Publications

Pipeline Politics: Is Puting Running Out of Gas?
The Weekly Standard
by Alex Alexiev, Steven F. Hayward

Published on May 27th, 2013
The Cold War is now so over that it might as well be grouped with the ancient ice ages, but there is one echo rolling across Europe from East to West: the Russian attempt to dominate the natural gas market on the European continent. As the energy sector accounts for 25 percent of Russia’s economy, any large changes in energy markets present major challenges for Vladimir Putin. Those old enough to recall the Soviet gas pipeline controversy of the early 1980s​—​a high-profile fight of the Reagan administration to deprive Moscow of hard currency​—​are right to have a feeling of déjà vu, as Putin’s motives transcend honest commerce.

La Cámpora in Argentina
The Rise of New Vanguard Generation and the Road to Ruin
by Douglas Farah

Published on May 13th, 2013
The rise and growing influence of La Cámpora, is among the least understood but most important aspects of the Fernández de Kirchner’s government, with direct ties back to the turbulent and violent “dirty war” between the Montonero Marxists guerillas and successive dictatorships in the 1970s. In acknowledgement of their absolute loyalty to her, the president fondly refers to the Camporistas as her “little soldiers.” Rather than reporting through normal cabinet chains of command, its leaders respond only to the president and Máximo, operating as a parallel power structure and severely undermining the institutional oversight of their actions.

China’s Rapid Political and Economic Advances in Central Asia and Russia
Testimony Before the House Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia and Emerging Threats
by John Tkacik

Published on April 16th, 2013
Future Asia will not look like today’s Asia. Eurasia in ten years -- by 2023 -- is on a trajectory toward Chinese preeminence, and China is now being helped along that trajectory by a strategic alignment with the Russian Federation. Why does Russia side with China in a relationship that makes little apparent geopolitical sense in 2013? Might it be a prudent strategy for the United States to tip the scales in the Russia-China relationship once again, as we did 44 years ago, to prevent the emergence of a new hegemonic power in Eurasia?

American Weakness and Korean Consequences
The Washington Times
by Richard Fisher, Jr.

Published on April 10th, 2013
The current North Korean crisis has yet to play out. The regime could yet launch multiple medium-range missiles and conduct another nuclear-weapon test. However, naysayers already are concluding that a recent U.S. military demonstration of resolve was “provocative,” and an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) test has been postponed. The reality is that this crisis and many more likely to follow have their roots in American weakness.

Transnational Crime, Social Networks and Forests: Using natural resources to finance conflicts and postconflict violence
World Bank: Forests Fragility and Conflict
by Douglas Farah

Published on April 1st, 2013
This chapter addresses the role of organized crime and commodity trafficking in facilitating armed conflict and producing cycles of protracted violence that persist in postconflict countries. It does so by looking at three case studies that demonstrate the different factors that drive conflicts and postconflict violence. After presenting a theoretical framework — of positive and negative state influence, the vital role of the criminalized state and transnational criminal substate actors, and the role of nonstate actors — it examines the social networks required at different nodes of the commodity chain. Such networks rely first on traditional elites to act as “local fixers,” supplying the criminal state or nonstate armed actor with connections to the market and financial networks needed to extract and sell the commodity. These local fixers rely on “super fixers” to supply transport and war materiel, as well as to connect them to international “shadow facilitators” who can move weapons and commodities, launder money, and obtain the fraudulent international documents needed. It then uses the three case studies to argue that transnational organized crime networks for trafficking commodities, specifically timber, can emerge in diverse circumstances of state strength — and state absence — that lead to cycles of violence. In Liberia a strong but criminalized state looted the marginalized, resource-rich rural areas, while in the timber-rich Petén region of northeastern Guatemala, and in forested areas of Colombia, criminal nonstate armed actors have operated in subnational territories mostly beyond state control.