paper “Between Russia and Europe, between War and Peace? What is at Stake in Armenia’s Upcoming Election?” by Mikayel Zolyan, published by the French Institute of International Relations on June 5, 2026. Zolyan, a former member of the Armenian Parliament, offers a detailed examination of the pivotal parliamentary elections scheduled for June 7, 2026, framing them not as a routine political event but as a critical referendum on the foreign and security policy trajectory set by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. The study’s core focus is the contest between the incumbent government’s strategy of diversifying Armenia’s foreign policy away from Russia and a pro-Russian opposition seeking to restore the traditional alliance with Moscow. The primary research question explores which orientation will prevail and what the implications are for the fragile peace in the South Caucasus and Armenia’s internal political development.

The author adopts a political analysis framework, grounding his assessment in an interpretation of Armenia’s recent geopolitical shifts, domestic political dynamics, and public opinion trends. The analytical approach is largely descriptive and predictive, combining a review of the key contenders, their platforms, and the external pressures shaping the electoral environment. Zolyan’s conceptual assumptions rest on the idea that Armenia is at a crossroads, with its foreign policy no longer being a settled matter of Russian allegiance but a subject of intense national debate. The methodology is implicit, drawing on available opinion polls, political observations, and an insider’s understanding of the political landscape to project plausible post-election scenarios. The central argument posits that the election results will be decisive for the future of Pashinyan’s «peace agenda» with Azerbaijan and Turkey, which is contingent upon his policy of «diversification» and reducing dependence on Moscow.

The paper’s principal findings detail a highly polarized electorate and a fragile lead for Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party, which is currently polling at around 32 percent. The analysis underscores the three main pro-Russian opposition forces: Samvel Karapetyan’s «Strong Armenia». Robert Kocharyan’s «Armenia alliance». and Gagik Tsarukyan’s «Prosperous Armenia». Karapetyan, a Russian-Armenian billionaire with Kremlin support, emerges as the primary challenger. The empirical evidence Zolyan presents includes poll results, the history of Moscow’s passivity during crises for Armenia, and the specific elements of Pashinyan’s policy platform, such as the recognition of Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity and the downplaying of the Genocide recognition issue in foreign policy. He notes that this pragmatic approach, while fueling economic growth, has also provoked a strong emotional backlash from those who see it as a betrayal of national identity. The author concludes that the most likely outcome is another term for Pashinyan, which would see a continuation of his delicate balancing act—moving closer to Europe and the United States while attempting to avoid a complete rupture with Russia. A victory for the pro-Russian opposition, though deemed unlikely, is presented as a scenario that could undermine the Washington Accords and the broader peace process, potentially leading to a return to conflict with Azerbaijan.

The paper’s originality is evident in its detailed portrayal of the actors involved, particularly the role of Kremlin-linked businessmen in opposition politics, and its assessment of the fragile state of Armenia’s democratic institutions. For an Israeli academic audience, this publication is significant for several reasons. It provides a case study in the complex navigation of regional conflicts by small states caught between rival powers, a theme with clear parallels to Israel’s own strategic environment. The analysis of how memory politics and identity shape foreign policy choices is relevant to understanding nationalist movements and irredentist claims in the post-Soviet space. Furthermore, the paper’s focus on the stability of the South Caucasus, a region of strategic importance, offers insights into broader Eurasian security dynamics and the potential for external interference to alter the trajectory of regional peace, which is of interest to scholars of security studies and international relations.

Zhanat Zakiyeva (National Academy of Sciences of Kazakhstan in Almaty), explores the dynamics of female participation in academic and policy-oriented research in her article “The role of women of central asia in political science: the case of Kazakhstan”, published  in the International Journal of Research in Education Humanities and Commerce, Volume 07, Issue 03, May-June 2026. The study centers on the “female presence” in political science within research institutes and think tanks across Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, comparing the late Soviet period from 1980 to 1992 with the era of independence. Zakiyeva addresses the origins and consequences of the third wave of feminization in Soviet science, persistent gender asymmetry especially in senior positions, and the barriers and prospects for advancing women researchers in shaping regional scientific and policy discourses.

The author adopts a mixed qualitative and quantitative methodology grounded in comparative analysis of the five Central Asian states, supplemented by content analysis of official documents, government publications, and media materials, alongside case studies of women’s engagement on international platforms such as the UN and UNESCO. This framework draws on legal documents, national and international statistics including UN Women, OSCE, and ADB reports, academic scholarship, interviews, and public speeches, combining historical, systemic, institutional, statistical, and analytical approaches without relying on new primary fieldwork.

Zakiyeva argues that Soviet policies enabled substantial female involvement in science, with women reaching parity or surpassing men in overall researcher numbers by the 1980s, particularly in humanities, social sciences, biology, and medicine, though political science, security, and economics remained male-dominated. Post-independence, patriarchal attitudes, institutional barriers, family responsibilities, and reduced scientific funding led to sharp declines in women’s leadership roles across the region, with women occupying only 10 to 20 percent of senior positions by 2025. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan show relatively higher representation—54 percent and 52 percent of scientists respectively, with targeted gender strategies—while Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan lag significantly, with women at 31 percent or lower in scientific workforces and minimal leadership presence. The text emphasizes that women researchers contribute soft power potential as mediators and experts in areas like sustainable development and water diplomacy, yet remain underrepresented as authors, panelists, and decision-makers in political science due to stereotypes, limited mentoring, and professional networks. Positive trends include gradual increases in educational attainment and state initiatives in Kazakhstan such as Bolashak and Nazarbayev University programs, alongside symbolic appointments like a woman heading the National Academy of Sciences. The study concludes that while gender empowering shows advancement, cultural and structural obstacles persist, recommending national strategies for STEM and political science education, expanded international cooperation, monitoring mechanisms, transparent recruitment, and integration of gender lenses into policy to foster inclusive scientific communities.

This publication contributes to regional scholarship by offering a comparative overview of women in Central Asian political science that highlights both Soviet legacies and post-Soviet divergences, filling noted gaps in empirical focus on this specific sphere and aligning with broader UN Sustainable Development Goals on gender equality. For Israeli scholars examining post-Soviet political development, ethnicity, nationalism, and international relations in Central Asia, the analysis illuminates institutional evolutions in think tanks and expert communities that influence foreign policy formation, regional cooperation, and responses to geopolitical pressures, providing a gender-informed lens on human capital and soft power dynamics in neighboring post-Soviet states.

The article “The Concept and Legal Framework of Local Public Administration Powers in the Republic of Moldova: Foundations and Practical Challenges,”  published in Public Policies.bg, Volume 17, Number 3 (June 2026), is authored by Sergey Dimitrioglo, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Public Administration at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski.” The study examines the legal and conceptual foundations of local public administration powers in the Republic of Moldova and situates this issue within the broader context of post-Soviet democratic transformation, decentralization, and European integration. The author seeks to clarify how local government competences have been defined, institutionalized, and implemented since the adoption of the Moldovan Constitution of 1994, while also identifying structural weaknesses that continue to affect the functioning of local self-government.

The article is grounded in doctrinal legal analysis supplemented by limited comparative analysis. Its primary sources include constitutional provisions, legislation regulating local public administration and administrative decentralization, legal acts concerning the Autonomous Territorial Unit of Gagauzia, and relevant international norms, especially the European Charter of Local Self-Government. Rather than focusing on empirical outcomes, the study concentrates on the conceptual content and normative architecture of local authority powers. Comparative references to Romania, Georgia, and Ukraine are employed to place the Moldovan experience within a wider regional framework of post-communist administrative reform.

A central argument of the article is that Moldova possesses a formally developed legal framework for local autonomy that broadly reflects European standards, yet significant tensions persist between constitutional guarantees and practical implementation. The author traces the evolution of the concept of local public administration and demonstrates that Moldovan law combines a commitment to local autonomy with a system in which competences remain heavily dependent on statutory regulation. Particular attention is devoted to the distinction between competences and powers. Competence is defined as the overall sphere of authority assigned to a public body, whereas powers constitute the specific rights and duties through which that authority is exercised. According to the author, inconsistent use of these concepts in legislation has contributed to interpretive uncertainty and administrative difficulties.

The study analyzes the two-tier structure of local governance established by the key decentralization laws adopted in 2006. First-level authorities are entrusted with functions relating to local property, taxation, infrastructure, social services, environmental management, and local regulation, while second-level authorities perform coordinating and strategic functions. The author emphasizes the legal distinction between own, shared, and delegated competences, arguing that the absence of sufficiently precise criteria for delimiting these categories remains one of the principal weaknesses of the existing framework. This ambiguity, in the author’s assessment, often enables central authorities to retain substantial influence over areas formally assigned to local government.

A major theme of the article is the gap between normative commitments and institutional realities. Although Moldovan legislation requires delegated responsibilities to be accompanied by adequate financial resources, the author argues that this principle has not been consistently implemented. Fiscal dependence on transfers from the central government limits the effective exercise of local autonomy and weakens the practical significance of formally assigned competences. The discussion of subsidiarity further reinforces this point. While subsidiarity is embedded in both European and national policy frameworks, the transfer of meaningful decision-making authority has remained incomplete, partly because of concerns regarding the limited administrative and financial capacities of many local units.

The article devotes special attention to Gagauzia, whose autonomous status introduces an additional layer of complexity into Moldova’s territorial organization. The coexistence of a general local government regime and a special autonomy regime creates legal ambiguities concerning competence allocation and institutional authority. The author argues that Gagauzia’s broader self-governing powers, distinct budgetary arrangements, and legislative prerogatives require a separate analytical framework and continue to generate unresolved jurisdictional questions.

The study’s contribution lies in its systematic synthesis of the conceptual and legal dimensions of local public administration powers in Moldova. By connecting constitutional principles, legislative provisions, and broader debates on decentralization, it highlights the relationship between legal design and democratic governance. The article concludes that meaningful local autonomy requires not only clearer legislation but also stronger fiscal foundations, improved administrative capacity, and greater commitment to the principle of subsidiarity. For Israeli scholars interested in post-Soviet political development, governance reform, regional autonomy, and state-building, the study offers a detailed examination of how decentralization and territorial diversity shape institutional development in a transitional state.

“Conscription, Scaling-up and Regional Defence: Perspectives from the Baltic Sea States”  is a policy-oriented report prepared by Fredrik Weibull of the Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki and Karl Ydén of the Swedish Armed Forces for the Geopolitics and Security Studies Center (GSSC) in Vilnius and published on 19 May 2026. The study examines how Lithuania, Sweden, Finland, Poland, and Germany are responding to changing security conditions in Europe through reforms of military manpower systems, with particular attention to compulsory military service and the challenge of expanding defence capabilities.

The report is driven by a central research question: which models of conscript training can be adapted by European states seeking to increase the volume of trained personnel. Rather than offering a comprehensive survey of regional security, the authors focus on regional defence understood as the practical organization and management of military capabilities. Their approach combines historical analysis, comparative policy examination, and institutional assessment. Particular emphasis is placed on Sweden and Finland, whose experiences provide the richest empirical material and contrasting examples of military recruitment systems. The study employs a selective comparative framework that investigates military service policies, recruitment structures, training systems, reserve forces, demographic constraints, and political-cultural factors shaping defence reforms.

A significant part of the report situates contemporary debates within a broader historical and conceptual context. The authors trace the evolution of conscription from early modern European state-building and the “reason of state” tradition through the rise and decline of mass armies in the twentieth century. They argue that the post-Cold War predominance of all-volunteer forces reflected changing geopolitical conditions, technological developments, and market-oriented approaches to military recruitment. In their interpretation, recent developments in Europe have revived interest in conscription and national service as states reconsider the relationship between sovereignty, territorial defence, and military preparedness.

The country studies reveal distinct trajectories. Lithuania reintroduced conscription in 2015 and is gradually expanding a system that combines volunteers with lottery-based selection. Sweden reinstated conscription in 2017 after a period of reliance on an all-volunteer force but continues to face limitations related to infrastructure, equipment, and training capacity. Finland stands out as the most consistent example of a large-scale mobilization model, having maintained conscription throughout the post-Cold War period while continuously adapting training methods and reserve structures. Poland has pursued rapid military expansion through voluntary service and reserve-building rather than renewed conscription. Germany, meanwhile, is engaged in an ongoing debate over the future of military service as it confronts recruitment difficulties and broader questions regarding defence policy.

The principal conclusion of the report is that the Finnish system offers the most useful model for states seeking to expand military manpower efficiently. The authors highlight Finland’s ability to process large cohorts, maintain extensive reserves, and organize overlapping training cycles that maximize personnel throughput. Building on this example, they recommend shorter and more focused training periods, greater use of reservists and non-regular personnel as instructors, increased training intensity, and closer cooperation between military institutions and technological education. The report also examines gender-neutral conscription, demographic decline, casualty sensitivity, technological specialization, and the future of mass armies, arguing that contemporary defence systems increasingly require highly skilled personnel rather than merely large numbers of recruits.

The study’s contribution lies in linking historical debates about conscription with current policy challenges in the Baltic Sea region. By comparing diverse national experiences and focusing on practical mechanisms of military expansion, it provides a framework for understanding how states can adapt manpower systems under conditions of strategic uncertainty. For an Israeli academic audience interested in security studies, military sociology, state capacity, and comparative defence policy, the report offers a detailed examination of how European states balance recruitment, training, reserves, and societal legitimacy while attempting to strengthen territorial defence in a changing regional environment.

In June 2026, the BESA PSCRP authors have analyzed a wide range of regional issues, including the recent developments in Eastern Europe, South Caucasus, and Central Asia.

In his thought-provoking opinion piece, Kiryl Kascian draws parallels between the contemporary anti-colonial critique and narratives inherent in Russian official propaganda. While “Russian official discourse has consistently promoted the claim that smaller states pursuing policies critical towards Russia, (…) do not possess fully authentic sovereignty,” the post-colonial discourse of today tends to treat smaller states as genuinely sovereign “mainly when they position themselves against the West”; otherwise, “their political agency suddenly becomes questionable.” The example of the Albanian leadership that supported Israel and was criticized for “ceding its sovereignty to Jerusalem” may be extrapolated to broader geopolitical rhetoric.

Velvl Chernin shares his observations on the Israeli perspective towards the future of the “decolonization movements of the peoples of the Russian Federation.” He finds it useful to understand what could potentially be at stake, even though the likelihood of these plans’ realization is very low at this moment. Chernin points to the noticeable “predominance of national movements representing traditionally Muslim peoples” within the Free Nations League, an umbrella organization for separatist and regionalist movements claiming parts of the Russian Federation’s territory. In May 2026, the “Council of the Tatars of the World” joined the FNL, which was announced by Ruslan Aysin, a prominent Tatar activist who has lived in Turkey since 2022 and was designated by Russian authorities as a foreign agent. Aysin is known to be openly hostile towards Israel and Jews, being a prominent supporter of Islamist movements. Among other controversial figures in the FNL is the President of the “Assembly of the Peoples of the Caucasus” and former Deputy Prime Minister of Ichkeria, Ruslan Kutayev, who had publicly attacked Israel and openly supported Hamas.

Velvl Chernin futher observes several challenges that the Ukrainian state and society may face if/when the country has the opportunity to return to peaceful life, based on both expert knowledge and personal experiences. Firstly, with the presidential elections postponed indefinitely, Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s popularity is now affected by public fatigue, frustration, corruption scandals, and latent antisemitism. Secondly, relationships between different groups of Ukrainian citizens may become challenging: between those who served at the front and who remained in the rear (this issue is further aggravated by the public resentment toward the Territorial Recruitment Centers), those who remained in the country and refugee emigrants (some of which will eventually return and bring totally different experiences), and the attitude toward the population of the territories that have long been under Russian control.

Boris Ginzburg overviews strategic (re)considerations by Azerbaijan towards potential joining the Abraham Accords Declaration. He posits that Baku might have begun questioning the necessity of joining the AAD for the realization of Azerbaijan’s strategic goals in the region, considering that most of the motives behind the potential accession focus mainly on “improving Azerbaijan’s standing in Washington.” The public discourse in Azerbaijan is now less focused on the AAD, not least because relations with Washington have deepened even without the accession, and because of the fears of retaliatory measures by (now even less predictable) Iran. Ginzburg concludes that “Azerbaijan’s value to the Jewish state” will remain crucial even outside the AAD framework, especially in what concerns the relations with the new regime in Syria, as well as with Türkiye, Russia (to secure “at least a modest continuation of Russian military presence in post-Assad Syria”), and France.

