Thursday, 25 January 2018 15:26

Russian Hybrid Tactics in Georgia

1801Nilsson-cover2

by Niklas Nilsson

Silk Road Paper

January 2008

 

Click here for PDF version  

 

1801Nilsson-coverExecutive Summary

Since its independence in 1991, Georgia is the country in the former USSR that has been most frequently and harshly subjected to Russian hybrid tactics – a practice that gained considerable attention after Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. Russia has at times of confrontation with Georgia – a common occurrence throughout these 25 years – relied on a combination of multiple pressure points to influence the decision making of the Georgian government, particularly in foreign- and security policy.

These pressure points have included traditional sources of state power and coercion, including the use of military force or the threat thereof; leveraging geopolitical realities on the ground, most prominently Russia’s control over the two breakaway regions of Abkahzia and South Ossetia, as means to exert diplomatic pressure; and the exploitation of economic dependencies as means for establishing punishments or rewards for different policy choices. They have also encompassed subversive elements, including co-optation and subversion aimed at inserting agents of influence in Georgia’s political elite and society; cyber-attacks; and a concerted effort in the informational sphere to promote a narrative, in Georgia itself as well as in the country’s key partners in the West, on Georgia and its trajectory in domestic as well as international politics that is favorable to Russian interests.

The use of these measures, which this paper terms a toolbox for hybrid tactics, in order to attain foreign policy objectives are neither unique to Russia, nor to the twenty-first century. States have always deployed similar means at their disposal, and combinations thereof, in international interactions and several examples certainly exist of the use of hybrid tactics by the U.S. as well as European states. Yet this paper posits that Russia’s deployment of hybrid tactics, and particularly their expression in the case of Georgia, should merit special attention.

The standoff between Russia and the West following the former’s aggression against Ukraine has raised important questions about European security and particularly about the credibility of NATO as a guarantor for it. For NATO, originally designed as an interstate alliance with the purpose of defending its members against external aggression, and despite NATO’s rediscovery of this purpose over the last three years, Russia’s largely successful deployment of hybrid tactics in Ukraine demonstrated the complexities of modern-day warfare. Rather than embarking on an overt invasion of Ukraine, Russia deployed Special Forces without insignia to take over administrative buildings in Crimea in cooperation with local militias, and in combination with a sustained information campaign rendering outside assessments of on-ground developments highly ambiguous until facts on the ground were firmly established.

The key question for NATO to address is how quickly and decisively the alliance would be able to react to similar developments in one of its members, especially one of the Baltic States. Russia’s demonstrated ability to deploy subversive tactics such as the use of proxy groups in targeted countries and to leverage its general appeal among segments of their populations, fueled through government-funded information channels, can potentially reduce the need for conventional means of warfare or make them redundant altogether. The question is whether an attack in the guise of hybrid tactics against one of NATO’s members would be anticipated in time to clear NATO’s threshold for action in its defense.

It is therefore important to study Russia’s development and use of hybrid tactics in other cases aside from Ukraine. Improving the understanding of the various tools that Russia deploys to influence countries in its neighborhood, and especially of how these tools can be combined to reinforce one another, is helpful in order to assess and address risks and vulnerabilities that have emerged in the volatile security situation evolving in the borderlands between Russia and the West in recent years. This is relevant not only to countries in Russia’s immediate neighborhood, but in a much larger context. Although vulnerabilities associated with hybrid tactics are naturally felt much more acutely in countries like Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Azerbaijan or in Central Asia, the use of similar tactics, or elements of them, could potentially be deployed also against existing members of NATO or the EU.

Georgia stands out as a particularly important case study of Russia’s deployment of hybrid tactics. The country’s longstanding conflict with Russia has over the years made it a target of the full spectrum of hybrid tactics that Russia currently deploys in Ukraine and elsewhere. In fact, Georgia can be said to have functioned as a testing ground for many of these tactics, making Georgia’s experience relevant far beyond the confined regional context.

