This week Azerbaijan, Georgia, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan each held various bilateral and multilateral meetings to discuss issues ranging from economic integration to security cooperation. Read these news stories and other highlights from Central Eurasia below.
This post was compiled by WOLA Intern Lesley Wellener.
- The 2014 FIFA World Cup began in Brazil on June 12, with armed forces backing up police in several high-crime areas of major cities. 2,700 troops were stationed in ...
Last week was the Center for a New American Security’s (CNAS) Eighth Annual National Security Conference. The panel discussions and keynote speakers’ focused on national security and foreign policy themes that resemble what have been discussed for years:
- Rising threat from state actors like Russia and China as well as rogue states like Iran and North Korea
- The metastasizing terrorist threat of al-Qaeda and its affiliates
- The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction
- Lack of U.S. leadership, ...
On June 16, seventeen faith and rights groups wrote an open letter to the U.S. Congress urging them not to fund the Counterterrorism Partnerships Fund (CTPF) proposed by President Obama in his recent West Point commencement address.
The letter states:
“Given the lack of information and policy engagement with Congress and others, we strongly urge that you not authorize...
Ties between the U.S. and Azerbaijan have become strained in recent months. The Azerbaijani government has pushed back vocally against American criticism of the country's human rights record, accusing Washington of interference in its internal affairs. Yet the two sides have mutual security interests and the tension involved in balancing this relationship was the subject of a...
For the first time, the Department of Defense (DoD) released a biannual report to Congress on its spending for Section 1004 counter-drug assistance, a major program that supports foreign governments’ counternarcotic activities.
The report, required by the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year (FY) 2013, covered the first half of FY2014, from October 2013 through March 2014. The numbers from the report already show...