Conference report: Central Asia and the South Caucasus in Transition: International Perspectives (August 2018) 
January 2019
On 30 - 31 August 2018 the international conference on „Central Asia and the South Caucasus in Transition: International Perspectives” took place in Tbilisi, Georgia. It was the 3rd conference organised by the PhD Support Programme EUCACIS and was supported by the ILIA State University Tbilisi, the city‘s second biggest academic entity. During the 2-day conference, panel debates covered such topics as security and stability, transition processes, as well as the role of the socio-cultural dialogue between Central Asia, the South Caucasus and Europe.
Read further on the event here.
A detailed conference report can be downloaded here.
France and Central Asia: Time for a New Vision?, CIFE policy paper No. 73
July 2018
Susann Heinecke reviews France's policy towards Central Asia and the current state of bilateral relations with the five Central Asian states Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. The paper examines the essence and outcome of France's engagement in Central Asia thus far, as well as its prospects for further engagement, in particular with regards to the renewal of the EU's Central Asia Strategy and the potential engagement in the Chinese OBOR initiative.
The paper can be downloaded here.
Zentralasien-Analysen No. 111: Katrin Böttger and Julian Plottka: On the Road towards a New EU-Central Asia Strategy
March 2017
In the current issue of “Zentralasien-Analysen” (No. 111, March 2017), Katrin Böttger and Julian Plottka published an article on the update of the 2007 EU-Central Asia Strategy. The authors claim that such an update should be in line with current changes in global geopolitics. In doing so, attention must be paid to coherence between the strategy’s aims and the recently adopted Global Strategy of the EU as well as the funding instruments for the region. Against this backdrop, this article aims at stimulating a debate on the update of the strategy as it is envisaged by the EU Special Representative for Central Asia for 2019. To this end, the development of the EU’s strategic priorities for Central Asia since 2007 will be portrayed and the debate will be encouraged with regard to three different areas: keeping in mind the question whether Central Asia can be addressed as a single region, the article suggests to focus more on preconditions for regional cooperation than on specific cross-border problem solving. In order to put the Global Strategy’s “principled pragmatism” into practice in Central Asia, the authors advocate a shift away from the EU foreign policy’s belief in progress. Furthermore, the article shows that the focus on specific priorities below the strategic level, as requested during the previous review of the Central Asia Strategy, has already been established – a circumstance that should be reflected in the new strategy.
(https://www.laender-analysen.de/zentralasien/)
Conference report: Die EU-Politik gegenüber Zentralasien und demSüdkaukasus zwischen regionalem und bilateralem Ansatz
January 2017
The first international EUCACIS conference took place in Almaty on 30/31 August 2016. Against the backdrop of the EU's new Global Strategy, the participants discussed the prospects of the Union's relations with the countries of the Southern Caucasus and Central Asia. Read further here.
A report in German was published in issue 1/2017 of the academic quarterly journal and can be downloaded here.