The case of Georgia also serves to demonstrate how the vulnerability of regional states connects closely with the sustainability and credibility of Western engagement with these countries. For long, besides the Baltic States, Georgia has remained the post-Soviet country that displays the most unambiguous political and public support for pursuing Euro-Atlantic integration and departing from Russian influence. Yet the message that Russia seeks to convey to the Georgian government and public, through a combined demonstration of military might and economic prospects, is that the potential rewards of pursuing integration with the West – either through NATO or the EU – are not worth the sacrifices involved in terms of either security or economic adaptation. With regard to both organizations, Georgia has undertaken demanding processes to conform to military, economic and governance standards, whereas the perspective of membership in either NATO or the EU has failed to materialize. In turn, this means that the ultimate rewards for these adaptation processes – security guarantees under NATO’s article 5 and full access to the EU’s single market – remain distant and largely unrealistic prospects for Georgia.

This reality has slowly dawned on an increasing portion of the Georgian population – and voters – of which a steadily growing minority now expresses skepticism towards their country’s longstanding pursuit of Euro-Atlantic integration. This view is reinforced by pro-Russian political parties and NGOs, as well as a range of alternative media, all increasingly active in Georgia since 2012. The common message of these actors is that they denounce the attempt to make Georgia a member of the Western liberal order as damaging both to Georgia’s security, due to the conflict with Russia that it implies, and to the traditional and cultural foundation of Georgian society. Instead, they argue, Georgia should pursue neutrality in its foreign policy and develop economic relationships both westward and northward. This vision remains utterly unrealistic – Georgia would hardly gain room for maneuver in its foreign policy by claiming neutrality; this would in fact close off the source of support that has up until now allowed it to limit Russian influence in Georgia, Yet it is becoming increasingly attractive to the segment of the Georgian population most affected by the deep structural problems of Georgia’s economy and the country’s ongoing economic crisis, and a larger proportion of the public that has long been disillusioned with the continuous and unproductive infighting among the country’s political elite.

Georgia’s vulnerability to Russian pressure in the different spheres outlined above should not be exaggerated. Georgia has endured a military invasion and a sustained severing of economic relations for several years, while the vast majority of its population, likely in part as a result thereof, remains supportive of Euro-Atlantic integration. However, a source of concern is the political vulnerability of the current government. Although the ruling Georgian Dream (GD) made an unexpectedly strong result and secured a constitutional majority in the October 2016 parliamentary elections, opinion polls indicate low approval ratings of the government as well as the political elite in general, and public disillusionment with Georgia’s development and prospects. This could quickly translate into a difficult domestic situation, as has been the case on several occasions in Georgia’s post-independence history. The fact that GD has built much of its support among voters on its ability to normalize relations with Russia, potentially increases the leverage associated with the types of hybrid tactics discussed in this paper. Facing weakened public support for its hold on power, the government could come under pressure to make concessions to Russia in exchange for the latter’s abstention from utilizing the various levers at its disposal.

Such concessions could involve, for example, accepting infrastructure projects in which Russia wishes to involve Georgia, allowing Gazprom a share in Georgia’s gas market in order to avoid renewed import bans on Georgian agricultural products, or acquiescing further steps towards formal accession of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. While such actions on Russia’s part would be manageable for Georgia as a country, they would potentially be highly damaging to GD as a ruling party.

This study serves both as an inventory of the foreign policy tools that Russia is capable of deploying against countries in its neighborhood and beyond, and as an approximation of their efficiency and limitations. The picture that emerges is that the toolbox available to Russia is at the same time multidimensional, sophisticated, and adaptable to specific regional and national contexts. Indeed, the military and economic tools available to Russia in relation to Georgia are very much attuned to the specific geopolitical context and economic interdependency of this relationship, whereas information campaigns in the Georgian, largely Russia-skeptical context, aim primarily to discredit the West and promote Georgian social conservative values. Yet the effectiveness of Russian hybrid tactics also stand in direct relation to the gains, in terms of security, economic benefits, and overall perspectives of inclusion that countries in the Eastern neighborhood are offered by the West. It is clear that the growing appeal of Russia’s preferred narrative of international politics in this region goes hand in hand with the West’s inability to counter it, in words as well as actions.

