By Natalia Konarzewska
April 15, 2020, the CACI Analyst
Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan visited Georgia on March 3-4 to discuss bilateral relations and held several high-profile meetings with top politicians including his Georgian counterpart Giorgi Gakharia and president Salome Zurabishvili. This is Pashinyan’s third visit to Georgia since he assumed office in 2018, following a peaceful power shift ousting the previous unpopular regime. His government has made a broader effort to reinvigorate ties with Georgia. Despite fundamentally different geopolitical outlooks and various challenges, Tbilisi and Yerevan have maintained good neighborly relations based on political pragmatism. Yet their partnership still has room for improvement.
By Natalia Konarzewska
November 12, 2019, the CACI Analyst
On September 11-12, Kazakhstan’s new President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev paid his first official visit to China, aiming to upgrade bilateral ties and generate more Chinese investment in the country. Yet the official rosy picture of flourishing bilateral relations is clouded by the plight of ethnic Kazakhs inhabiting China’s Xinjiang region and the social and environmental concerns surrounding Chinese investments in Kazakhstan. For the past several years, China’s economic clout in the country has been growing but social attitudes towards China have simultaneously deteriorated rapidly, resulting in a rise of anti-Chinese sentiment and protests – the latest taking place in Kazakhstan’s major cities in early September. Moreover, Kazakhstan is undergoing a political transition process which makes the country even more vulnerable to the strong influence of its eastern neighbor.
The Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst is a biweekly publication of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program, a Joint Transatlantic Research and Policy Center affiliated with the American Foreign Policy Council, Washington DC., and the Institute for Security and Development Policy, Stockholm. For 15 years, the Analyst has brought cutting edge analysis of the region geared toward a practitioner audience.
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