Gershon Kogan analyzes the Tehran regime’s attempts to target the political imagination in post-Soviet societies. Across international platforms oriented toward Central Asian audiences, “Tehran is framed overwhelmingly as the aggrieved party,” and “internal Iranian dissent is systematically recast as externally sponsored provocation.” Central Asian states are effectively targeted because of transit and economic interdependence (generating “editorial self-restraint” when the “absence of critical coverage” is viewed as a signal) and Islamic networks and cultural proximity (which “produce a baseline interpretive disposition toward Iranian narratives”). Since the Iranian narrative reach in Central Asia cannot “operate through direct consumption of Persian- or Arabic-language state media,” it does so through indirect and uncoordinated media amplification (via Turkish-language outlets embedding Iranian framing within an Islamic solidarity narrative, and Russian-language aggregators and Telegram channels), which produce the “inoculation effect,” i.e., resistance to counter-narratives. Azerbaijan is a different narrative target and structurally inconvenient reference point, being framed as a platform for hostile operations against the IRI. Kogan also claims that “the analytical gap between Iran specialists and post-Soviet analysts is a structural vulnerability” that needs to be overcome.

Andrei Kazantsev-Vaisman shares his perspective on how the evolving role of the Middle Corridor as an indispensable land artery and its integration with the Indo-Israeli “Spice Route” can “forge a resilient, multilateral network of interchangeable nodes,” which he calls a “Eurasian arc of connectivity,” where “the interests of global actors no longer merely collide but have become functionally dependent on the stability of local states.” For regional actors, the priority remains the “maximization of cargo flows while maintaining the openness and de-politicization of the route,” and India is striving to secure stable access to Central Eurasia to establish a reliable bypass route that would function even in the event of regional destabilization. Kazakhstan may serve as the central gateway of the Middle Corridor and a “translator of interests,” capable of maintaining balance among various actors. Israel’s role may be one of the “intellectual integrator” of the MC and the “Spice Route,” providing AI-driven logistics, supply chain cybersecurity, and “smart customs,” which would transform Jerusalem into a “strategic crossroads for two of Eurasia’s largest logistical systems.”

Last but not least, Alexander Shpunt has prepared his regular overview of several important academic publications that address post-Soviet political and economic development.

In the upcoming months, the post-Soviet conflicts research program will continue to provide timely analysis of the ongoing events in the post-Soviet space.

PSCRP-BESA Reports No 213 (June 24, 2026)

Perhaps for the first time since our monitoring program began, we encountered a situation where two publications, both worthy of the quality of their research and scientific integrity, were not included in our review. This is because the authors chose the topic of these materials to add fuel to the fire of a specific conflict in the post-Soviet space. Scientists are also ordinary people. They suffer from the full range of aspects that conflicts bring, just like their neighbors: bakers, bus drivers, or musicians. And their desire to somehow help their side of the conflict through their work is also understandable.

We sympathize with them, but we cannot allow our work to worsen conflicts instead of mitigating them.

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Published by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) in May 2026, the “Regional Strategic Roadmap: Central Asia 2024–2030”  is an institutional strategy document designed to translate IWMI’s global Strategy 2024–2030 into a region-specific framework for Central Asia. Although not presented as a conventional academic study, the roadmap combines analytical assessment, policy review, stakeholder consultation, and organizational planning to identify priority areas for future intervention. The document reflects IWMI’s long-standing engagement in Central Asia since 2001 and is framed by a foreword from the organization’s Regional Representative for Central Asia, Dr. Barbara Janusz-Pawletta. Its central concern is the relationship between water security, climate change, regional cooperation, and sustainable development in one of the world’s most water-stressed regions.

The roadmap is built upon a research-for-development approach that treats scientific evidence, policy engagement, and practical implementation as mutually reinforcing processes. Methodologically, it relies on regional diagnostics, country-level policy analysis, expert consultations, stakeholder engagement, and a review of IWMI’s own activities and publications. The document explicitly emphasizes evidence-based prioritization and a theory of change according to which improved water security emerges when data, analysis, and scientific knowledge are translated into institutional reform, public policy, and operational action. A consultative co-design process involving IWMI researchers, regional experts, national stakeholders, and international partners serves as the foundation for the strategic framework.

The authors portray Central Asia as a region shaped by arid conditions, dependence on transboundary river systems, Soviet-era legacies of water-intensive development, and mounting climate pressures. Particular attention is devoted to glacier retreat, declining river flows, droughts, floods, deteriorating water quality, growing demand for water, and the continuing significance of the Aral Sea crisis. At the same time, the roadmap stresses the emergence of new opportunities arising from improved regional relations, expanding dialogue, digital technologies, and growing interest in climate-resilient solutions. A notable argument advanced throughout the document is that water should be understood not as a source of conflict but as a platform for cooperation, trust-building, and shared development.

The roadmap identifies five interconnected strategic priorities: climate change and water security; transboundary water cooperation; water productivity and sustainable agriculture; digitalization and data-driven water management; and ecosystems, WASH, and inclusive water services. These priorities are linked to concrete intervention pathways, expected outcomes, partnerships, and implementation timelines extending to 2030. The publication’s principal contribution lies in its synthesis of regional water challenges into an integrated strategic agenda that combines environmental, institutional, technological, and socio-economic dimensions.

For Israeli scholars interested in post-Soviet affairs, the document is particularly relevant because it illuminates how resource management, regional cooperation, climate adaptation, and governance interact in Central Asia, a region where transboundary water issues are closely connected to questions of stability, development, and interstate relations.

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Tianyu Fan of Yale University’s Department of Economics presents in this working paper, dated 20 May 2026, an ambitious attempt to integrate geopolitical relations into the study of long-run economic development. Entitled “Measuring Geopolitical Alignment and Economic Growth”, the study asks whether a country’s geopolitical alignment with major powers constitutes an independent determinant of economic growth and, if so, through which mechanisms such effects operate. The paper addresses a gap in the growth literature, which has traditionally emphasized domestic factors such as institutions, human capital, geography, and technology while paying comparatively limited attention to the external political environment.

The central contribution is the construction of a new event-based measure of bilateral geopolitical alignment. Using large language models with web-search capabilities, Fan compiles a dataset of 373,020 geopolitical events involving 193 UN member states and 24 major powers between 1960 and 2024. Events are classified through the CAMEO framework and assigned Goldstein scores reflecting degrees of cooperation or conflict. These bilateral relationships are then aggregated into a country-level geopolitical alignment index weighted by the global economic importance of major states. The author argues that this approach captures temporal and relational dynamics that are obscured by conventional indicators such as UN General Assembly voting similarity, sanctions, or alliance membership.

Methodologically, the study combines large-scale data construction with local projection techniques and country fixed-effects models. Identification relies on within-country variation over time, supplemented by robustness checks, placebo exercises, alternative specifications, component decompositions, and two instrumental-variable strategies. Fan consistently seeks to demonstrate that the observed relationship between geopolitical alignment and economic performance is not reducible to trade patterns, institutional quality, domestic instability, or other familiar explanations.

The principal finding is that improvements in geopolitical alignment generate substantial and persistent gains in GDP per capita. A one-standard-deviation permanent improvement in the index is associated with roughly a ten percent increase in GDP per capita over twenty-five years. The paper links these gains to enhanced domestic stability, investment, productivity growth, trade expansion, and human-capital accumulation. It further argues that diplomatic, economic, and security dimensions of international relations each contribute independently to growth outcomes. The analysis also suggests that democracy and geopolitical alignment function as complementary but distinct channels of development.

Beyond its empirical results, the paper contributes to emerging debates on geoeconomics and the measurement of international political relations. For readers interested in post-Soviet and broader Eurasian affairs, the study is particularly relevant because it examines long-term consequences of geopolitical realignments, international fragmentation, and changing relations among major powers. Its framework offers a systematic way to assess how shifts in the international environment may influence development trajectories, making it a useful contribution to discussions of security, international order, and economic transformation.

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Emzar Kakhidze, Professor at the Faculty of Humanities of Batumi State University, published “On the National Identity of Georgians” in the 2026 inaugural issue of ARU Journal of Art History Studies. The article addresses the historical formation of Georgian national and civilizational identity and seeks to explain the long-term cultural, political, and geopolitical factors that shaped Georgia’s development from antiquity to the present. Rather than employing a formal empirical research design, the study adopts a broad historical-civilizational approach, combining historical interpretation, geopolitical reflection, and a longue durée reading of Georgian statehood. The author explicitly proposes a review of key turning points in Georgian history as a means of understanding contemporary tensions and future prospects.

The central argument is that Georgian identity emerged through continuous interaction with several major civilizational spheres without becoming fully absorbed by any of them. According to Kakhidze, early Georgian culture was influenced by the Oriental world while avoiding the essential characteristics of Asian despotism. Contacts with the Classical world likewise remained significant but did not fundamentally transform the underlying cultural matrix of the eastern Black Sea region. At the same time, relations with Rome and especially Byzantium contributed decisively to Christianization and to a civilizational choice that enabled the rise of the unified Georgian kingdom and its medieval political achievements. The author presents the Byzantine model as a crucial foundation of Georgia’s most successful period of statehood, while also emphasizing the balancing role played by Persia and later the Caliphate.

The article interprets subsequent decline through the combined effects of invasions, fragmentation, feudal conflict, and the loss of the broader Byzantine framework after 1453. Russian expansion is presented as both a unifying force and a source of ambiguity: it restored territorial cohesion and introduced a channel for Western influences, yet failed to generate a renewed Georgian statehood comparable to the earlier Byzantine-inspired experience. Kakhidze further argues that contemporary Georgia remains marked by post-Soviet political and cultural patterns. In his view, Georgian elites often misunderstand the enduring significance of historical ties with the Middle East, religion, communal organization, and traditional social practices. The article concludes that successful modernization requires confidence in indigenous capacities and adaptation of external models to local realities.

For scholars of the post-Soviet space, the study is noteworthy as a concise statement of a civilizational interpretation of Georgian history linking identity formation, geopolitical orientation, religion, empire, and modernization. Its relevance for Israeli readers lies in its discussion of the interaction between regional powers, historical memory, state-building, and competing civilizational influences in the South Caucasus.

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Compiled by Joseph Schechla, coordinator of the HIC-HLRN, this briefing note was issued by the Housing and Land Rights Network of the Habitat International Coalition on the occasion of the 13th World Urban Forum and surveys housing and land rights issues in Azerbaijan from 2000 to 2026. The text “Housing and Land Rights Issues in Azerbaijan”  is framed as a review of forced evictions and dispossession that compares documented incidents with the HLRN Violation Database, while also measuring state practice against Azerbaijan’s constitutional guarantees and human rights treaty obligations.

The report’s central argument is that post-Soviet transition, oil-fueled urban redevelopment, and increasingly coercive state spatial planning have produced a long-term pattern of displacement. It traces a shift from early “beautification” campaigns in Baku to later infrastructure-driven clearances, extractive-industries dispossession, and the 2023 mass expulsion of ethnic Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh/Artsakh. Across these cases, the author presents forced eviction not as isolated administrative excess but as a systemic instrument of governance, demographic management, and image-building.

Analytically, the note rests on a legal and human-rights framework rather than on a formal social-scientific theory. It contrasts constitutional property protections and Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 to the European Convention on Human Rights with what it describes as an absent independent judiciary, broad administrative discretion, and weak remedies. The report repeatedly stresses the gap between law and practice, especially where occupancy vouchers, “public interest,” and redevelopment designations are used to dilute tenure security and reduce compensation. Its methodology is documentary and comparative: it assembles reported cases, draws on treaty-body findings and European Court jurisprudence, and maps them against the HLRN database.

The empirical core is a sequence of cases that includes Baku White City, Winter Boulevard, the National Flag Square and Crystal Hall clearances, Sulutəpə, Sovetsky, Söyüdlü, the Baku green corridors, and the Karabakh mass displacement. The report emphasizes violence, utility cutoffs, inadequate notice, below-market compensation, and retaliation against journalists and housing-rights defenders. It also highlights an intergenerational displacement cycle, in which people displaced in the 1990s are again pressured to move under the “Great Return” program and related resettlement schemes. The database table lists 14 instances affecting 346,560 persons, while the narrative warns that repression and data suppression create an “information black hole.”

For an Israeli academic readership, the publication is useful because it links housing, conflict, ethnicity, and state-building in a post-Soviet setting, while also speaking to debates on urban governance, forced migration, restitution, and the human-rights costs of geopolitical restructuring. It is especially relevant to scholarship on how spatial policy can become a tool of coercion in conflict-affected societies.

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Donatas Brandišauskas, affiliated with the Lithuanian Institute of History, published preprint article “Paths Made Together: Human–Reindeer Caravans in the Siberian Taiga” in 2026 through the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2004 and 2020 across the Zabaikal Region, Buriatiia, South Yakutiia, and the Amur Region of the Russian Federation, Brandišauskas examines Evenki reindeer herding with particular attention to caravan formation as a site of sustained interspecies learning and mutual attunement. The central research question challenges a prevailing claim in North Asian pastoral studies, namely the argument advanced by scholars such as Charles Stépanoff and David G. Anderson that Soviet collectivization fundamentally disrupted Indigenous human-reindeer relations by rendering animals quasi-autonomous and stripping them of social personhood, producing what Anderson termed Rangifer sovieticus.

The study is framed within a multispecies ethnographic approach integrating phenomenological, ethnoarchaeological, and cognitive anthropological perspectives. Brandišauskas draws on contributions concerning embodied enskilment, joint attention, and corporeal synchrony, engaging Tomasello on shared intentionality, Argent on kinesthetic empathy in human-animal riding, and Zeder on domestication as a relational and coevolutionary process. The methodological basis is long-term participatory fieldwork yielding detailed empirical knowledge of Evenki herding techniques, vocabulary, and relations with individual animals.

The article argues that Soviet collectivization did not fundamentally alter human-reindeer relations among the Evenki communities studied. Contrary to the autonomy thesis, Brandišauskas documents that herding continues to rely on close interpersonal engagement through riding, cargo transport, milking, and systematic training. Reindeer are recognized as social partners with distinct temperaments, names, and behavioral repertoires. Caravan assembly, termed elgenga, is a deliberate compositional practice in which animals occupying differentiated positional roles, such as the lead riding animal uchak, the steadily paced dakhaptuk, the fast-running daraki, and the sluggish tanchaki, are arranged according to individual character to ensure coordinated movement across demanding taiga terrain. Hobbling devices, bells, wooden collars, and tethering arrangements function not as simple restraints but as communicative interfaces cultivating responsiveness and shared expectations, a process the Evenki conceptualize through the term dogovoritsa, meaning mutual agreement.

Mutual trust is built through what Brandišauskas calls embodied synchrony, whereby reindeer perceive the skill and emotional state of riders through what informants describe as reading with their muscles. Well-trained animals remain calm under extreme conditions, navigate return routes independently, and transmit caravan behavior to younger animals through entrainment. The paper also addresses archaeology, arguing that material residues of Evenki herding, including tethering features, trampled vegetation, reused river crossings, and hearth deposits, constitute multi-agent imprints of interspecies cooperation rather than incidental traces.

The scholarly contribution lies in its empirically grounded challenge to the autonomy paradigm dominant in North Asian pastoral anthropology, and in its integration of multispecies ethnography with ethnoarchaeological frameworks to reframe domestication as ongoing relational labor rather than a completed historical event. For researchers engaged with post-Soviet indigenous communities, ethnicity, and the legacies of Soviet collectivization in Siberia, the article provides a corrective to assumptions of cultural discontinuity. It is equally relevant for scholars of human-environment relations, mobility studies, and embodied knowledge in post-Soviet regional contexts.

In May 2026, the PSCRP papers addressed a wide array of topics, including the developments in and around Russia, Armenia, and Central Asian states.

Gershon Kogan retrospectively analyzes the outcomes of the Soviet Union’s dissolution for its former member states, based on the economic and demographic statistics and institutional context. He concludes that the “single strongest predictor of post-Soviet modernization is (…) institutional anchor.” While the Belovezha Accords were a “ratification of disintegration already underway,” post-Soviet development has produced certain modernization gains, which have been “purchased at a demographic price that standard development metrics do not capture.” Freedom of movement produced huge demographic losses. There is no single post-Soviet development trajectory but rather three internally coherent pathways, which the author calls “Liberal Prosperity, Authoritarian Stability, and Demographic Expansion.” The opportunities for institutional and geopolitical choices available for a multiethnic state’s successors are inevitably uneven, and that is what Gershon Kogan considers to be the paper’s main conclusion.

Alexander Shpunt provides a thorough and structured overview of the recent crisis in state-church relations in Armenia. As root causes for the conflict, he lists the dismantling of the “theocratic-political symbiosis” between the Church and the former elites, ideological clash between the ideologies of “Historical” and “Real” Armenia, as well as geopolitical and electoral considerations (the AAC being at times perceived as a channel of external influence, and the incumbent elite’s actions being considered attempts at silencing the major opposition voice). Shpunt traces the crisis’s chronology from the 2015 constitutional referendum, which laid the legislative ground for authority misinterpretations, through the 2018 Velvet Revolution and the 2020 and 2023 defeats in the Karabakh wars, followed by the establishment of the Church-led “Tavush for Homeland” opposition movement, to the 2025 formulation of the “Real Armenia” ideology. The conflict escalated in 2025, when mass arrests of the Armenian clergy took place, and in 2026, when a “roadmap for Church Reforms” (including the demand for the incumbent Church leader’s removal) was formulated. The author specifically points to the roles of several external stakeholders, such as Russia, Turkey, Azerbaijan, the EU, and the Armenian global diaspora. Shpunt concludes his overview with several possible scenarios, including further escalation and institutional polarization, the canonical schism within the AAC, “institutional Cold War,” and peaceful diaspora-mediated de-escalation, although the latter does not seem the most feasible at the moment.