Click here for PDF version of the full study.

Read 15240 times Last modified on Thursday, 25 January 2018 15:39

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  • Dysfunctional centralization and growing fragility under Taliban rule
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    By Sayed Madadi

    One year ago, on Aug. 31, 2021, the last foreign soldier left Afghanistan. Since then, the situation in the country has only grown more fragile, marked by deteriorating living conditions, widespread human rights violations, and increasing political instability. One key contributing factor to the crisis is a dysfunctional centralized governance structure that has become more paralyzed and unresponsive under Taliban control. The group has greatly aggravated the problem with its rigid religious ideology and exclusive political agenda, but it well predates the Taliban takeover. The situation has steadily deteriorated over the past two decades as a result of a system that undermined local mechanisms of resilience, deprived people of access to basic public services, and marginalized them politically. With the Taliban at the helm, the system now only perpetuates further political exclusion, economic deprivation, and human suffering. The worsening economic conditions and political environment in the last year offer ample evidence of this.

    Ever hungrier population

    According to the most recent data from the World Bank, Afghanistan is now the poorest country in the world and the per capita income has declined to 2006 levels. The Taliban’s return to power exacerbated an already worrisome economic and humanitarian situation. Pushed to the brink by recurrent droughts, chronic cycles of violence, and poor governance, the insurgent offensive that captured Kabul last August created a shockwave that neither the economy nor the people could absorb. Before 2021, the latest poverty rate in Afghanistan was 47% and 35% of people reported that they were unable to meet their basic needs for food and other essential goods. Now, according to the World Bank and the United Nations, more than 95% of the population is poor, with more than 70% suffering from food insecurity. In an undiversified and limited economy that does not have much to offer, only a staggeringly low 2% said that they did not face limitations in spending. Rising prices caused by high inflation, the liquidity crisis, and a massive drop in international trade, coupled with sharply decreased household incomes, have reduced purchasing power for millions and increased unemployment to record levels, even as an estimated 600,000 people enter the labor force annually.

    Many of these sources of fragility, of course, existed before the Taliban came to power. For over a century, Kabul has grown in monetary wealth, human capital, and opportunities at the expense of the rest of Afghanistan. The economic wealth and metropolitan character of the capital has come with the centralization of state power and revenue collection since 1880. For decades, lack of opportunities — and later on conflict — brought the best and the brightest from around Afghanistan to the capital, thus gradually draining the provinces of intellectual capital and economic resources. Historically, the Kabul-based kings gave land titles and trade monopolies to traditional power-holders in return for revenue, while the latter extorted the local population to raise what was required to pay Kabul. The central state relied on the periphery for resources, soldiers, and legitimacy, but hardly provided anything in return.

    The 2004 constitutional architecture did little, if anything, to change that. As foreign funding flowed in at unprecedented levels, the concentration of political power and economic planning in the capital continued to draw resources and talent from the periphery, eroding the foundations of local resilience. Local and provincial power holders and economic tycoons survived only because they maintained strong ties with those who controlled financial wealth and political decision-making at the center. The immense wealth that the Karzais gained in the south or the riches that Atta Mohammad Noor was able to raise in the north were not possible without the backing of central authorities, which in both cases were highly formalized: Ahmad Wali Karzai was the head of Kandahar’s provincial council and Atta served as the governor of the lucrative Balkh Province for over a decade. Staggering levels of corruption and state capture enabled a select group to easily gain control of the country’s economic riches and move them abroad.

    The population was already struggling by the time the Taliban returned to power. Studies and analysis by the U.N., the World Bank, and independent observers had long warned about increasing poverty, unemployment, and cyclical droughts. After last August, the depletion of human resources and economic wealth and the withdrawal of the international presence in Kabul disrupted value production and business enterprise around the country. The crisis has left millions of people helpless, not only because of their reliance on the Kabul-centric legal regulatory framework, but also because most of the job market — the public sector and the NGOs — was funded by donor money from Kabul. The full international withdrawal shrank the economy by more than one-third and the implications of the political crisis disrupted the markets for much longer than the country could afford. After severe drought and conflict displaced over 700,000 people last year, hundreds of thousands have left Afghanistan since August 2021 in search of a better life.

