Herzog’s Visit to Baku and the Hijab Controversy: Who Was Behind the “Israeli Connection” Narrative?

Israeli President Isaac Herzog visited Azerbaijan to attend the Seventh Summit of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA). Addressing the summit, he emphasized, among other things, that Azerbaijan, under President Ilham Aliyev’s leadership, had become a model of stability, demonstrating economic growth and strengthening ties with countries across the region. Herzog described the decision to hold the summit in Azerbaijan as symbolic, stressing that the country serves as an example of regional partnership, tolerance, and confidence-building.

Competing Islams in Central Asia

More than three decades after the Soviet collapse, analysts still ask whether Central Asia is “Islamizing.” The question assumes a single Islam and a single direction of travel, and it casts the region’s future as a contest between faith and secular statehood. The evidence points elsewhere. Central Asia is becoming more Islamic and more nationalist at the same time, and the real struggle is over which Islam will define its future.

Reimagining the Persianate Sphere: Iran’s Response to Turkic Regional Integration

In mid-August 2026, Iran’s First Vice President Mohammad-Reza Aref met in Tehran with Tajikistan’s Minister of Energy and Water Resources, Daler Juma. The substance of the meeting was unglamorous: oil bitumen and petrochemical exports, aviation fuel, a joint energy commission, and a first half of 2026 in which bilateral trade already ran some 15 percent ahead of the same period in 2025. Only after working through this ledger did Aref turn to build on the “extensive cultural, civilizational, and linguistic commonalities” between the two countries by establishing a “Union of Persian-Speaking Countries and Regions,” and to pursue the idea “seriously” through further meetings and visits.

Written Sovereignty: Turkey, Russia, and Iran in the Battle Over Post-Soviet Scripts

Script is rarely a neutral technical choice in this region. Which alphabet a state teaches its children is a declared vector of civilizational allegiance — a public signal of which power it expects to matter for its future. This is what "written sovereignty" means in practice: not legal independence, but the ongoing, contested right to decide whose cultural gravity a nation writes itself into. Three powers are currently making competing claims on that gravity in the post-Soviet Turkic and Persianate world — Turkey, Russia, and Iran — and they are not equally equipped to press the claim.

Azerbaijan Uses the Middle Corridor to Consolidate Its Geopolitical Position

The Middle Corridor, officially known as the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (TITR), is a vital logistics route connecting East Asia and Europe. It is a multimodal corridor combining road, rail and maritime transport. By bypassing traditional northern transport routes, it helps strengthen regional connectivity and improve trade efficiency. Azerbaijan plays a key role in this transport network, using its strategic position on the Caspian Sea to ensure the uninterrupted transit of goods between China, Central Asian countries and European markets.

What Azerbaijan’s Mediation within the Israeli-Turkish Disputes Reveals about the Current State of Affairs between Jerusalem and Ankara

One of the geopolitical aftermaths of the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, is the deteriorating bilateral relations between Israel and Türkiye. The South Caucasus state of Azerbaijan, which considers both states its closest allies, unsurprisingly once again serves as a mediator between the two antagonists. Drawing on expert interviews and qualitative data, this paper will be the first to illuminate these mediation efforts in greater detail.

Renaming the Map: Turkey’s Cognitive War for Central Asia and Its Persian Dimension

In November 2025, Turkish Minister of Education Yusuf Tekin made a declaration that passed largely unnoticed in Western strategic circles but sent a quiet tremor through the Persian-speaking world. Addressing the replacement of “Central Asia” (Orta Asya) with “Turkestan” (Türkistan) in Turkey’s national history curriculum, Tekin offered an explanation that was anything but pedagogical: the term “Central Asia,” he argued, had been deliberately introduced into academic literature to divide the Turkic world. The new curriculum, he made clear, was correcting a historical injustice — not updating a geography textbook (Anadolu Agency 2025).

Azerbaijan Uses the Middle Corridor to Consolidate Its Geopolitical Position

Reconfiguration of Power in the Middle East: The Russian and Post-Soviet Dimension

The revival of the Israel–Greece–Cyprus partnership reflects a broader realignment in the Eastern Mediterranean driven by Turkey’s expanding military posture, competition over energy routes, and debates on Gaza’s postwar future. These dynamics are embedded in larger connectivity projects such as IMEC and the Middle Corridor, while provoking sharp resistance from Ankara. Russia’s increasingly ambivalent stance suggests diminishing readiness to back Turkish ambitions as its own priorities shift toward Ukraine, Central Asia, and pragmatic engagement with Washington.

Moscow’s Weakness Behind the Crisis With Baku

The events of June 27, in Yekaterinburg signify not just a mishandled law enforcement operation —they mark a potential turning point in post-Soviet regional order. The deaths of two ethnic Azerbaijani brothers during Russian police raids have exposed the limits of Moscow's traditional tools of influence and highlighted the growing assertiveness of its former allies.