The authors from the PSCRP team present their view of what they consider a coordinated campaign against the incumbent Armenian authorities, orchestrated by Moscow. They point to Armenia’s NSS suspicions regarding the AAC officials’ role in potential undermining of the upcoming elections, paired with the public accusations against the Catholicos made by the Prime Minister. Subsequently, the PSCRP authors emphasize the alleged significant presence of Russia’s security services in Russia’s embassy in Yerevan, with “Rossotrudnichestvo,” Russia’s cultural outreach agency, acting as a soft-power provider. Furthermore, the analysis points to the potential role, reported by Azerbaijani outlets, of the former ICC prosecutor in attempts to “correct” the West’s policy toward Yerevan; reportedly, Ocampo’s efforts are backed by the Armenian diaspora, including oligarchs based in Russia. Finally, the authors note the recent filmed assassination warning against the incumbent Prime Minister, and Russia’s supposed use of regulatory pressure as a political instrument, with the regulatory agencies responsible for consumer safety and agriculture imposing restrictions on the Armenian goods several weeks before the scheduled election day.

Alexander Shpunt presents an original overview of the internal political situation in Russia in light of the upcoming State Duma elections. He deliberately abstains from drawing on non-Russian and Kremlin-opposed sources to grasp how Russia itself perceives the picture. Firstly, Shpunt points to the reduction of “quotas” traditionally allocated to the systemic parliamentary opposition for single-member constituencies. Then he evaluates the specific trajectories of each of the major parties in the Russian political field. The ruling party, “United Russia,” underwent substantial leadership restructuring in 2025, making it more centralized and compact. The party’s internal primary system transitioned to the country’s Public Services digital platform, enabling an increase in the number of rank-and-file party members participating in candidate selection, and the incumbent MPs are evaluated based on their legislative activity and the base of committed supporters. The Communist Party, enjoying an effective network of regional and local party branches, has recently engaged in confrontations with the Kremlin’s political management, openly criticizing the government’s socio-economic policy and restrictions, and the pressure on the regional branches has intensified. The Liberal Democratic Party has recently moved from personalized eccentric populism to a more systematic agenda, comprising the “Russian Question,” social priorities, and economic policy suggestions. The “Just Russia” party, which reverted to its original name in 2025, and which considers “angry patriots” its target electorate, is now facing existential uncertainty, and the upcoming election results will probably determine the very continued existence of this political project. The “New People” party, presenting itself as a “party of no prohibitions,” is now considered among the possible candidates for the second place in the race, especially after the merger with the “Party of Growth,” which brought it substantial business resources and attracted, to an even bigger extent, the “systemic liberal” electorate. The potential involvement of the SVO veterans in the electoral campaign may entail significant risks to political manageability, since this cohort is not disposed toward political compromise in the fight against “internal enemies.” Shpunt concludes that the upcoming elections may be viewed as a plebiscite on the very survival of the “systemic opposition” model.

Vladimir (Ze’ev) Khanin discusses the interim impacts of the Second Iran War on Moscow’s geopolitical considerations. As for now, Russia’s support to Iran remains minimal and mostly verbal. Moscow might view the war as an opportunity to receive unexpected additional dividends: the prolonged blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and destruction of oil and gas export facilities may expand the market for sanctioned Russian energy resources, and the massive use of Tomahawk missiles against Iran makes supplies of these missiles to Ukraine less likely. However, at the same time, the destroyed Iranian plants will cease to be sources of ammunition and weapons supplies for the Russian army, and the Kremlin’s refusal to condemn Iran’s actions, including those aimed against the UAE and Saudi Arabia, might damage Moscow’s position in the Gulf. Also, Iran’s direct military confrontation with the Gulf states can undermine the schemes of sanctioned goods supply developed by Iran and involving these countries.

The paper by Andrei Kazantsev-Vaisman discusses the new U.S. strategy for Central Asia, in light of the 2019-2025 Strategy’s expiration. In line with their traditional multi-vector foreign policy approaches, the Central Asian states currently seek to deepen dialogue and cooperation with the United States, but in terms not implying military and political confrontation with Russia or China. (Since Iran is now undergoing a major internal and external crisis, these countries may afford serious disagreements with Tehran’s opinion concerning their cooperation with the US and Israel). These desires now correspond with the Trump administration’s preference for flexible diplomacy based on business deals and not on outward geopolitical containment, being formulated as a strategy emphasizing infrastructure, transit, resources, and flexible diplomacy. The C5+1 summit in Washington in 2025, the growing role of the Middle Corridor in the functioning of Central Asian economies, and Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan’s significant role in the inaugural summit of the Board of Peace further demonstrate the prospects of this policy vector.

Finally, Alexander Shpunt presents his monthly overview of several new academic publications focused on the post-Soviet space.

In summer 2026, we are going to continue publishing timely and professional analytical commentaries on the ongoing developments in the post-Soviet area. Stay tuned!

PSCRP-BESA Reports No 207 (May 31, 2026)

Just as in the previous issue of our monitoring, readers saw many studies of Central Asia, the April issue contains a significant amount of material on the western flank of the post-Soviet space. As with last month, this wasn’t some kind of editorial tactic—it’s clear that sometimes coincidences drive the logic of a piece more powerfully than the intended message.

However, it wasn’t geography, but worldview and ideology, that took center stage in the April issue of our monitoring. We tried to cover these topics sparingly—they are too sensitive and complex for unbiased analysis.

But, clearly, the global shortage of worldview narratives and megaconcepts that each of us observes makes the demand for new ideologies so powerful that researchers simply can’t ignore it.

In the Ethiopian International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research (Volume 13, Issue 1, January 2026), Muahammadqodir Sheraliyev and Senior Lecturer Farrukh Ganiev of the Academy of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Uzbekistan present a policy-oriented analysis titled “Improvement of the Preventive Inspector’s Mechanism for Early Prevention of Offenses in Improving the Criminogenic Situation in the Regions“.

The article examines the evolving role of prevention inspectors – local police officers responsible for community-level crime prevention – in Uzbekistan’s mahallas (neighborhood communities), particularly in areas designated with a complex “red” criminogenic status. Drawing on recent presidential decrees (PP-1 and PP-253 of 2025), the authors analyze how these officers can shift from reactive law enforcement to proactive, data-driven early intervention. The study addresses core questions about the causes of regional crime spikes, the limitations of fragmented information systems, and the potential of enhanced inter-agency cooperation, digital tools, and community structures like the “mahalla seven” to stabilize high-risk environments.

Methodologically, the work combines descriptive policy review with practical recommendations. It references official statistics from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, pilot project outcomes from Tashkent districts, and selected academic literature while proposing concrete institutional innovations. Rather than empirical fieldwork, the piece functions as an applied criminological brief advocating systemic modernization aligned with Uzbekistan’s “New Uzbekistan” development strategy.

The central argument is that prevention inspectors must become coordinators of targeted early prevention rather than mere registrars of offenses. Key proposals include creating a unified digital platform (“Mahalla-Prevention 2.0”) integrating databases from multiple ministries, implementing AI-supported risk mapping and patrol optimization, adopting CPTED (Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design) principles, and strengthening the inspector’s leadership over multidisciplinary teams addressing unemployment, family conflicts, youth issues, and social rehabilitation. The authors cite pilot data showing significant reductions in repeat offenses and project broader crime rate declines if these mechanisms are scaled nationwide by 2026–2030.

This research contributes to post-Soviet criminology by illustrating how Central Asian states are adapting Soviet-era administrative structures to contemporary challenges of urbanization, migration, and socio-economic transition. For Israeli readers, the article offers comparative insights relevant to managing security and social cohesion in multi-ethnic, multi-confessional societies facing similar issues of localized crime, radicalization risks, and community policing. Uzbekistan’s emphasis on mahalla-level prevention resonates with Israeli discussions on neighborhood resilience and early intervention against emerging threats, while the focus on digital governance and inter-agency coordination holds lessons for hybrid security models in volatile regional environments. As Central Asia remains strategically significant for Israel – due to its position between major powers and shared concerns over extremism and instability – this Uzbek case study enriches scholarly thought on how post-Soviet states are reconfiguring internal security architectures in the 21st century.

Daria Blinova and colleagues from the University of Delaware and University of Pennsylvania introduce a major new resource for the study of authoritarian political communication in their arXiv preprint  (2605.15886v1, 15 May 2026).

The team, led by Benjamin E. Bagozzi as corresponding author, has assembled an ambitious dataset of interlinked multimodal materials drawn from official Russian government sources. It encompasses two large corpora: speeches and associated images from the Kremlin website spanning late 1999 to September 2025, and materials from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (mid.ru) covering 2004 to October 2025. In total, the collection includes over 15,600 English-language and 19,300 Russian-language speeches, paired with tens of thousands of images, harmonized metadata (dates, speakers, geolocations, official tags), and cross-lingual identifiers that link parallel Russian and English versions of the same communications.

The researchers employed systematic webscraping of the official sites, careful data cleaning, and a human-in-the-loop multimodal topic modeling approach using BERTopic. A Russian politics expert then refined and grouped the resulting latent topics into higher-level categories, with validation against official Kremlin tags and expert review. This methodology enables precise linkage between texts and visuals while preserving original language variations, allowing analysts to examine not only content but also deliberate differences in messaging across domestic and international audiences.

The resulting resource offers rich insights into the evolution of Russian elite rhetoric on domestic and foreign policy priorities. By facilitating comparisons between Kremlin and Foreign Ministry outputs, as well as Russian versus English versions of speeches, the dataset illuminates strategies of audience differentiation, framing, and legitimation in an authoritarian context. Its multimodal and multilingual character addresses critical gaps in existing text- or image-only collections, providing a testbed for temporal, spatial, and cross-lingual analyses of signaling and propaganda.

This work makes a valuable contribution to computational social science and the study of authoritarian politics by supplying analysis-ready, transparently documented data with validated topical annotations. For Israeli academic readers, the dataset holds particular relevance amid ongoing regional dynamics involving Russia – from the conflict in Ukraine and its ripple effects on global energy and security, to Moscow’s posture in Syria and the broader Middle East. Understanding the nuances of Russian official discourse, including how it tailors narratives for different audiences, equips scholars to better assess Moscow’s strategic intentions, hybrid influence operations, and implications for Israel’s national security environment in the post-Soviet space. The resource promises to enrich empirical research on conflict rhetoric and great-power competition in ways directly pertinent to Israeli strategic studies.

Karsten Brüggemann’s text “Doing It the ‘Baltic Way’: Internationalism and the Soviet Roots of the Singing Revolution”, published in “Ethnic Relations in the Baltic Reconsidered” (Central European University Press, 2026), offers a nuanced reinterpretation of the late Soviet era in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

Brüggemann, Professor of Estonian and General History at Tallinn University and President of the Baltische Historische Kommission, draws on extensive secondary literature, archival sources, and studies of cultural practices to challenge the dominant national memory narrative of straightforward anti-Soviet resistance. Instead, he examines how Soviet nationalities policy – particularly the ideology of “friendship of peoples” and internationalism – paradoxically sustained and even cultivated national identities in the Baltic SSRs.

The study addresses a central paradox: how a supposedly denationalizing regime enabled the mobilization that culminated in the 1989 Baltic Way human chain. Brüggemann demonstrates that everyday “banal nationalism” (invoking Michael Billig) flourished within Soviet institutions through song festivals, professional trilateral networks, folklore events like the Baltica festival, and cultural initiatives that blended socialist form with national content. These structures, originally designed to integrate the Baltic republics into Sovetskaia Pribaltika, created personal and institutional ties among elites that proved crucial during perestroika. Popular fronts drew heavily on members of the Soviet creative and scientific intelligentsia who had learned to operate effectively within the system.

A key argument is that Soviet internationalism did not erase national particularity but provided material support and legitimate frameworks for its expression, ultimately facilitating the transition from reformist support for perestroika to demands for sovereignty and independence. The chapter highlights how local elites used official channels – such as inter-republican conferences, student festivals, and cultural exchanges – to build transnational Baltic solidarity that transcended, yet emerged from, the Soviet context.

This work makes a valuable contribution to post-Soviet studies by moving beyond binary resistance-collaboration frameworks toward a more sophisticated understanding of hybrid identities and institutional legacies in late socialism. For Israeli academic readers, Brüggemann’s analysis holds particular relevance amid ongoing debates about ethnic relations, nation-building, and minority policies in multi-ethnic states. It illuminates mechanisms through which imperial structures can inadvertently foster national consciousness – insights pertinent to understanding dynamics in Russia’s near abroad, frozen conflicts, and the complex interplay between central authority and peripheral identities in the post-Soviet space. By historicizing the Baltic path to independence, the chapter enriches scholarly discourse on how cultural and network capital can transform seemingly stable multinational entities.

“The Geopoliticisation of Domestic Issues in the Baltic Sea Region and Central and Eastern Europe” by Joakim Ekman, Thomas Sedelius, and Kjetil Duvold, published online on 20 May 2026 in “East European Politics”, serves as the introduction to a timely special issue examining how conflict Russia and Ukraine has reshaped political life in post-Soviet and neighbouring spaces.

The authors, affiliated with Södertörn University and Dalarna University in Sweden, conceptualise “geopoliticisation” as the process by which domestic conflicts, preferences, and debates are reframed through the lens of geopolitical rivalries – particularly the value-based divide between the West/EU and Russia. Drawing on Cadier’s earlier work, they trace how an initially non-geopolitical EU Eastern Partnership evolved into a site of contestation after 2014, accelerating dramatically with the 2022 full-scale invasion. The introduction synthesises contributions analysing party strategies, public opinion, elite dynamics, and electoral behaviour across multiple national contexts, addressing three core questions: how domestic issues are interpreted geopolitically, which actors drive these processes, and what implications arise for democracy and political competition.

Key insights reveal the pervasive embedding of geopolitical orientations in everyday politics. Examples include the Sweden Democrats’ strategic shift toward NATO support ahead of elections, public attitudes toward strongman rule in semi-presidential systems, the Georgian Dream government’s use of “declarative Europeanisation” alongside affective geopolitics to sustain power, sharply polarised elite alignments in Belarus, and the pro-EU referendum victory in Moldova despite Russian interference. The authors highlight regional variations – strong pro-Ukrainian stances in the Baltic states and Poland versus more ambiguous positions further south – rooted in historical legacies and contemporary domestic incentives.

This special issue makes a valuable contribution by bridging the gap between international geopolitics and domestic political analysis, demonstrating that geopolitical frames increasingly co-constitute internal conflicts rather than merely overlaying them. For Israeli readers, the research holds particular resonance amid Israel’s own navigation of great-power rivalries and hybrid threats in the post-Soviet space. Patterns of autocratisation in hybrid regimes, elite manipulation of geopolitical narratives, and the resilience (or fragility) of democratic attitudes offer analytical parallels relevant to understanding Russian influence operations, energy dependencies, and the interplay between external alignments and internal stability – dynamics that continue to shape strategic calculations in Israel and beyond.

“Negotiating Traditional and Western Values in Social Media: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Kazakhstani Influencers’ Content” by Zhaskairat Burkitbayev and Zhomart Simtikov of Abai Kazakh National Pedagogical University in Almaty, Kazakhstan, together with Ayhan Kaya of Istanbul Bilgi University, Türkiye, was published in “Frontiers in Political Science” in April 2026.

The study examines how Kazakhstani social media influencers navigate tensions between traditional Kazakh norms – rooted in nomadic heritage, Islamic ethics, and Soviet legacies – and Western liberal values such as individualism, consumerism, gender egalitarianism, and secularism. Focusing on Instagram and TikTok, the authors ask what discursive strategies influencers employ, in which domains (particularly gender roles, sexuality, consumption, and religiosity) conflicts emerge most sharply, and how audiences respond. Employing critical discourse analysis, they scrutinize 500 posts and 3,000 comments from 50 influencers active between 2023 and 2024, combining linguistic, visual, and multimodal examination with attention to platform affordances and broader political-economic contexts.

The analysis identifies four main strategies: selective Westernization, neotraditionalist discourse (often commodifying ethnicity as “brand capital”), cosmopolitan-liberal advocacy, and ambivalent positioning that openly acknowledges unresolved tensions. Rather than achieving coherent synthesis, influencers frequently produce what the authors term “strategic incoherence” – the simultaneous maintenance of partially incompatible value positions through mechanisms like semantic reframing, temporal compartmentalization (e.g., religious content during Ramadan alongside secular lifestyle posts), and contextual maneuvering across platforms. Gender emerges as the central arena of contention, with female influencers crafting postfeminist articulations that blend empowerment narratives with reassurances to traditional expectations. Audience comments cluster into conservative-oppositional, liberal-supportive, and conciliatory positions, reflecting generational, educational, and urban-rural divides.