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    Therefore, without offering social protection, public services, and economic opportunities, the centralized revenue collection continues to further deplete the provinces of resources that could otherwise help them mitigate the risks of economic and environmental shocks. The Taliban's interference in the distribution of humanitarian aid takes away from the neediest people their only means of survival in the midst of destitution, further compounding local fragility. Despite a year of trials and the infusion of more than $2 billion in aid into Afghanistan, the economic and humanitarian situation continues to deteriorate. Although conventional humanitarian assistance programs help people get by in the short term, they also reinforce a relationship of dependency on aid without developing opportunities for employment and private enterprise, thus reinforcing deeper vulnerability. These approaches — coupled with the Taliban’s centralized and unaccountable governance — build on ineffective modalities that disenfranchise local communities, compound economic deprivation, exacerbate environmental shocks, and intensify human suffering.

    A totalitarian regime

    The political and human rights situation has equally deteriorated under the Taliban. While the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission says more than 1,500 people have been killed by the regime since last August, some independent observer groups report that around 2,000 civilians from the Hazara ethnic community alone have been killed. Protests by women have been repeatedly suppressed and participants have been imprisoned, tortured, and killed. The government is populated entirely by Taliban clerics, excluding all other political forces and non-Pashtun groups. The persecution of Tajiks in the name of quelling the military resistance in the north and of Hazaras justified by ethno-sectarian divisions — the latter are mostly Shi’a — continue. Afghanistan is the only country in the world that prevents girls from getting an education by barring them from secondary schools. Most women cannot work, and a woman’s political agency and social status are tied to that of a man, who has to accompany her, fully veiled, anywhere she goes outside the home. According to Reporters Without Borders, 40% of all media outlets in the country have disappeared and 60% of journalists have lost their jobs. The figure for female journalists is even higher, at 76%.

    The Taliban have managed to consolidate their power within an Islamic Emirate that borrows significantly in structural design from its predecessor Islamic Republic, rather than introducing a new institutional architecture. Save for a few tweaks, the broader framework of the system has remained the same. The judiciary system, for example, and its relationship with the head of state have not changed. The Taliban have kept most political and governance institutions as they were, filling positions across the ministries and provinces with their own appointees. The major institutional change the Taliban have brought has been the removal of elections to establish popular legitimacy: The head of state is now a divinely mandated supreme leader, and there is no legislative branch. These alterations, while substantial on paper, have not changed much in practice. Given the highly centralized nature of the republic with an overly powerful president at the top, electoral processes had failed to produce either legitimacy or accountability for much of the last two decades. In many instances, elections provided opportunities for embezzlement and corruption by enabling actors with ulterior motives to buy votes and then abuse public office to enrich themselves. This was particularly true in the case of the parliament and provincial councils, institutions captured by a handful of kleptocrats who failed to keep an overly strong executive in check.

    The binary division of a republic versus an emirate was what bogged down the peace talks until they fell apart in the run-up to the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul. The fact that the group has consolidated its power through the very system it so vehemently rejected says a lot about the actual democratic character of the centralized political institutions. The narrowing of the public space under the Taliban, for example, indicates that the degree of openness for debate and democratic practices before 2021 was not necessarily a byproduct of a meticulous institutional design that checked the use of power and ensured accountability. Rather, it was attributable to the personal commitment to democratic values of those in control. For over a decade, Hamid Karzai, who ruled through tribal consensus and appeasement, enabled a conducive environment in which a vibrant media industry and civil society took root. Across Afghanistan, especially in Kabul and other key urban centers, demonstrations against the government were ubiquitous.

