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.