This research makes a valuable contribution to scholarship on value transformation and digital culture in under-studied post-Soviet Central Asian contexts. By linking local discursive agency to the structuring forces of platform capitalism and global cultural hierarchies, it illuminates processes of hybridization that defy simple narratives of Westernization or tradition preservation. For Israeli academic readers and strategic analysts, the study holds particular relevance amid Israel’s engagement with post-Soviet states and the broader Eurasian space. Kazakhstan and its neighbors represent a complex arena where Russian, Chinese, Islamic, and Western influences intersect; understanding how digital platforms mediate cultural and value conflicts offers insights into societal resilience, identity politics, and soft-power dynamics that shape regional stability and potential partnerships in an era of shifting global alignments.

“Infrastructure Failure in Times of Development as Derisking: Is Failing Early the Best We Can Hope For?”  by Lela Rekhviashvili (Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Leipzig) and Evelina Gambino (University of Cambridge), published online on 18 May 2026 in “New Political Economy”.

In this timely article, Rekhviashvili and Gambino examine the intersection of renewable energy infrastructure, financial derisking mechanisms, and project failure through the lens of the cancelled Namakhvani hydropower plant (HPP) in Georgia’s Rioni Valley. The authors interrogate what failure signifies in an era of “development as derisking,” where states assume substantial risks to attract private investment in green infrastructure, while questioning whether early project cancellation might limit long-term extraction and harm.

Drawing on extensive participant observation with the Rioni Valley Movement (RVM), interviews with activists and experts, analysis of leaked project agreements, and NGO legal assessments, the study blends activist scholarship with political economy. The researchers demonstrate how the 2019 agreement between the Georgian state and the Turkish-Norwegian consortium Enka Renewables exemplified derisking: the state provided land, water resources, tax exemptions, power purchase guarantees, and compensation for political and force majeure events, while imposing minimal obligations on the investor regarding local employment, environmental safeguards, or energy security benefits.

The central argument is twofold. First, derisking actively contributes to failure by socializing risks onto public budgets and local communities, weakening state oversight, and fueling social resistance. Second, and more provocatively, derisking enables investors to extract value even from failed projects – evidenced by Enka’s successful arbitration claim of approximately USD 383 million for a project barely underway. The authors highlight how the RVM came to view early cancellation as a relative success, protecting the valley from deeper socio-ecological devastation while exposing the extractivist logic underlying green transition financing in peripheral economies.

This research advances debates on infrastructure-led development and the Wall Street Consensus by showing that failure itself becomes a site of accumulation under derisking regimes. It enriches post-Soviet studies by linking contemporary green infrastructure pushes to longer histories of uneven transition, privatization, and dependency in Georgia.

For Israeli readers, the article offers valuable insights into the political economy of energy infrastructure in the post-Soviet space. Georgia’s struggles with hydropower megaprojects, foreign investment arbitration, and authoritarian responses to environmental protest resonate with broader regional dynamics involving energy security, great-power competition, and the tensions between climate goals and local sovereignty – issues that intersect with Israel’s strategic interests in Caucasian stability, diversified energy routes, and understanding resistance patterns in contested development contexts.

Dmitry Didenko’s article “The Evolution of Well-Being in Russia/USSR (19th–21st Centuries)” , published in «Social Evolution & History» (Vol. 25 No. 1, March 2026, pp. 63–91), offers a multidisciplinary historical analysis of Russian societal development through the lens of augmented well-being concepts drawn from welfare and happiness economics.

Affiliated with the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration in Moscow, Didenko bridges history, economics, and sociology to examine how material and non-material dimensions of well-being evolved across the late Imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet periods. The study addresses core questions about the continuity and non-linearity of modernization processes, the limitations of GDP-centric metrics, and whether the Easterlin paradox—where happiness plateaus despite rising income—manifests in the Russian context.

Methodologically, Didenko combines conventional quantitative indicators, such as Historical Human Development Index (HIHD) estimates from Prados de la Escosura and Mironov, life expectancy series, educational enrollment and attainment data, and homicide rates as a proxy for personal security, with innovative content analysis of digitized Russian-language Google Books. This allows him to track public interest in environmental quality and construct a Happiness Index based on the relative frequency of positive versus negative sentiment terms.

The article’s central argument is that Russia achieved remarkable catch-up in human development during key phases (particularly the late 19th century, 1920s–1950s, and post-2000s recovery), yet progress remained uneven and vulnerable to systemic shocks. Education showed the most sustained gains, while health improvements stagnated after the 1960s and personal security fluctuated sharply with state capacity, peaking during periods of institutional breakdown (1917, 1990s). Environmental concerns rose with industrialization but declined amid post-Soviet deindustrialization. Happiness indices reveal cyclical patterns tied to major historical events, ultimately supporting the Easterlin paradox in Russia, where subjective well-being decoupled from further material growth at a relatively low threshold.

Didenko highlights non-linear “wave-like” dynamics across the three historical periods, with transitions often triggering downturns in well-being measures. This nuanced, data-rich portrait enriches the modernization paradigm by incorporating subjective and institutional factors.

For Israeli readers, the study holds particular relevance amid ongoing strategic interest in the post-Soviet space. Understanding the internal social and perceptual dynamics shaping Russian state resilience, public sentiment, and long-term stability offers valuable context for analyzing Moscow’s foreign policy behavior, energy politics, and influence across Eurasia—factors that intersect directly with Israel’s security environment and regional diplomacy.

In April 2026, the PSCR program has prepared analytical materials covering a wide range of developments in the South Caucasus, Central Asia, Russia, and Ukraine.

Alexander Shpunt provides a comprehensive analysis of the decision by the Georgian authorities, officially dismantling the so-called Provisional Administration of South Ossetia. It took just a couple of months to finalize the abolishment by January 1, 2026. This body was an institutional manifestation of the Georgian policy of non-recognition of the separatist entities on its territory and of the consensus regarding the country’s territorial integrity shaped under Mikheil Saakashvili’s presidency. The decision was taken de facto unilaterally by the parliamentarians from the ruling “Georgian Dream” party, often considered pro-Russian and blamed for re-orienting Georgian foreign policy from the Euro-Atlantic track towards reconciliation with Moscow. Although the operational scope of the Provisional Administration has been limited in recent years, many observers view the decision as yet another symbolic step away from the recent decades’ pro-European path and as an acknowledgment that hopes for re-integrating South Ossetia are in effect abandoned. However, the municipal administrations for Georgia’s regions included in South Ossetian territory continue to operate in exile, as does the exiled Government of the Autonomous Republic of Abkhazia, meaning that “Georgian Dream” is still not ready to abandon the “formal architecture of non-recognition” altogether.

The PSCRP team has prepared a material discussing the upcoming parliamentary elections in Armenia set for June 7, 2026, against the background of what the authors called an intense media campaign to remove the incumbent Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan from his post. This campaign, as the authors frame it, is led by the Russian state media, and at the same time by the Armenian diaspora in the U.S. (notably, ANCA). Pashinyan’s visit to Moscow in April 2026, when the Armenian PM rebuffed the arguments voiced by Vladimir Putin regarding the future of Russian-Armenian cooperation, served as a starting point for a “state media offensive”: “Every major Russian state-aligned outlet framed Pashinyan as ungrateful, deluded, or outright treacherous.” Apart from this, several hundred protesters gathered outside the Armenian embassy in Moscow during Pashinyan’s visit. Indeed, the PM’s “Civil Contract” party advocates for normalization with Turkey and Azerbaijan, enhanced partnership with the U.S., and potential EU accession; all these points are viewed with suspicion from both Moscow and Armenian diaspora circles, with the U.S.-initiated TRIPP corridor being one of the “hinge issues” in the relevant discussions.

The PSCRP team has analyzed Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s visit to Azerbaijan in April 2026. The Ukrainian president’s first trip to the South Caucasus since 2022 was marked by a discussion of military-technical cooperation between Kyiv and Baku, Zelenskyy’s proposal to hold trilateral negotiations between Ukraine, Russia, and the US in Azerbaijan, and Ilham Aliyev’s expression of support for Ukraine’s territorial integrity. While the nationalist ecosystem on Telegram responded to the summit in Gabala with invectives and alternative explanations, the Russian state media reported on the event without any substantive analytical commentary and traditional triumphalism, confining itself to factual reports and “institutional minimalism,” which the authors find telling in itself.

Boris Ginzburg provides a careful reassessment of what some media sources dubbed the “first official meeting” between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya in Vilnius in January 2026. He proposes several explanations for Kyiv’s motives to end the previously maintained “strategic distancing” of the Belarusian opposition. First, Ginzburg thinks that Zelenskyy might want to strengthen the latter’s pro-European camp, since the stance of several prominent opposition leaders released by Minsk in December 2025 on the Russian-Ukrainian war might be described as “ambiguous.” Second, Kyiv might try to gain leverage in negotiations with Washington by counter-signaling the incumbent administration’s potential rapprochement with the official Minsk. Third, this move could be seen as an investment in Ukraine’s relations with Lithuania and Poland, so as to promote Ukraine’s fast-track EU accession. Fourth, Zelenskyy’s change in communication strategy, which has become visibly harsher since January 2026, might serve domestic political needs, to create a “strongman-image” if the presidential elections are to take place.

Velvl Chernin presents his analytical overview of the book “The Path to Freedom” by Ruslan Gabbasov, one of the leaders of the “Bashkort” Bashkir nationalist organization (banned in Russia in 2020), who was designated by the Russian authorities as a foreign agent and an extremist. The book is a programmatic document for the Bashkir nationalist movement, advocating the establishment of an independent Bashkir state as the only means to resist what Gabbasov calls “forced assimilation.” He sees the chance for such developments in the political crisis that might hypothetically emerge in Russia as a result of the ongoing war. Gabbasov envisions a Western-style democracy as an ideal for the Bashkir state, but only when ethnic Bashkirs become the majority; before this, autocracy is needed. Turkic post-Soviet states, especially Kazakhstan, are regarded as models, and a pan-Turkic political unity is a goal to be achieved. Bashkir nationalists, according to Gabbasov, should rely on a small and active nationalist elite and act in close cooperation with other national movements. The book’s author advocates for the migration of “ethnically close populations” to the independent Bashkortostan, sketches both “minimal” and “maximal” territorial claims, underlines the importance of Islam as an “ethnic symbol,” and calls for armed confrontation with what he labels “occupational authorities.” Although more an interesting artefact than a political program having any realistic potential, the book still captures a mindset widespread in certain circles associated with the “national movements” in Russia’s regions and in emigration.

Andrei Kazantsev-Vaisman continues his monitoring of the public narratives surrounding the U.S./Israeli-Iranian war in the Central Asian countries. On social media, conspiracy narratives are widely shared, including those of Israeli/Jewish control over world politics, and reports of Iran’s “successes” in the war. The main sections of the anti-Israeli sentiment on social media in Central Asia are Islamist-fundamentalist discourse (focused on pan-Islamic solidarity and spread through the Arab, Turkish, and Iranian media), Western left-radical discourse (focused on anti-imperial and anti-colonial narratives), and Russian-language anti-Western discourse. The fusion of these sources “creates an informational landscape in which religious solidarity, geopolitical resentment, and conspiracy narratives reinforce one another.”

Nati Cantorovich documents the recent surge in antisemitic discourse across the countries of the former Soviet Union. Since June 2025, when the operation “Rising Lion” was launched, the external influence (mainly from Iranian and Hamas-affiliated sources) has transformed from marginal to core components of mainstream propaganda in several regions and countries, with the narratives being based on a “synthesis of classical antisemitism, Soviet-era anti-Zionism, and modern geopolitical grievances, alongside radical Christian and Islamic religious motifs.” When the “Lion’s Roar” operation started, most prominent narratives in the post-Soviet hate discourse were global Jewish control, radical religious rhetoric (including blood libel), Nazi comparisons as a way for delegitimizing Zionism, competing victimhood, and more locally rooted propaganda motifs (like the Jewish origin of opposition figures, the “hypocrisy” of political emigrants who left for Israel, the strategic conflation of Ukrainian and Israeli policies, etc.). If in Central Asian and Caucasian states, this discourse was largely confined to social media, in Belarus, as Cantorovich notes, “hate speech is spearheaded by the highest echelons of the regime’s media apparatus.” In this regard, the situation in Russia is different, since overt antisemitic expressions are normally confined to only the “second or third tier of the propaganda hierarchy.”

Last but not least, Alexander Shpunt presents his monthly overview of important new academic publications focused on the post-Soviet space. 

PSCRP-BESA Reports No 200 (April 30, 2026)

Our monitoring of March's academic publications, which touched on the post-Soviet space in one context or another, unexpectedly focused on the Central Asian region. This wasn't the editor's choice; it's simply that interest in this part of the post-Soviet space is growing exponentially among researchers worldwide. In our view, each of the five works we present to our readers deserves not only a place in the monitoring, but also a thoughtful reading. 

1. The article "Regional security collaboration between Central Asia and China: contemporary challenges and future prospects"  was authored by a team of Kazakh scholars: Mura Sarybayev from the Department of World History at Abai Kazakh National Pedagogical University in Almaty; Duman Zhekenov, Dean of the Faculty of International Relations at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University in Almaty, with Bekzhan D. Kossalbayev, an associate professor affiliated with both the Faculty of International Relations at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University and the Institute of Geology and Oil-Gas Business at Satbayev University in Almaty; along with co-authors Kamshat Rustem and Akaidar Kurmanbek. It appeared in the open-access journal Frontiers in Political Science in March 2026 (volume 8, article 1670875), following peer review and revisions completed earlier that year.

The study employs a mixed-methods approach combining qualitative systematic analysis, statistical examination of trade, economic, and defense indicators (processed via tools like Microsoft Excel), generalization of empirical data, and scenario-based forecasting. The authors draw on a broad range of sources, including official documents, trade statistics, reports on joint exercises and agreements, and existing scholarship on the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI/OBOR), and post-2021 regional developments such as the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan and Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Their analysis focuses particularly on Kazakhstan as a detailed case while incorporating region-wide patterns from Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. Security is conceptualized multidimensionally—encompassing state/regime stability, transnational threats like terrorism and extremism, and economic/infrastructural protection—within the framework of regional security complexes.

The main findings portray China's security engagement in Central Asia as evolving from primarily economic and confidence-building measures in the 1990s–2000s to a more structured, multidimensional role post-2013 BRI launch and especially after 2021. Key components include bilateral and multilateral (via SCO and the newer C+C5 format) cooperation in border management, counterterrorism, intelligence sharing, joint military exercises (often focused on Xinjiang-adjacent areas and scenarios like border breaches or hostage situations), training programs for law enforcement, equipment donations, and surveillance technology transfers. The authors highlight drivers such as shared threats from Afghanistan, protection of Chinese investments in energy pipelines, transport corridors, and strategic minerals, alongside mutual interests in regime stability and connectivity. They identify challenges including uneven resource distribution, sovereignty concerns among Central Asian elites and publics, public ambivalence toward Chinese influence (with declining favorable views in some surveys), potential overdependence, and competition with Russian, Western, Turkish, and other actors. Three future scenarios are outlined: a continuation of business-as-usual incremental cooperation, a more security-centric framework, and a holistic model integrating economic, environmental, and social dimensions. Overall, the study concludes that China has become an important but not dominant security actor, operating through a mix of bilateral flexibility and SCO multilateralism, while Central Asian states use these ties to diversify partnerships and bolster internal stability without fully displacing Russian influence. The "development-security" nexus—where infrastructure investments are framed as foundations for peace—underpins Beijing's approach but faces limits due to local perceptions and mismatched priorities.

As a monitoring effort focused on conflicts and political dynamics in post-Soviet spaces, the BESA Center's work at Bar-Ilan University tracks great-power competition, regional instability, and spillover risks that could affect broader Eurasian security architectures. Central Asia's role as a transit hub for energy, minerals, and logistics intersects with global supply chains relevant to Israel's economic resilience, while instability emanating from Afghanistan or shifts in Russian influence could exacerbate radicalization, migration pressures, or proxy dynamics with implications for Middle Eastern security environments. China's expanding security footprint—through surveillance technologies, military training, and infrastructure protection—offers lessons on authoritarian regime-stabilization strategies, hybrid threat management, and the interplay between economic dependence and political leverage, all of which parallel dynamics Israel observes in its own neighborhood and with major powers. Understanding these evolving alignments helps contextualize potential disruptions to energy markets, the hedging behaviors of smaller states, and opportunities or risks for third-party engagement in a region where Israel maintains diplomatic and economic ties. In an era of multipolarity accelerated by events like the Ukraine war, such analysis sharpens insights into how distant regional security complexes might indirectly influence Israel's threat environment, alliance considerations, and long-term strategic planning.