    After 2014 when Ashraf Ghani came to power, the democratic space began to shrink for a variety of reasons, chief among them the intolerance of the president and his inner circle. Crackdowns on public protests, silencing of independent media and civil society, and marginalization of political opponents and critics, including through the use of force, became increasingly common. In order to act with the utmost impunity, Ghani maintained a facade of accountability through the ministries while monopolizing state functions by creating parallel institutions at his own office. Since last August, the Taliban, undeterred by any prospects of accountability, have further centralized the structure by removing the subsidiary units of the Arg, Afghanistan’s presidential palace, and have instead directly utilized the formal government bureaucracy to consolidate their power, implement their extremist views of what an Islamic society should look like, and silence any voices of dissent. In other words, the centralized political and governance institutions of the former republic were unaccountable enough that they now comfortably accommodate the totalitarian objectives of the Taliban without giving the people any chance to resist peacefully.

    What lies ahead

    The Taliban, who claimed to represent rural Afghanistan, have further oppressed and marginalized Afghans outside Kabul as their core members continue to settle in the now dual capitals of Kabul and Kandahar. The Taliban’s thinking about governance based on a rigid interpretation of religion and ethnonationalist politics, as much as it evolves in practice over time, has further centralized political decision-making and economic resources in the hands of a few. As economic resources become more scarce, wealth will be controlled by those who hold political power at the highest levels.

    This will only deepen the drivers of fragility and conflict, including poverty, exclusion, and discrimination. With drought likely to become an annual occurrence by 2030, the financial and banking crisis set to continue for the foreseeable future, and the economy expected to keep shrinking, people across Afghanistan are becoming increasingly vulnerable. Moreover, the unsustainably large but still inadequate humanitarian aid budget, which has offered a minimal lifeline to the country, will be in danger of getting smaller in light of recent security developments that further limit the parameters of international engagement with the regime. The United States has reportedly withheld talks about the possible unfreezing of Afghanistan’s central bank assets held by the U.S. Federal Reserve and the U.N. Security Council has not extended travel exemptions for 13 Taliban leaders. These developments also mean that potential foreign investment, even from friendly partners of the regime, such as China, will likely take a long time to materialize. The overall impact of all of this will be to push Afghans across the country further and deeper into cycles of economic deprivation and political instability with substantial implications for health, education, and human rights, especially for women and children.

    However, as much as centralization allows the Taliban to consolidate power in the short run, it equally makes its long-term survival unlikely. The group led a highly decentralized, mobile insurgency where local commanders oversaw the war in their areas in whatever way they saw fit. That was vital to withstand the republican army and its partners, as well as recruit non-Pashtun commanders in the north, which later proved fatal to the republic. But now they are struggling to transform from a decentralized insurgency into a centralized government and what were previously strengths have become weaknesses. Commanders such as Fasihuddin, once trusted with complete authority, are expected to give up their autonomy and obey orders. The regime is also facing difficulties integrating key battlefield leaders into its new official structures in an appropriate way, as the appointment of Qayum Zaker to an arbitrary assignment managing the resistance in Panjshir illustrates. These trends stemming from the centralization of power will eventually push away those who were key to the Taliban’s success — similar to how President Ghani’s exclusionary politics alienated the republic’s natural allies. The Taliban have long prioritized their cohesion over any other political objective. Now, unable to govern and unwilling to share power with other political forces, the centralized regime’s disintegration becomes increasingly inevitable — and arguably has been expedited — as it fails to incorporate even its own senior political and military leadership into decision-making processes.

    Sayed Madadi is a Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy’s International Forum for Democratic Studies and a Nonresident Scholar with the Middle East Institute’s Afghanistan and Pakistan Studies Program. You can follow him on Twitter @MadadiSaeid. The opinions expressed in this piece are his own.

     Read at Middle East Institute

     

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  • Greater Central Asia as a Component of U.S. Global Strategy
    Monday, 07 October 2024 13:50

    By S. Frederick Starr

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    Silk Road Paper
    October 2024

    Click to Download PDF

    Introduction

    Screenshot 2024-10-07 at 9.55.36 AMWhat should be the United States’ strategy towards Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the region of Greater Central Asia (GCA) as a whole? Should it even have one? Unlike most other world regions, these lands did not figure in US policy until the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Though the new Baltic states entered Washington’s field of vision in that year, in those cases the Department of State could recall and build upon America’s relations with independent Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania during the inter-war decades. For the US Government after 1991, GCA was defined less as sovereign states than as a group of “former Soviet republics” that continued to be perceived mainly through a Russian lens, if at all.  

