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Paper abstract

This paper investigates Uzbekistan’s climate change trajectory by understanding its past policy strategy and the changes to tile what its future policies would shape with consideration of the current geopolitical tension. The bilateral and multilateral agreements such as the Trade Investment Framework Agreement (TIFA), Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), Paris Agreement, and other relevant agreements are dissected in this paper to grasp the context of what this could mean for the region. Also, evaluate the gaps which lead to environmental disasters such as the lack of strategic environmental assessment (SEA) tools to mitigate current and future environmental crises such as the Aral Sea Disaster and the fertilizer crisis in Uzbekistan. Recommendations to move forward on the Climate Change front in Uzbekistan is to implement data gathering on environment-related indicators. Uzbekistan’s strategy to move towards its national interest is to provide a safe environment for its people and simultaneously maintain its national role and duties that it signed in the Paris Agreement. A joint initiative with neighboring countries that are doing well in collecting regional statistics. This is especially important as Uzbekistan is surrounded by a geopolitical haze encircled by Afghanistan’s Taliban and Russia’s military operations.

Keywords: Uzbekistan, Central Asia, Climate Change, Climate Change Grant, World Bank, UNFCCC, Environmental Disaster

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This paper focuses on the Russia-Ukraine war and its impact on the socio-economic, political, and cultural life of the neighbouring country, Georgia. In 2022, 222,274 Russian immigrants entered Georgia, and their influx triggered the debate about migrants' lives in Georgian society and its socio-economic and political dynamics. The research tries to answer the question, what are the Russian migrant's experiences in Georgia, and how are they dealing with social, political and economic life? The study is based on qualitative sociological research and data collected through in-depth interviews with Russian migrants. Research reveals that most of the migrants were economically active, and the majority of the immigrants were men, that somehow reflects the gender-specific phenomena.

Interestingly, 30% of the respondents were self-employed, the remaining 70% were earning their livelihood by depending upon the labour market of the other countries, and most of them were engaged in IT-related fields. Migrants invested in real estate or started small businesses such as opening cafe-bars, entertainment facilities, sports, yoga halls, and dog hotels and started new unexploited economic activities. All the respondents opened bank accounts in Georgia and were not having problems from the structural level institutions. Apart from this, some respondents were sceptical and perceived that at the societal level, their presence was not welcomed. In this regard, one of the respondents shared “Russians are not welcomed in Georgia. I have never seen such attitude in Turkey. This makes me feel uncomfortable”. This research concludes that the Russian migrant in Georgia can be a possible source to generate new economic activities, can be considered as potentially productive human resources, and may impact the labour market. However, there is a potential threat connected with the growing economic activities of the Russian migrants, so this is the state’s responsibility to adopt precautionary measures which may safeguard the interest of the state and its people since people have a reservation about the growing influx of Russian in Georgia which is based on the historical deals between Georgian and Russia.

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The proposed paper investigates the triadic relations between the state, society, and religion’s relations in republican Afghanistan (2001-2021) with respect to political order. It contends that Afghanistan’s failure of the political order is inherent in the state’s inability to carve out a suitable model of pluralism to administer the role of religion both in polity and society. The tension between secular and Islamist forces has put the political order at bay. To understand the tension, the paper borrows Stephen Monsma and Christopher Soper framework of pluralism to examine three sets of questions. First, how did the state regulate religion, or in the other words, how did the state strike a balance between public order and social safety on the one hand and religious practices on the other? Second, to what extent the state employed Islam to manufacture unified national culture and forge common values? And lastly, how neutral was the state in terms of supporting or weakening a specific religious or secular idea? Following an examination of different conceptions of secularism in Afghanistan, the paper proposes pluralist secularism as an appropriate model to construct what Alfred Stepan calls “twin tolerations” for a deeply divided but at the same time religious society.