2. The preprint "Sustainability of Irrigated Agriculture in Central Asia: Historical Development, Policy Transitions, and Future Challenges Under Climate Change" was authored by Zhanar Tulindinova, Bakhtiyor Pulatov, Ainura Batykova, Albina Prniyazova, Khizer Zakir, Sanat Kushkumbayev, and Ben Jarihani (corresponding author). The team represents a diverse international collaboration: Tulindinova and Prniyazova are affiliated with Kazakh institutions (L.N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University and the Academy of Public Administration under the President of Kazakhstan in Astana); Pulatov and Jarihani with the Central Asian University of Environmental and Climate Change Studies in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and James Cook University in Australia; Batykova with the Kyrgyz National Agrarian University in Bishkek; Zakir with the University of Salzburg in Austria; and Kushkumbayev with the Kazakhstan Institute for Strategic Studies. This multidisciplinary group combines expertise in regional studies, ecology, land and water management, geoinformatics, and strategic analysis.

The article was posted on 21 April 2026 on Preprints.org (doi: 10.20944/preprints202604.1442.v1) as a non-peer-reviewed version. It offers a comprehensive review synthesizing historical policy analysis with Earth observation (EO)-based assessments of land use, vegetation dynamics, evapotranspiration, and hydroclimatic trends in the Amu Darya and Syr Darya river basins.

The study integrates qualitative historical and policy review with quantitative insights derived from satellite data (including Landsat, MODIS, and other EO products for mapping irrigated areas, NDVI vegetation indices, and actual evapotranspiration). It examines the evolution of irrigation from pre-Soviet traditional systems through massive Soviet-era expansion (which increased irrigated land by ~60% between 1962 and 2002, primarily for cotton and wheat monoculture) to post-1991 national reforms involving Water User Associations, IWRM principles, and limited modernization. The analysis highlights persistent challenges such as ageing infrastructure, low irrigation efficiency (often below 40-50%, with only ~46% of diverted water reaching crops), widespread soil salinization, waterlogging, and the dramatic shrinkage of the Aral Sea (74% surface area and 90% volume lost since 1960). Satellite evidence shows that irrigated agriculture has remained stable or even intensified in many areas rather than contracting, with sustained or slightly increasing consumptive water use despite policy efforts. Hydroclimatic trends reveal warming exceeding global averages (projected +2–6°C by 2100), earlier snowmelt, glacier retreat, shifting runoff patterns (more spring, less summer flow), and increasing variability, all of which heighten irrigation demand while reducing reliable water supply during peak growing seasons. The authors discuss emerging opportunities from remote sensing, digital tools, GIS, AI for crop mapping and water accounting, and the need for stronger transboundary cooperation via institutions like the ICWC and IFAS.

The main conclusions emphasize that irrigated agriculture continues to dominate water use (75-90%+ of withdrawals) and remains vital for food security and livelihoods across Central Asia, yet its sustainability is threatened by inefficient systems, environmental degradation, and accelerating climate impacts. High consumptive water use persists due to intensification offsetting efficiency gains. Long-term viability requires integrated reforms: basin-scale water accounting supported by EO technologies, infrastructure modernization (canal lining, drip/sprinkler systems, better drainage), cropping diversification away from water-intensive monocultures, improved institutional coordination at national and regional levels, and enhanced transboundary data sharing and governance to manage the water-energy-food nexus amid upstream hydropower versus downstream irrigation tensions.

This study holds clear significance for Israel and its strategic interests. Israel, as a global leader in arid-zone agriculture, drip irrigation, precision water management, and climate-resilient farming technologies, possesses extensive expertise directly relevant to Central Asia’s challenges. Water scarcity, salinization, and efficient irrigation are core issues Israel has successfully addressed for decades in its own arid environment. Central Asia’s instability—exacerbated by potential food insecurity, rural discontent, water-related tensions, or migration pressures from failing agriculture and the Aral Sea crisis—could ripple into broader regional geopolitics, affecting energy routes, great-power competition (Russia, China, Turkey, Iran), and stability along peripheries of the post-Soviet space. For Israel, monitoring and understanding these dynamics supports situational awareness in conflict and security studies, particularly regarding hybrid threats, resource-driven conflicts, or opportunities for Israeli agricultural technology exports and diplomatic engagement in water diplomacy. Israeli innovations in remote sensing for irrigation monitoring, desalination-adjacent efficiency tools, and policy frameworks for transboundary water (drawing from the Jordan River basin experience) could contribute to stabilization efforts. In the context of the Begin-Sadat Center’s focus on conflict in post-Soviet countries, this preprint illuminates a critical “slow-burn” driver of potential instability—agricultural and environmental stress under climate change—that complements analyses of more acute political or military conflicts, offering insights into long-term resilience factors in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan.

3. The article under review is authored by Burkhanova Mamura, affiliated with Navoi State University in Navoiy, Samarqand viloyati, Uzbekistan. It bears the exact title “Concept of ‘Uzbek Intelligentsia’  in historical-cultural and socio-philosophical discourse” and was published in the Journal of Multidisciplinary Academic and Practice Studies, Volume 2, Number 3, 2025, pages 163–171. The study employs a qualitative, multi-layered methodology that combines cultural-historical analysis, conceptual mapping, and critical discourse analysis. Primary sources examined include Jadid-era publications, Soviet documents, and post-independence media. The author utilized NVivo software for coding discourse markers and conducted comparative analysis with Russian and Kazakh contexts to situate the Uzbek experience within broader post-Soviet trajectories. The research is structured around three chronological phases: Jadidist reformism (1870–1920), Soviet ideological structuring (1920–1991), and post-independence reconfiguration (1991–2025), with particular attention to the “New Uzbekistan” reforms initiated under President Shavkat Mirziyoyev since 2016.

Burkhanova’s main findings portray the Uzbek intelligentsia not as a fixed social class but as a fluid, adaptive, and dialectical process continuously redefined by historical contingencies. In the Jadidist period, intellectuals acted as enlighteners (marifatchi) promoting Islamic enlightenment, educational reform, and cultural modernization while respecting religious values. During the Soviet era, they embodied a paradox of cultural preservation alongside enforced ideological conformity, creating a “double consciousness” between national authenticity and socialist realism. In the post-independence and especially the digital age, the intelligentsia has diversified significantly, with new actors emerging through blogs, Telegram channels, YouTube, and other digital platforms as civic influencers, digital educators, and online commentators. Recurring conceptual nodes such as marifatchi (enlightener) and xalqparvarlik (people-centeredness) demonstrate continuity in the moral-intellectual responsibility of this group across epochs. The author concludes that the intelligentsia functions as both a product of and a contributor to national transformation, serving as a mediator between tradition and modernity while addressing society’s “questions of existence” in each historical phase.

This study holds particular significance for Israel and its strategic interests in Central Asia. Uzbekistan represents one of the most populous and geopolitically important states in the region, with growing economic ties to Israel in areas such as agriculture, water management, technology, and security cooperation. Understanding the evolving role of the Uzbek intellectual elite is crucial because the intelligentsia shapes national identity, public discourse, and attitudes toward modernization, secularism, religious revival (particularly moderate Islamic currents), and external partnerships. In the context of “New Uzbekistan,” the diversification of intellectual voices—including digital actors—may influence future orientations toward Israel, the broader Middle East, and global powers. For Israeli policymakers and analysts monitoring post-Soviet spaces, the article provides valuable insight into how historical legacies of Jadidism, Soviet experience, and contemporary digital transformation interact to form a pragmatic, state-integrated yet ethically grounded intellectual class. This dynamic can affect Uzbekistan’s foreign policy stability, openness to Western and Israeli partnerships, and resilience against radical ideologies—factors directly relevant to Israel’s interests in regional security, countering Iranian or other external influences, and fostering constructive bilateral relations in a strategically sensitive area.

4. The research paper titled “Contesting the liberal international order from within: Illiberal networks and the crisis of liberal democracy”  was authored by Sanna Salo, a Senior Research Fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs (FIIA) specializing in the European Union and strategic competition; Ville Sinkkonen, a Leading Researcher at FIIA focusing on global security and governance; Maria Lindén, a Research Fellow at FIIA in the area of global security and governance; Sinikukka Saari, a Leading Researcher at FIIA covering Finland and Northern European security; and Juha Jokela, Programme Director at FIIA for the European Union and strategic competition program. The study was published in March 2026 as FIIA Research Paper 4 by the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, an independent research organization based in Helsinki that provides analysis on international affairs relevant to Finnish foreign policy and broader European security.

The authors develop their analysis through a qualitative, interpretive approach rooted in norms research and international relations theory. They examine the diffusion of illiberal strategies across three case studies—Russia as an influential outsider pioneering an “illiberal playbook,” Hungary under Viktor Orbán as a challenger operating from within the European Union, and the United States under the second Trump administration as the former hegemon turning against the order it once championed. The framework identifies four strategic tools of norm entrepreneurship and contestation: brokerage (building coalitions and networks), wedging (exacerbating divisions through hybrid means), persuasion (discursive reframing of norms), and coercion (including threats and economic pressure). The study traces how these tools, initially refined in authoritarian or hybrid contexts, have been adapted and scaled up by actors within liberal democratic systems, drawing on secondary literature, public statements, policy documents, and observed political practices without relying on original fieldwork or quantitative data.

The main findings emphasize that the contemporary crisis of the liberal international order (LIO) is increasingly endogenous rather than purely exogenous. Illiberal actors empowered by democratic mechanisms—elections, open societies, and institutional access—are actively delegitimizing the liberal elements of democracy (constitutional checks, minority rights, multilateral institutions) while preserving formal democratic facades. Russia provided early templates of manipulative “political technologies,” hybrid interference, and “sovereign democracy” rhetoric that resonated with populist forces. Orbán’s Hungary demonstrates how an insider can dismantle domestic checks and balances, then use brokerage (via new groupings like Patriots for Europe) and wedging (vetoes and blackmail in EU decision-making) to obstruct the Union from within, often framing it as a defense of national sovereignty against liberal overreach. The second Trump administration exemplifies this shift at the systemic level: through rhetorical attacks on allies, elevation of European illiberal figures, transactional coercion (such as threats over Greenland or linking security guarantees to EU policies), and active wedging in European elections and societies, the US has blurred the insider-outsider distinction and accelerated the “merger of discontents” across transnational illiberal networks. The authors argue that domestic backsliding often precedes and enables international contestation, with experiences of humiliation or perceived weakness (post-Soviet decline for Russia, financial crisis for Hungary, relative decline and cultural grievances for the US) serving as tipping points. They conclude that rigid inside/outside dichotomies in IR scholarship miss these fluid networks, and that legitimate contestation of norms could ultimately strengthen resilience if managed constructively.

As a small democracy navigating a hostile regional environment, Israel has long relied on the stability and normative consistency of the liberal international order, including strong transatlantic alliances, multilateral institutions (despite their frequent biases), and shared democratic values that underpin support from the United States and parts of Europe. The paper’s analysis of endogenous erosion—especially the US pivot toward transactionalism, civilizational framing, and skepticism of multilateralism—highlights risks to the reliability of American leadership and potential fractures in Western unity, which could complicate Israel’s security partnerships, intelligence cooperation, and diplomatic maneuvering against Iran and its proxies. The diffusion of illiberal playbooks, including hybrid interference, disinformation, and wedging tactics pioneered by Russia and emulated elsewhere, directly echoes challenges Israel faces from state and non-state actors seeking to exploit domestic divisions or international forums. Moreover, the rise of sovereignty-focused, anti-globalist networks may create new openings for pragmatic bilateral ties (as seen in some European right-wing shifts toward Israel) but also risks amplifying isolationist or “America First” tendencies that prioritize short-term deals over long-term strategic solidarity. For Israeli policymakers and analysts monitoring post-Soviet conflicts, the study offers a useful lens on how authoritarian influences spread into democratic spaces, informing assessments of hybrid threats, norm contestation in international organizations, and the evolving balance between liberal universalism and particularist sovereignty claims that affect everything from UN votes to sanctions regimes relevant to the Middle East.

5. Rico Isaacs, affiliated with the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom, is the author of the article titled "Whose Nation Is It Anyway? Towards Methodological Cosmopolitanism in Studies of Nationalism and Nation-Building in Kazakhstan".  The piece was published in the journal Nations and Nationalism (volume 2026, issue 01, pages 1–11), an open-access article under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

The study is primarily a theoretical and meta-analytical intervention rather than an empirical fieldwork-based investigation. Isaacs conducts a critical review of existing scholarship on nationalism and nation-building in Kazakhstan over the past three decades. He identifies a dominant social constructivist approach in the literature that repeatedly frames analysis through the classic civic-ethnic dichotomy (or its proxy categories), even in works that claim to transcend it. Drawing on concepts from Homi K. Bhabha, Ulrich Beck, and others, the author proposes shifting to a methodological cosmopolitanism grounded in "vernacular cosmopolitanism." This framework emphasizes hybridity, mobility, multilingual practices, translocal identities, and everyday negotiations of belonging in sites such as workplaces, schools, markets, and urban-rural interactions. The analysis incorporates insights from existing ethnographic and sociolinguistic studies on Kazakhstan and Central Asia (e.g., works by Abashin, Marsden, Jašina-Schäfer, and others) to illustrate potential applications, while outlining general criteria and historical/social intervening conditions (Soviet nationality policy legacies, sociolinguistic environment, urban-rural divide, migration and mobility, location and timing) for applying this approach. No new primary data collection is described; the method is conceptual critique combined with synthesis of prior qualitative research.

The author's main conclusions are that the persistent reliance on the civic-ethnic binary in Kazakhstan studies constitutes a form of "methodological constructivist nationalism." This not only essentializes and misrepresents the fluid, plural, and multivocal nature of lived identities in the country but also inadvertently reinforces the authoritarian regime's legitimation strategies, which have historically deployed both civic (interethnic harmony, Kazakhstani citizenship) and ethnic (Kazakhification, historical myths tied to leadership) narratives under Nazarbayev and now Tokayev. By reducing complex, hybrid realities to opposing categories, scholarship fails to capture how ordinary citizens negotiate belonging through mundane practices, code-switching, and translocal connections. Isaacs argues for an ontological and methodological shift toward vernacular cosmopolitanism, which better accounts for "cosmopolitanism from below" in a multi-ethnic, post-Soviet context marked by Soviet legacies, globalization, and authoritarian power. This offers a roadmap for future research that foregrounds everyday sites of interaction and avoids entangling analysis with regime categories of practice. Ultimately, the article asks "whose nation is it anyway?" to highlight how dominant scholarly frames limit understanding and serve power structures.

Israel maintains strategic partnerships with Kazakhstan, a key Central Asian state with substantial economic ties (energy, agriculture, and technology); a notable Jewish community (including many who emigrated to Israel), and a complex multi-ethnic fabric involving Russian speakers, Muslims, and other groups. Understanding nation-building dynamics in Kazakhstan is relevant to assessing regional stability, potential ethnic tensions or migrations that could affect diaspora communities, and the broader post-Soviet space where hybrid identities and authoritarian legitimation play out. For Israeli policymakers and analysts monitoring conflicts and identity politics in former Soviet republics, the article's critique of binary ethnic-civic models and its emphasis on hybrid, translocal belongings provide a more nuanced lens for evaluating risks of instability, the role of language policies, migration flows, and regime resilience—factors that intersect with Israel's security concerns regarding radicalism, great-power competition (Russia, China), and opportunities for bilateral cooperation. In the context of decolonial and postcolonial debates, it also invites reflection on how external scholarship engages with non-Western nation-building processes without imposing simplifying frameworks, which aligns with Israel's own experiences navigating diverse identities and narratives in a contested region.

Regardless of our intentions, the March of 2026 became thematic in terms of the BESA PSCRP publications: all of them focus on various aspects of the ongoing military campaigns against the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Gershon Kogan provides a structured overview of the geopolitical risks that instability in Iran might bear for the post-Soviet region. He recommends understanding fragmentation as not an event but a process of gradual transformation and erosion, consisting of territorial, institutional, functional, and cognitive aspects. Kogan considers political-institutional, military, and peripheral drivers of instability. The Iranian situation demonstrates the limits of a securitization strategy in foreign and internal politics, and military conflict risks turning the country not into a “besieged fortress” but into a field of narrative fragmentation. The peripheral power vacuum, caused by the redistribution of governance resources toward key security nodes, might be easily filled by alternative actors. Fragmentation processes in the IRI are likely to affect the South Caucasus (border instability and migration pressure) and Central Asia (transforming transit routes and logistics, radicalization and information campaigns, and the weakening of border control). Kogan recommends four monitoring priorities regarding the Iranian destabilization, namely, border corridors, information operations, regional diplomatic signals, and proxy-structure activity.

Andrei Kazantsev-Vaisman focuses on the Central Asian subregion and scrutinizes official and unofficial reactions to the war with Iran in these states. The domineering official reactions are those of expressing concerns but maintaining a rather neutral stance, which allows for greater flexibility in managing potential risks. The leaders of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have sent formal condolences over the death of Ayatollah Khamenei, but generally remained neutral in assessing the situation. The author claims the public attitudes toward the actions of the US and Israel depend on various factors, inter alia, the strength of fundamentalist Islamic influence in particular regions, susceptibility to external informational influence, the degree of state control over public expression, and the internal political positioning of the actors.

The PSCRP team further zooms in to concentrate on the strategic vulnerabilities Tajikistan is facing now, as both its key geopolitical partners, Russia and Iran, are confronted with major crises of a military nature. The strategic dependence of Dushanbe on Russia is evident, manifesting in remittances from the diaspora, military infrastructure, and economic ties. However, in recent years, these levers have proved less reliable than they once were. Consequently, a dangerous situation might emerge if the Tajik-Afghan border remains without the Russian protection and if the Tajik diaspora in Russia is targeted to leverage influence on Dushanbe. In the case of Iran, the ties are more ideological and cultural but still have a significant economic component. The regimes, however, are strikingly different, and civilizational affinity may be easily overwhelmed by other interests. China is trying to fill the void, but Beijing’s influence may be equally disruptive for Tajik economic development and societal stability. The authors claim that, should Dushanbe wish to use the strategic opportunity to reorient its foreign policy partially, it should prioritize its geographic position as a stronghold against the flow of illicit substances from Afghanistan, its natural resources (minerals and hydropower potential), “civilizational” traits, and an emerging security architecture in the region.

Moving to the South Caucasian area, the PSCRP team assesses the Iranian strikes against targets in Azerbaijan, namely, an airport in Nakhchivan and a school in Shekerabad. Baku has harshly reacted to these drone assaults, but in a diplomatic way. The Iranian government denied its involvement in the incident, unlike the IRGC, which has acted nearly autonomously since mid-2025 and has now claimed responsibility for attacks against Baku. The goals may include further restricting the airspace corridor or driving up oil prices. However, it is also possible that IRCG tries to provoke Azerbaijan and Turkey into intervening and thus making the people rally around the flag—echoing the situation of the Iraqi invasion in 1980. Although in reality, such a situation could be catastrophic for Iran, Baku is unlikely to yield to these provocations.

Vladimir Ze’ev Khanin shifts attention to the Eastern European part of the post-Soviet space and provides an analysis of reactions from Russia and Ukraine to the ongoing Israeli and U.S. operations against the IRI. While the official Kyiv has explicitly supported the intervention, the Moscow authorities have condemned it as an act of unprovoked aggression. As part of bilateral cooperation, Moscow and Tehran have supplied each other with certain military technologies; however, this does not entail direct military action for the sake of the partner’s protection, and at the moment, the Kremlin has limited itself to official condemnations and offers of assistance in achieving a peaceful solution. On the contrary, Kyiv offered its assistance in dealing with the Iranian drones. Moscow’s cautious stance, despite the significance of the infrastructure Iran has provided to it in recent years and the investments it has made into the IRI economy, may also be influenced by the involvement of the Gulf states and the fact that Russia may also expect to gain some economic and military profits from the current war. Khanin draws readers’ attention to the fact that both the U.S. and Israeli leaders face important elections in the fall this year, with the coming months being politically decisive. Thus, they both need a short, decisive campaign that presents a “picture of victory,” while Donald Trump must also persuade the electorate that the operation itself was justified.

Finally, Kyril Kascian describes Belarus’s foreign political attitude towards the ongoing U.S. and Israeli operations against Iran as rhetoric supportive of the Tehran regime, but not entailing any practical actions or risks to Minsk. In the author’s words, the authorities in Belarus and Iran have long cooperated due to the shared challenges posed by Western sanctions and the close nature of their ruling regimes. So, the official rhetoric of Lukashenka, as the most prominent foreign political actor of Belarus, remains anti-Western and, in part, anti-Israeli. This happens despite the historical role of the Belarusian Jewish community in both Belarus and Israel and the multifold personal ties between many Belarusians and Israelis.

Last but not least, Alexander Shpunt shares his monthly overview of several important academic publications focused on the post-Soviet space.

We wish our readers a Happy Passover and continue our analysis of the ongoing events in Eastern Eurasia. 

PSCRP-BESA Reports No 193 (March 24, 2026)

In February, a number of the works we review below were devoted to the analysis of post-communist countries, the study of the concept of “socialist heritage,” and the discourse of leaders during crises.

Jelena Džankić, Eleanor Knott & Szabolcs Pogonyi. “Citizenship in the global struggles for democracy.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (March 2026)
This introductory article to a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies  presents the results and structure of a long-term research project (CITDEM) examining the relationship between citizenship regimes and democratic backsliding, with particular attention to post-communist and post-colonial contexts.

The authors—affiliated with the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (European University Institute, Florence, Italy); the Department of Methodology (London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK); and the Department of Philosophy (Central European University, Vienna, Austria)—develop a three-component analytical model organized around three factors shaping the relationship between citizenship and democracy: identity politics, political projects, and economic interests, corresponding respectively to the formation, instrumentalization, and exploitation of citizenship regimes.

The authors begin from a seemingly paradoxical empirical observation derived from a systematic analysis of citizenship legislation in 20 post-communist countries between 1990 and 2021: citizenship regimes tend to remain stable during periods of democratization, but, paradoxically, become more open—rather than more restrictive—during periods of democratic backsliding. This pattern challenges the prevailing assumption in the citizenship and migration literature that more inclusive membership policies inherently signal democratic progress.

The central argument is that illiberal and autocratizing regimes may deliberately expand access to citizenship—granting it to diaspora populations, ethnic kin abroad, or wealthy investors—not to deepen democratic participation, but to manipulate electorates, consolidate political power, project geopolitical influence, or generate revenue. Conversely, restrictions on citizenship do not necessarily indicate democratic decline. The relationship between citizenship and democracy is thus characterized as complex, non-linear, and highly context-dependent.

A number of case studies directly concern the post-Soviet space, making this special issue particularly relevant for analysts of regional security and political dynamics—although the brevity of this monitoring report allows us only to recommend that readers examine these sections independently.

The article situates post-Soviet and post-Yugoslav cases within the global context of democratic decline. The authors cite Lührmann and Lindberg’s estimate that more than one-third of the world’s population currently lives under conditions of deteriorating civil liberties and political rights. In this context, citizenship is positioned as both a barometer and a mechanism of democratic health: its manipulation reflects the weakening of formal democratic institutions while simultaneously accelerating that process.

The mechanisms described—passportization, extraterritorial ethnic citizenship, and citizenship-by-investment—have direct relevance for strategic analysis in Israel.

More broadly, the question of how citizenship regimes interact with disputes over sovereignty and minority protection frameworks has direct implications for Israel’s own legal and diplomatic environment, including ongoing international pressure regarding residency, citizenship, and the political rights of the Arab population. The article’s analytical framework—distinguishing between the formation, instrumentalization, and exploitation of citizenship—offers a universal vocabulary for comparative assessment of such dynamics.

Xidong Ma, Yukun Zhang, Yan Li & Runheng Hu. “Formation and development of the socialist heritage concept: a chronological and thematic theoretical review.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2026, forthcoming). DOI: 10.1057/s41599-026-06774-3
The article, published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (Springer Nature), presents a systematic review of sources tracing the emergence and consolidation of the concept of “socialist heritage” (SH) as both an academic and political category. Drawing on 29 official documents from major international heritage organizations—including ICOMOS, DOCOMOMO, UNESCO, and UIA—as well as 137 multilingual theoretical sources, the authors reconstruct the conceptual trajectory of SH from the early 1990s to the present.

The methodological rigor of the study is notable: it follows the PRISMA methodology and employs thematic synthesis rather than simplified automated bibliometric analysis, which the authors justify in terms of interpretive accuracy.

The authors define socialist heritage as “the remnants of the material outcomes of large-scale socialist construction carried out in socialist countries,” including architecture, urban planning, monuments, green spaces, infrastructure, and landscapes. A key contribution of the study is its tracing of the concept’s evolution from its formal articulation at an ICOMOS expert meeting in Warsaw in 2013, where ICOMOS member Natalia Dushkina introduced the umbrella term “socialist heritage” to encompass structures ranging from socialist realism and socialist modernism to pre-Soviet avant-garde movements across the former socialist bloc.

This positioning has important analytical implications for the study of post-Soviet conflicts: it treats landmark architectural objects not merely as artifacts, but as politically encoded spatial instruments whose post-regime fate becomes a focal point of identity संघर्ष.

The article identifies three stages in the development of the concept (referred to as the “social seam”), each corresponding to broader political dynamics in the post-Soviet space.

The first stage (early 1990s–early 2010s) is characterized as a period of field research and value assessment, concentrated primarily in Russia and Germany. Throughout this phase, no unified conceptual term existed, and scholarly activity remained fragmented by period and geography.

The second stage (early–mid 2010s) marked formal conceptualization and institutional recognition. The April 2013 Warsaw meeting became a key milestone, producing both Dushkina’s definition and the establishment of the ICOMOS ISC20C “Socialist Heritage Initiative.”

The third stage (late 2010s–present) involves the development of practical preservation methodologies. ICOMOS has progressively expanded early warning mechanisms for endangered heritage sites. The 2020 “Historic Thematic Framework of the 20th Century,” prepared by ICOMOS ISC20C and the Getty Conservation Institute, provided a structured tool for integrating historical heritage into broader cultural heritage assessments.

Several aspects of this study are particularly relevant for analysts tracking conflicts and political processes across the former Soviet Union. The article systematically demonstrates—using source-based examples—how the demolition, preservation, or repurposing of Soviet-era monuments and infrastructure has served as a field of political contestation in Ukraine, the Baltic states, Georgia, and Belarus, across both active and latent conflict zones.

From the perspective of Israel’s analytical interests, the issues discussed intersect with several related challenges. The instrumentalization of archaeological heritage—materialized historical memory—in struggles over identity and territorial legitimacy is directly relevant to Israel. The article’s concept of “dissonant heritage”—structures recognized as historically significant but politically contested—provides a comparative framework applicable to similar debates in Israel.

GEOpolitics (Issue No. 28, March 2026)
In this section, we depart slightly from the usual format of our monitoring and present not just a single work, but a publication by our colleagues—a periodic analytical journal.

GEOpolitics is a Tbilisi-based analytical journal focused on Georgia’s foreign policy, security dynamics in the South Caucasus, and the broader geopolitical landscape of the post-Soviet period. The journal positions itself as committed to Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic integration and democratization. Its contributors include former Georgian ambassadors, deputy ministers, and scholars affiliated with Georgian and European institutions.

The best way to present the journal is through an example, and we have selected Tornike Gordadze’s article “Iran’s Uncertain Future and the Fragile Geopolitics of the South Caucasus.”

Gordadze takes as his starting point the coordinated U.S.–Israeli air and missile strikes of February 28, 2026, targeting Iranian military infrastructure and political leadership, including reports of the elimination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other senior figures. The article constructs a scenario-based model with three trajectories—orderly pragmatic transition, chaotic state collapse, and hard authoritarian succession—and assesses their implications for actors in the South Caucasus.

He begins with a methodological caution, drawing on Robert Malley’s observation that Western policymakers have historically misjudged both the resilience and fragility of Middle Eastern regimes, citing the U.S. miscalculation of Assad’s trajectory in Syria as a structurally analogous case. This serves as a warning against deterministic confidence in any of the three scenarios.

Under an orderly transition scenario, Russia would lose a partner for sanctions evasion; Iran’s reintegration into global energy markets would depress oil prices and indirectly weaken Russia’s war economy; and Georgia could re-anchor itself within Western frameworks, losing its intermediary role in sanctions “gray zones.” Armenia would benefit most, gaining a normalized southern border and increased strategic autonomy. Azerbaijan would benefit from reduced ideological hostility from Tehran, although Iranian opposition to extraterritorial corridor projects would likely persist even under a reformist government.

In the collapse scenario, Armenia is identified as the most vulnerable actor, losing its main non-hostile southern border and facing increased coercive pressure from the Azerbaijani–Turkish axis. Azerbaijan faces a paradox of short-term tactical gains offset by risks of ethnic resistance from the large Azerbaijani population in Iran and broader regional destabilization. Georgia would face migration pressure, increased organized crime, and heightened Western scrutiny of its role as a sanctions-evasion platform.

In the authoritarian succession scenario, Gordadze argues that Russia retains a tactical partner without significant strategic gains, while Georgia risks entrenchment within an authoritarian axis linking Russia, China, and nationalist Iran—regardless of Georgian societal preferences.

The study explicitly links the Iranian question to Russia’s war economy, noting that any escalation or transition in Tehran will affect Eurasian transit corridors, energy markets, and the resilience of Russian military logistics. It concludes with a recommendation that U.S. and European policymakers treat Iran not as a self-contained regional issue, but as a structural variable within the Eurasian order.

For the Begin-Sadat Center, the article provides a direct analytical assessment of the consequences of Israeli military actions in the South Caucasus—an aspect rarely addressed in the region’s strategic literature. Its geographic focus adds a layer of analysis often absent in Israeli and American assessments of strikes on Iran: namely, the secondary effects on post-Soviet conflict geography, Russia’s strategic positioning, and the interconnection frameworks embedding both Western and Israeli interests. The analysis of Georgia’s evolving rapprochement with Iran—including public expressions of solidarity with Tehran by Georgia’s Deputy Foreign Minister following Israeli strikes—documents a diplomatic posture that warrants close monitoring from the standpoint of strategic interests.

The GEOpolitics journal is published monthly .

Tsvetkova, N. “Historical analogies as markers of decisions: an LLM-assisted analysis in foreign policy.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2026, forthcoming). DOI: 10.1057/s41599-026-06930-9

The article, forthcoming in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, makes what we consider a genuinely groundbreaking methodological and conceptual contribution to the study of foreign policy decision-making. It argues that historical analogies function not merely as cognitive or rhetorical tools, but as observable markers of already-forming political decisions.

The author contends that the repeated appearance of specific historical analogies in leaders’ discourse during crises reflects the consolidation of a policy course before it becomes visible in official statements or overt actions.

The study analyzes 1,100 official documents—499 from the Clinton presidency, 375 from Putin’s presidency, and 226 from Xi Jinping’s presidency—using an OpenAI GPT-based procedure to identify potential analogies, which were then manually verified and coded as cognitive, rhetorical, or signaling.

The operational definition treats a historical analogy as a comparison between a past event and a current political situation, excluding purely descriptive references and metaphors lacking explicit policy relevance. The three-part coding scheme distinguishes: cognitive use (diagnosing a situation and structuring options), rhetorical use (justifying decisions ex post or mobilizing support), and signaling use (articulated before a decision and subsequently repeated, serving as a correlational marker of an emerging choice).

All runs were conducted using GPT-4.0 via the ChatGPT web interface in August 2024, with key prompts repeated two to three times and all extracted data manually validated. As a reliability check, prompts were re-run on a newer model (GPT-5 “Thinking,” October 2025), yielding identical results.

The article situates itself within two established traditions of foreign policy analysis. The cognitive tradition (Hong, 1992; Jervis, 2017) argues that historical analogies help leaders make decisions under pressure by providing ready-made frameworks, albeit with risks of misapplication. The rhetorical tradition sees analogies as tools for mobilization and legitimation, shaping public opinion for external audiences.

Building on these, the study proposes a third perspective: when leaders draw an analogy—linking a current crisis to a specific past event—it indicates that the analogy has already structured their decision-making process to such an extent that they have, consciously or not, committed to acting in accordance with that historical precedent.

While the article provides extensive illustrative material, the brevity of this review allows us only to recommend that readers explore it independently.

The study offers a methodologically reproducible and conceptually grounded tool for analyzing leadership intent in foreign policy based on open-source information. More broadly, the idea that recurring historical analogies may serve as observable correlates of settled political decisions provides a potentially valuable additional instrument for analytical institutions engaged in early warning assessment of state behavior in conflict regions, including the post-Soviet space—and, of course, the broader Middle East.

Calderwood, E., Bell, T. R., Bone, J., & Lundberg, G. H. (2025). “Why Russian? Language choice and enrollment in U.S. universities.” Russian Language Journal, Vol. 75, No. 2

This study—whose fieldwork was conducted at Brigham Young University and six other U.S. universities during the Fall 2024 semester—appeared in print late last year but has only now become available online, and is therefore included in our February monitoring.

The report examines motivational and deterrent factors influencing American students’ decisions to study Russian in the current geopolitical context. While primarily pedagogical and sociolinguistic, its findings bear on a broader strategic question: whether the ongoing Russia–Ukraine conflict—now in its fourth year—is reshaping Western societies’ investment in Russian-language human capital, a resource directly relevant to intelligence, diplomacy, conflict analysis, and civil society engagement in the post-Soviet space.

Data were collected using two custom-designed Qualtrics surveys conducted in Fall 2024, combining structured multiple-choice questions with opportunities for open-ended responses. Analysis included descriptive quantitative data and thematic coding of qualitative responses.

The study formulates two research questions: which factors facilitate or hinder enrollment in Russian language courses, and what measurable impact, if any, the Russia–Ukraine war has had on student engagement.

Across both groups, the dominant motivational cluster was integrative rather than instrumental: students cited cultural curiosity, desire to communicate with Russian speakers, interest in travel to Russian-speaking countries, and prior language-learning experience as primary drivers. Career-oriented motivations, while present, were secondary. The authors note this represents a measurable shift from the pre-conflict baseline (Merrill, 2013), where career advancement ranked first—indicating that the current cohort is primarily driven by affective and interpersonal, rather than strategic and professional, incentives.

Among students who considered but ultimately rejected studying Russian, the main deterrent was preference for another language rather than active rejection of Russian itself. Secondary deterrents included scheduling constraints, perceived grammatical difficulty, and uncertainty about professional utility. The war in Ukraine was not cited as a primary reason for отказ.

Only 14% of current Russian learners reported mixed feelings about studying the language; just three respondents expressed concern about using Russian in public. One of the most operationally significant findings is that 88.2% of active learners intend to continue their studies regardless of political developments.

From the perspective of a research center focused on the post-Soviet space, the study offers several analytically significant insights. Chief among them is the dual motivational response to the conflict: while a minority of students reported increased motivation to study Russian as a critical language, the majority experienced primarily logistical rather than ideological effects. This suggests that American civil society has not developed a “language embargo” against Russian comparable to, for example, the suppression of German language instruction in the United States during World War I.

Alexander Shpunt is an Israeli and Russian researcher and expert in the theory and practice of information and analytical work in the field of politics and resides in Haifa. Since 2016 he has served as a professor at the National Research University “Moscow Higher School of Economics. In 1999–2011 he also served as the executive director of the “Effective Policy Foundation”, the largest think tank in the RF at that time, and in 2011 founded and headed the Institute of Political Analysis Tools, specializing in systems for monitoring political behavior.

In February 2026, the research by the PSCR program was focused on the dynamics in the European part of the post-Soviet space (namely, Ukraine and Belarus), the South Caucasus, and Kazakhstan.

Velvl Chernin recalls his recent long experience of visiting various Ukrainian cities and working with Ukrainian refugees, to tentatively assess the impact of the war on Ukrainian society. He notes the widespread fatigue of the war, embitterment towards Russians, and the similarities between Israeli and Ukrainian societies experiencing post-traumatic stress; the similarities are even more enhanced by the fact that many Jews and Israelis serve in the Ukrainian army, while a lot of Israelis of Ukrainian origin serve in the IDF. The author also stresses the importance of the societal divisions that emerged among Ukrainians living near the front line, in the rear, and in the occupied territories.

Boris Ginzburg analyzes Aliaksandr Lukashenka’s foreign policy specifics in light of his recent visits to several Middle Eastern and Northern African countries. Ginzburg emphasizes several structural characteristics of Belarus’ foreign policy highlighted by the leader’s MENA tour, namely, the use of foreign political moves to enhance domestic and international legitimacy, the personalist character of international relations and distrust towards the diplomatic profession, and the role of mediator often assumed by Lukashenka in international conflicts (even if such a role was not solicited). The author assumes these characteristics, if taken into account, might help Israeli foreign policy to more neatly leverage its diplomatic potential in dealing with Minsk, most importantly, to recalibrate the latter’s relations with Tehran.

The material by the PSCRP team reacts to the US Vice President Vance’s visit to Azerbaijan and Armenia in February this year. The authors describe the current geopolitical situation surrounding Armenia, which is disappointed in its strategic alliance with Russia and might seek alternatives, in cooperation with the U.S., to the Iranian influence. The paper argues that the window of opportunities for enhanced dialogue with South Caucasian nations is now open for Washington, due to the geopolitical realignments in the post-Soviet space. However, Yerevan’s strategic choice depends on the figure of Nikol Pashinyan, the incumbent prime minister, who faces growing opposition to his rule, partly influenced by Russia and by nationalist circles in the diaspora.

The PSCRP team assesses the reasons for and implications of the ongoing backsliding of Georgia’s EU accession process, symbolically marked this month by the inclusion of a Georgian port into another EU sanctions package. Reportedly, the port of Kulevi is increasingly used to circumvent the European sanctions against Moscow. The authors emphasize the role of the “Georgian Dream” party and its de facto leader, Bidzina Ivanishvili, having close ties to Moscow, in the rapid re-orientation of Tbilisi’s foreign policy aspirations from EU-oriented to Russia-tied. They argue that the reasons might lie in the party’s unwillingness to implement the enhanced EU democratic control mechanisms, while cooperation with Russia might yield economic dividends without any infringements on the potential political monopoly. At the same time, Brussels’ available tools to influence Georgia remain limited, since targeted personal sanctions and suspending a EU candidate status require anonymity, which can hardly be reached.

Alexander Shpunt analyzes Kazakhstan’s recent constitutional amendments – a draft for a new Constitution, with 84 % of the text changed compared to the previous version, was published in January and will be subject to a referendum. The new constitutional draft significantly alters the entire structure of political power in Kazakhstan, inter alia, making the legislative organ unicameral and creating a post of vice-president. Shpunt argues that, considering the external danger of Russia’s influence (which the incumbent president is attempting to resolve by allying more closely with China) and the internal discrepancies caused by the residual presence of the former president’s inner circle, constitutional amendments may be aimed at preserving the incumbent’s position in power even after his official presidential term ends (in 2029). While preparing the reform, the Kazakhstan authorities have secured the ground by legally discouraging political opposition from parliamentary representation and any political activities, and by introducing stronger control over the media landscape. The author concludes that Kazakhstan’s strategic choices may be diverse, but all of them are highly dependent on the figure of the president.

Also, traditionally, Alexander Shpunt has prepared a monthly overview of significant and interesting publications concerning the conflicts and political transformations in the post-Communist space.

Despite the challenges of the turbulent global geopolitics, the PSCRP continues its work, highlighting the specifics of the intersection between conflicts and politics in the post-Soviet space. Stay tuned!

PSCRP-BESA Reports No 185 (February 24, 2026)

January turned out to be a positive surprise: the speed of global transformations, the emergence of new configurations of interests, and new roles for seemingly traditional actors were fully on display across the post-Soviet space.
And researchers felt it too, clearly revising their plans in favor of greater topicality and a demand for a strategic look from the standpoint of today and the near future.

The study “The Internationalization of Armed Intrastate Conflict: A Systematic Assessment of the State of Research, Data, and Explanations” was prepared in the working-paper format for the research center “Transformations of Political Violence” (TraCe) in cooperation with Goethe University Frankfurt.

The authors—Frederik Schissler, Felix Bethke, Hanna Pfeifer, Constantin Ruhe, Regine Schwab, and Jonas Wolff—assessed trends in the internationalization of armed intrastate conflicts, combining quantitative data analysis with bibliometric research since the early 2000s and theoretical innovations—an approach that makes the work especially relevant for studying the transformation of conflicts in the republics of the former USSR.

Using data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), they show that internationalized intrastate conflicts—defined as conflicts involving the troops of foreign governments—rose markedly after 2008, reaching an unprecedented level by 2020, when twenty-seven such conflicts occurred worldwide. This trend is not merely a statistical fluctuation but a fundamental shift in conflict patterns: internationalized conflicts account for the majority of battle-related deaths in intrastate conflicts from 2004 to 2022. The authors distinguish between direct support (troop deployments) and indirect support (arming, training, intelligence, financing), demonstrating that while direct military intervention draws attention, indirect support has historically been more widespread. UCDP External Support Data (ESD) for 1975–2017 show that indirect state support—particularly arms supplies, training, and the provision of intelligence—was the predominant form of external involvement.

This distinction is important for understanding post-Soviet conflicts, where Russian intervention has often relied on hybrid approaches that combine a limited direct military presence with extensive indirect support. The Transnistria conflict (1992), the Georgian conflicts in South Ossetia and Abkhazia (2008), and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine illustrate this model, in which direct troop involvement is officially denied or constrained, while indirect support—including weapons, advisers, and intelligence—proves decisive.

There is also a specific regional pattern in the post-Soviet space. For example, Russia’s support is often directed at unrecognized proto-state entities challenging recognized governments (Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova), whereas Western support typically reinforces incumbent governments against Russia-backed challengers. This produces a characteristic regional model in which great-power competition generates competing interventions in support of opposing sides.

The authors’ network-analytic model is especially helpful for looking at how post-Soviet conflicts have spread to other countries. By treating conflicts as unfolding within networks that include the primary conflict parties and external actors with different ties and attributes, the model captures the multi-level character of post-Soviet conflicts, where historical legacies, ethnic linkages, economic dependency, and geopolitical rivalry intersect.

This framework identifies three potential drivers of internationalization: (1) changes in the characteristics of actors; (2) changes in ties between actors; and (3) changes in structural context that alter the salience of existing characteristics and ties. Each dimension highlights aspects of post-Soviet conflict dynamics.

With regard to actor characteristics, the authors emphasize the growing prevalence of Islamist insurgent groups as a core feature driving internationalization. While this factor primarily explains trends in the Middle East, North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa—regions that account for 82 percent of internationalized conflicts since 2010—it is directly relevant to part of the post-Soviet conflict landscape, including the two Chechen wars in the North Caucasus and instability in Central Asia.

The dimension of ties between actors is even more applicable to post-Soviet conflict analysis. The authors point to links (ethnic, religious, ideological), historical relationships (especially colonial legacies), geographic proximity, and interstate rivalry as key factors shaping external intervention. Post-Soviet conflicts display strong ethnic-kin dynamics—Russian support for Russian-speaking populations in Ukraine, Moldova, and the Baltic states; Armenian-Azerbaijani rivalry extending into Nagorno-Karabakh—that fit squarely within this analytical framework. The historical legacy of Soviet-era political and economic integration created durable connections that are activated in post-independence conflicts, with Russia claiming a special responsibility to protect Russian-speaking populations and to maintain influence in what it calls the “near abroad.”

In our view, the most significant analytical takeaway from the study is its treatment of conflicts as a mode of great-power rivalry. The authors argue that this is central to conflict internationalization in the post-Soviet period. They note that during the Cold War, superpower rivalry produced proxy wars in which “the enemy of my enemy may become my friend.” In the post-Soviet space, this dynamic is re-emerging—not as a simple replay of the Cold War, but as a complex regional and global competition. NATO enlargement, EU enlargement, Russia’s claims to a sphere of influence, and, more recently, economic engagement with China create intersecting structures of rivalry in which conflicts in Georgia, Ukraine, and possibly Central Asia become arenas for competing external powers.

The network model proposed in the study points to promising research directions for scholars of the post-Soviet period. Systematic comparison of patterns of external support in post-Soviet conflicts could show how intervention strategies have evolved, whether external support is reactive or follows established criteria, and how regional powers (Turkey, Iran, China) are developing their roles in interventionist activity. The model’s attention to non-state supporters is especially relevant in post-Soviet contexts, where private military companies, militias, and transnational political networks provide support that state actors cannot or do not want to provide.

In addition, the authors’ emphasis on coalition-based support suggests studying how multilateral organizations operate in post-Soviet conflicts. The limited and selective activity of the CSTO, OSCE monitoring missions, and informal Western coordination mechanisms represent coalition dynamics distinct from UN or NATO peace operations examined in much of the internationalization literature. Understanding why some post-Soviet conflicts attract multilateral involvement while others remain bilateral or trilateral could shed light on the conditions that facilitate—or constrain—the escalation of internationalization.

The gaps in knowledge identified by the study—especially regarding non-state supporters, mechanisms of indirect support, and temporal dynamics—point to critical needs in the study of post-Soviet conflicts. Since the region remains a key arena in which the transformation of the global order manifests itself in violent conflicts, a careful, systematic analysis of internationalization patterns, drivers, and consequences becomes necessary both for academic understanding and for policymaking aimed at limiting conflicts and ultimately resolving them.

As is well known, Israel is one of three countries in the world—alongside Libya and Sierra Leone—that has no monarch and, at the same time, no constitution.

That is precisely why the topic of constitutional conventions, which have become a substantial part of Israeli political practice, is far from merely theoretical for us as Israeli researchers.

Constitutional conventions—generally unwritten rules grounded in actual practice that define, guide, and constrain the actions of constitutional actors—have long been regarded as an integral part of constitutional architecture in common-law countries. The British legal system, in particular, relies heavily on such conventions to bridge the gap between formal legal norms and political practice. Civil-law traditions, however—dominant in continental Europe and transplanted into the Soviet sphere—have historically resisted incorporating unwritten law into their constitutional frameworks.

The post-communist experience created a distinct environment and deepened this resistance—this is precisely the focus of the article “Exploring Constitutional Conventions in Central Europe and Their Relevance to the Comparative Debate”, prepared by David Kosař and Attila Vincze for The American Journal of Comparative Law.

The authors identify two layers of legal formalism that “strangled” the debate on constitutional conventions in post-Soviet Europe (the Warsaw Pact countries and the former Soviet republics): first, the German/Austrian legal tradition, which emphasizes codification, closed systems of legal sources, and legal certainty; and second, the Soviet legal legacy, marked by “vulgar Marxism,” which viewed law as an instrument of elite domination. This dual inheritance produced a constitutional culture deeply suspicious of unwritten norms—norms associated either with legal uncertainty (in the German tradition) or with arbitrariness (in the Soviet tradition). The research question, therefore, is as follows: can constitutional conventions emerge and function meaningfully in post-communist civil-law systems—and if so, under what conditions?

The authors analyze four models of constitutional-convention development.

Czech Republic: The Judiciary and Political Struggle
Among the Visegrad countries, the Czech Republic offers the most favorable environment for constitutional conventions. The Czech Constitutional Court has repeatedly recognized constitutional conventions as binding sources of law and has even treated them as justiciable. Notable cases include disputes over the president’s power to appoint the Governor of the Czech National Bank (2001) and judges (2008).

In the landmark Langer case, the Supreme Administrative Court ruled that a constitutional convention had formed requiring the president either to appoint judicial candidates recommended by the government or to issue reasoned individual decisions explaining any refusal on statutory grounds. This amounted to a significant judicial constraint on presidential discretion through recognition of unwritten constitutional norms.

However, this judicial recognition triggered fierce political disputes. President Miloš Zeman, as is well known, openly refused to abide by unwritten rules. This resistance culminated in Zeman’s deliberate non-compliance with judicial decisions—he never appointed Mr. Langer to the judicial post despite the court’s ruling, although some compensation was ultimately paid.

Isn’t this an experience so familiar to Israeli researchers?…

Thus, the Czech case reveals both the potential and the limits of constitutional conventions under post-communist conditions. Courts may recognize such conventions and attempt to enforce them, but their effectiveness ultimately depends on political actors’ willingness to comply—a willingness that cannot be guaranteed in systems with weak traditions of constitutional self-restraint.

Hungary: Theoretical Rejection and Practical Erosion
Hungary represents the opposite trajectory. As early as 1991, the Hungarian Constitutional Court explicitly rejected constitutional conventions, ruling that no conventions, customs, or memoranda could regulate politics, since that would contradict the very purpose of a written constitution. The Court adhered to what the authors call a naïve view: that the constitution is a “closed and complete system of rules,” to be interpreted exclusively by the Constitutional Court.

This rejection had profound consequences for the development of Hungarian constitutional law. First, it officially excluded customary or generally accepted norms from constitutional scholarship and from the sources of law. Second, it established a model in which the Constitutional Court was expected to resolve every political conflict through abstract constitutional interpretation—what Kim Lane Scheppele termed “juristocracy.”

All the more curious, the authors note, is that informal practices inevitably emerged in Hungarian constitutional life, especially regarding presidential powers, parliamentary procedures, and appointments to constitutional offices. Yet these practices remained theoretically underdeveloped and vulnerable to political manipulation.

Viktor Orbán’s consolidation of power since 2010 has effectively eliminated any limited role constitutional conventions might have played. With a two-thirds parliamentary majority enabling constitutional amendments at will, Orbán’s government demonstrated an instrumental approach to law that left no room for unwritten constitutional constraints. Hungary’s 2011 Fundamental Law clearly enumerates the sources of law and denies conventions any legal status, entrenching formalism while paradoxically enabling abuses of constitutional rights.

A telling example concerns the appointment of the Chief Justice. Although a long-established tradition required prior experience within the national judiciary, in 2019 this requirement was ignored to facilitate the appointment of András Varga, a political ally who lacked general judicial experience. The government justified this breach through strict textualism, arguing that no such requirement existed in formal legislation—demonstrating how a formalist legal culture can serve authoritarian ends.

Poland: Systematic Exclusion and the Rule of Recognition
Poland displays perhaps the most theoretically consistent rejection of constitutional conventions among the Visegrad countries. Article 87(1) of Poland’s 1997 Constitution explicitly lists the sources of universally binding law: “the Constitution, statutes, ratified international agreements, and regulations.” This explicit “rule of recognition” effectively closes the Polish legal system to unwritten sources of constitutional law.

This clear codification of legal sources reflected lessons drawn from the arbitrariness of the communist era. Under communist rule, loopholes in the sources of law were deliberately exploited, and post-1989 reformers sought to eliminate such ambiguity. Building mechanisms of constitutional review required clear constitutional norms, making the notion of constitutional custom too vague to serve as a legal basis for judicial decisions.

Nevertheless, some informal practices have formed, including the principle of discontinuity of parliamentary work, which requires that all matters not completed by parliament be closed at the end of a parliamentary term, despite the absence of any basis in written law. In addition, Polish presidents developed a practice of refusing to appoint judges in certain circumstances and of exercising sovereignty over the armed forces in ways not expressly authorized by the constitutional text.

However, these practices remain theoretically unrecognized and politically contested.

Slovakia: Scholarly Activity without Judicial Recognition
Slovakia occupies an intermediate position. Unlike Poland and Hungary, Slovakia’s constitution contains no explicit list of legal sources, which in theory leaves room for constitutional conventions. Slovak constitutional scholarship has increasingly turned to this concept, especially since the late 2010s, often drawing both on common-law literature and on Czech developments.

Yet this scholarly interest has not been reflected in judicial practice. Slovakia’s Constitutional Court has at times referred to “established practice” or “constitutional traditions” in interpreting constitutional provisions, but it has not engaged in an in-depth treatment of constitutional conventions or offered any systematic conceptualization of them. Slovakia’s ordinary courts have not addressed conventions at all.

Differences in approaches to constitutional conventions across the Visegrad countries present an analytical puzzle. All four countries share similar historical trajectories: before 1918 they were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; after World War II they lived under communist rule; they transitioned to democracy roughly in 1989–1993; and they joined the European Union in 2004. All inherited the formalism of the German legal tradition and the instrumental approach to law characteristic of the Soviet legacy. Nevertheless, their approaches to constitutional conventions differ substantially.

The authors propose four preliminary explanatory factors:

1. Constitutional rules of recognition
The presence or absence of explicit constitutional provisions enumerating the sources of law appears to be a decisive factor. Poland and Hungary, where permissible sources of law are explicitly listed (excluding conventions), display greater hostility toward unwritten constitutional norms. Article 87(1) of the Polish Constitution and Article T(1) of Hungary’s Fundamental Law create formal barriers to recognizing constitutional conventions as legally binding.

By contrast, the Czech and Slovak constitutions contain no such provisions, making their legal systems more open to unwritten sources. This openness has had side effects—particularly in the Czech Republic, where the 2013 Civil Code explicitly incorporates conventions and customs into civil and commercial law, potentially normalizing unwritten law more broadly within Czech legal culture.

2. Levels of majoritarianism
The degree of majoritarianism—that is, the extent to which a parliamentary majority can act without institutional constraints—significantly influences the development of constitutional conventions. Constitutional conventions tend to arise where political actors are required to cooperate and compromise, creating incentives to establish predictable rules of interaction.

3. Constitutional and political stability
The formation of constitutional conventions requires time and repeated practice. It also requires sufficient political stability for patterns of behavior to become entrenched and recognized as normatively binding.

The Czech Constitution of 1993 has remained virtually unchanged, apart from the introduction of direct presidential elections in 2013. This stability has allowed constitutional norms to solidify as accepted practice. Despite frequent changes of coalition governments, the political environment has preserved the fundamental democratic rules of the game.

By contrast, Hungary adopted an entirely new constitution in 2011, explicitly emphasizing a break with the previous regime. Poland adopted a new constitution in 1997 and experienced a constitutional collapse during the rule of the Law and Justice party (2015–2023). Slovakia amended its constitution twenty-four times, many of the amendments substantially altering the structure of government; it experienced semi-authoritarianism under Vladimír Mečiar in the 1990s and, more recently, democratic backsliding under Fico.

4. Individual actors and intellectual networks
The authors stress that “people may matter even more” than institutions. The education and intellectual orientations of influential constitutional scholars and judges shaped each country’s receptiveness to constitutional conventions.

Although this study focuses on one part of the post-Soviet space—Central European countries that were part of the former Soviet bloc—its conclusions have broader implications for understanding constitutional development across the entire post-Soviet region, including the states that emerged from the former Soviet republics.

The experience of the Visegrad Group demonstrates that constitutional conventions can play a meaningful role in democratic consolidation—but only under specific conditions. Where political systems require cooperation among multiple actors (low levels of majoritarianism), where constitutional and political stability allow practices to become entrenched, where legal systems remain open to unwritten norms, and where influential legal elites support such norms, constitutional conventions may become genuine constraints on power.

For post-Soviet democracies facing similar challenges—Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, and the Central Asian republics—this analysis leads to sobering conclusions. Constitutional conventions are unlikely to serve as reliable safeguards against democratic backsliding. They may function as useful adaptive mechanisms in relatively stable democratic settings, but they cannot substitute for strong formal constitutional provisions, independent institutions, and a political culture committed to constitutional restraint.

The article “Connectivity and Competition in the South Caucasus: Geography as a Source of Power”, published by The International Centre for Defence and Security (ICDS, Estonia), addresses a topic broad enough to serve as the theme of a major multi-day academic conference. Nevertheless, Koen Claessen of the University of Glasgow succeeds in avoiding a superficial approach.

Koen Claessen’s January 2026 analysis of transport connectivity in the South Caucasus appears at a moment when infrastructure has become inseparable from geopolitics. The study examines two major transport initiatives—the Middle Corridor (Trans-Caspian International Transport Route) and the International North–South Transport Corridor (INSTC)—demonstrating how geography has been transformed from passive territory into an active instrument of statecraft for the three South Caucasus republics: Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia.

The armed conflict in southeastern Russia and Ukraine that began in February 2022 fundamentally altered the balance of power in Eurasia. Disruptions to the Northern Corridor through Russia, combined with instability along maritime routes through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, transformed the South Caucasus from a peripheral transit zone into a strategically significant node of global trade.

The Middle Corridor constitutes a multimodal network linking China’s eastern seaboard with Europe via Central Asia, the Caspian Sea, the South Caucasus, and Turkey. As the article notes, the institutional structure of the route reflects a complex intersection of national, regional, and great-power interests. The establishment of the International Association of the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route in 2017, followed by a quadrilateral declaration by Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Kazakhstan in March 2022, demonstrates attempts at multilateral governance. However, as the author observes, coordination remains “fragmented and insufficient,” while competing national priorities continually undermine collective efficiency.

Before February 2022, the Middle Corridor occupied a peripheral position within Eurasia’s transport system. With a capacity of only 100,000–120,000 TEU (twenty-foot equivalent units), compared to 1.5 million TEU for the Northern Corridor, it was primarily used for urgent, high-value cargo destined for Southeastern Europe. Transit times ranged from 16 to 20 days, and costs from $3,500 to $4,500 per forty-foot container, placing it between the faster but more expensive Northern Corridor (14–18 days, $2,800–3,200) and the slower but cheaper maritime route (28–40 days, $1,500–2,000).

The conflict in southeastern Europe prompted a strategic reassessment. The Northern Corridor experienced at least a 35 percent reduction in east–west shipments, as companies faced rising costs, insurance premiums, and political risks, including potential sabotage of railway infrastructure in Russia and Belarus. Demand for the Middle Corridor rose by 65 percent in 2023. Yet this growth paradoxically undermined the route’s competitive advantage: transit times increased from 16–20 days to over 40 days due to capacity constraints, eliminating its time advantage over maritime alternatives while maintaining higher costs.

This apparent contradiction—rising demand accompanied by declining competitiveness—illustrates the transformation of the Middle Corridor from an economic project into a geopolitical one, which is undoubtedly the study’s central analytical conclusion.

The route’s significance is now defined not by optimal cost-benefit ratios but by its role as the “most stable and important land connection between Europe and Asia” in an era of geopolitical instability. The author convincingly argues that recent disruptions—the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on ports, the 2021 obstruction of the Suez Canal, and ongoing Houthi attacks that forced 90 percent of vessels to reroute around Africa (adding roughly ten days)—have exposed the vulnerability of maritime transport, positioning the Middle Corridor as a critical strategic reserve rather than merely one of three options.

At the same time, the route’s dependence on rail, road, and maritime transport across several sovereign jurisdictions creates exceptional coordination demands that participating states have not met. The system suffers from railway capacity limitations: tracks remain non-electrified and lack double-track infrastructure; Kazakhstan’s infrastructure requires modernization; and shortages of rolling stock further constrain capacity.

Regulatory fragmentation presents equally serious obstacles. The absence of synchronized customs procedures, border services, and transnational standards reflects the prioritization of national interests over collective efficiency. This is particularly evident at key transshipment points such as the Khorgos Gateway dry port and the Caspian Sea crossing between Aktau/Kuryk and Baku/Alat. The duopoly of the Azerbaijan Caspian Shipping Company (ASCO) and KazMorTransFlot (KMTF) fails to generate competitive pressure for improvement.

The “Middle Corridor,” Koen Claessen notes, has become an arena of intensifying competition between the European Union and China, both of which recognize infrastructure as an instrument of influence. The EU has increased funding under its “Global Gateway” initiative: in January 2024 it pledged up to €10 billion for sustainable transport and energy connections in Central Asia, and in April 2025 the EU–Central Asia summit allocated €3 billion, launching a new strategic partnership. European officials explicitly state that this engagement offers “a different approach” from China and Russia, emphasizing local value creation rather than resource extraction.

China’s response underscores the strategic value of infrastructure. Despite significant overlap between Belt and Road components—specifically the China–Central Asia–West Asia Economic Corridor (CCAWEC)—Beijing seeks integration rather than competition, signing a Memorandum of Understanding with Turkey in 2015 and including Chinese logistics organizations as associate members of the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route.

This infrastructure competition reflects broader geopolitical realignments in the post-Soviet space. Azerbaijan’s balancing of EU and Chinese financing provides Baku with additional leverage while preserving strategic autonomy—a model that mirrors broader regional efforts to avoid excessive dependence on any single external actor.

Koen Claessen demonstrates how infrastructure in contested regions remains hostage to broader geopolitical currents, and how small states’ attempts to leverage geography for autonomy confront the reality that their transit value depends on conflicts and rivalries beyond their control.

Above all, the study highlights the limits of geographic determinism in international relations. While geographic location may offer potential leverage, translating it into sustained influence requires infrastructure development, multilateral coordination, and a stable geopolitical environment—conditions that remain difficult to achieve in the South Caucasus. States in the region may occupy strategic positions between Europe and Asia, but their ability to capitalize on that geography ultimately depends on the competing interests of external powers rather than on autonomous regional agency. In this sense, connectivity politics in the South Caucasus reveals both the opportunities and the constraints facing small states in the contemporary international system.

In January 2025, the research papers produced by the PSCR program covered the developments in such subregions as the South Caucasus, the Baltics, Central Asia, and Russia.

Kiryl Kascian overviews the situation concerning LRT, Lithuania’s public broadcasting corporation. Recently, a populist, far-right party, “Nemunas Dawn,” which gained a chance to enter the ruling coalition because of the extreme pluralism in the Lithuanian party landscape, proposed amendments to the law concerning the broadcaster status. The amendments would facilitate the removal of LRT’s Director General and thus diminish the independence of the media corporation. Opposition parties responded with filibustering tactics, and civil society organized rallies to protect media freedom from infringements, while also speculating about the personal aspects of the desire to oust the incumbent Director General. Eventually, the government decided not to fast-track the legislative amendments.

Against the background of the recently announced changes in the regulations concerning the official Russian migration policy, Alexander Shpunt outlines the main milestones in the development of a stable Vietnamese diaspora in Russia. He stresses the initially temporary character of Vietnamese migration based on the agreements between Vietnam and the Soviet Union, with subsequent turning of a part of the Vietnamese workers into an element of the “shadow market,” and main channels for the Vietnamese workforce to enter the Russian economy in the post-Soviet period. The demographic characteristics and networked human capital allowed for the creation of a stable and resilient migrant community that, at the same time, remains highly dependent on “exploitative market regimes” and “opportunistic criminals.” Based on the above, the author doubts that, after working in Russia, “new Vietnamese migrants (…) will all return to Vietnam” – and this conclusion may be extrapolated to other potential migrant communities from the “far abroad.”

The PSCRP team summarizes the strategic choices Armenia is facing at the moment. The authors view the country as caught between competing geopolitical ambitions, but at the same time, facing the prospect of tangible positive changes. The latter are, however, highly dependent on the position of the incumbent leader, Nikol Pashinyan, and the upcoming constitutional referendum. In the meantime, Moscow and Tehran are trying to exert influence on the political decisions made in Yerevan, and the Armenian diaspora is now acting against the changes envisioned by the Pashinyan administration. The authors conclude that “Armenia must end its strategic ambiguity and demonstrate that it is prepared to anchor itself in the Western orbit. And the West must be prepared to support that choice with more than rhetoric.”

Vladimir (Ze’ev) Khanin analyzes how the current wave of anti-government protests in Iran is viewed in Russia and Ukraine. The position of Kyiv is a vocal support for the potential revolution, since Iran is regarded as the main ally of Russia and one of its major arms suppliers. Moscow’s position is more complicated, since, although officially being Tehran’s ally, with multiple documents signed regarding this alliance, the official Kremlin maintains rather restrained rhetoric and avoids undertaking any sustained practical steps. This may be motivated by Moscow’s unwillingness to enter into direct conflict with the Trump administration, and by the arguments of Russia’s oil lobby. Russia’s reaction is mostly confined to diplomatic efforts aimed at the conflict de-escalation. The Israeli position is no less ambiguous, because of the presumed insufficient readiness of the Jewish state to debunk possible Iranian attacks, and the fears that the ayatollah regime is not weakened enough to fall because of external action.

Gershon Kogan thoroughly analyzes the strategic anxiety that Israeli-Azerbaijanian cooperation creates for Iran’s regional security considerations. Amid the internal crisis, Tehran’s sensitivity to external reference points is heightened, and Baku is perceived there as a “structurally inconvenient reference point,” whose very existence challenges the narrative of the “presumed inseparability of Shi‘ite identity from Islamic governance and clerical authority.” The outcome of the recent wars in Karabakh, influenced, inter alia, by Baku’s cooperation with Israel, meant a qualitative shift in Tehran’s northern security environment. For Jerusalem, strategic cooperation with Azerbaijan, which has a long border with Iran, is, among other things, a tool to generate “a persistent sense of strategic uncertainty in Tehran.”

Andrey Kazantsev-Vaisman outlines the opportunities that are now emerging for Israeli foreign policy in Central Asia. While the relations with Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan are already well-developed, especially upon the former’s accession to the Abraham Accords, the broader regional diplomatic efforts by Jerusalem might mean expanding Israel’s strategic contacts in the “Islamic world.” At the moment, Turkey, Russia, and China tend to assume the position of pragmatic tolerance towards such developments, Iran is largely absorbed by its own internal challenges, and other Central Asian states closely monitor the development of Israel-Kazakhstan relations, maintaining a cautiously positive view towards following the example. The most positive scenario for Israeli diplomacy can be the establishment of a permanent consultative format with the “Central Asian Six” (where now Baku is also represented), which can be non-institutional, non-binding, demilitarized, depoliticized, and focused on economic and infrastructural development.

Vladimir (Ze’ev) Khanin further draws the readers’ attention to the recent trilateral summit Israel-Cyprus-Greece. The parties have discussed “planning large-scale joint exercises, enhancing the operational readiness of their armed forces, and exchanging intelligence”; the issues of energy trade were raised, as well as the projects for establishing TITR and IMEC economic corridors. However, it was primarily the discussions on the post-conflict arrangement of the Gaza Strip that raised significant concerns in Turkey. Ankara perceives this move “as a challenge to its aspiration to replicate in Gaza the Syrian model — that is, to establish external control over the enclave and keep in power the radical Islamist group Hamas.” As Turkey is looking for actors that might potentially support it in the confrontation “with the Athens–Jerusalem–Nicosia triangle,” it might possibly count on Moscow. However, the latter’s position is rather ambivalent: although Russia’s relations with Greece and Cyprus have deteriorated in recent years, Moscow-Ankara relations are rather cool as well, mostly because of Turkey’s cooperation with Ukraine and the US, and regional ambitions for leadership and influence in the post-Soviet space, traditionally considered by Russia as its exclusive zone of interests.

Last but not least, as always, Alexander Shpunt has prepared his monthly digest of five research publications concerning the conflict dynamics in the post-Soviet space.

We are now already working on the research papers to be published in the next few months, so as to keep the readership updated regarding the post-Soviet events.