    Over the first generation after 1991 US policy focused on developing electoral systems, market economies, anti-narcotics programs, individual and minority rights, gender equality, and civil society institutions to support them. Congress itself defined these priorities and charged the Department of State to monitor progress in each area and to issue detailed country-by-country annual reports on progress or regression. The development of programs in each area and the compilation of data for the reports effectively preempted many other areas of potential US concern. Indeed, it led to the neglect of such significant issues as intra-regional relations, the place of these countries in global geopolitics, security in all its dimensions, and, above all, their relevance to America’s core interests. On none of these issues did Congress demand annual written reports.  

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    While all this was going on, the expansion of China’s navy and of both Chinese and European commercial shipping called into question the overriding importance of transcontinental railroad lines and hence of GCA countries. Taken together, these developments marginalized the concerns and assumptions upon which earlier US strategy towards GCA had been based. With Afghanistan no longer a top priority, American officials refocused their attention on Beijing, Moscow, Ukraine, Israel, and Iran, in the process, increasing the psychological distance between Washington and the countries of Central Asia and the Caucasus.  

    It did not help that no U.S. president had ever visited Central Asia or the Caucasus. This left the initiative on most issues to the GCA leaders themselves. Thus, it was Kazakhstan and not the State Department that proposed to the U.S. government to establish the C5+1 meetings. It was also thanks to pressure from regional leaders that the White House arranged for a first-ever (but brief) meeting between Central Asian presidents and the President of the United States, which took place in September 2023 on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. By comparison, over the previous year Messrs. Putin and Xi Jinping had both met with the regional presidents half a dozen times. Hoping against hope, the Central Asian leaders hailed the C5+1 meeting as a fresh start in their relations with Washington. Washington has done little to validate this 

     

    Additional Info
    • Author S. Frederick Starr
    • Publication Type Silk Road Paper
    • Published in/by CACI
    • Publishing date October 2024
  • Press-Release: The "International Kazak Language Society" Presented the Kazakh Translation of "Geniuses of their Time Ibn Sina, Biruni and Lost Enlightenment", in Washington DC
    Tuesday, 22 October 2024 13:36

     

     

    PRESS-RELEASE

    THE INTERNATIONAL “KAZAK LANGUAGE” SOCIETY PRESENTED THE KAZAKH TRANSLATION OF “GENIUSES OF THEIR TIME. IBN SINA, BIRUNI AND LOST ENLIGHTENMENT”, IN WASHINGTON D.C.

     

    Author Dr. Frederick Starr places great importance on  making his work accessible to a broad audience

    October 21, 2024, Washington D.C. | The American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC) in Washington, D.C., hosted the presentation of the Kazakh translation of the book, “Geniuses of Their Age: Ibn Sina, Biruni, and the Lost Enlightenment”, authored by the renowned American historian Dr. Frederick Starr. This translation was initiated and realized by the International Kazakh Language Society (Qazaq Tili), with the support of Freedom Holding Corp., and in collaboration with the Embassy of the Republic of Kazakhstan in the USA.

    Dr. Starr's book, “The Genius of Their Age: Ibn Sina, Biruni, and the Lost Enlightenment “, explores the lives and contributions of two outstanding figures of the Eastern Enlightenment, Ibn Sina and Biruni, whose intellectual legacies shaped both Eastern and Western thought. It highlights their significant contributions to science, medicine, and philosophy, and their role in the broader development of human knowledge. A major portion of the narrative details their biographies, achievements, and the lasting impact of their work on the intellectual heritage of the world.

    This is the second translation of Dr. Starr's work into Kazakh, following the successful release of his first book, “Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane” by the International Kazakh Language Society.

     

    The translation of this latest work was inspired by and aligns with the vision outlined in Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev’s recent article, “Renaissance of Central Asia: On the Path to Sustainable Development and Prosperity.” In support of promoting a shared vision for Central Asian prosperity, the book, which sheds light on the region’s profound intellectual legacy, was translated into Kazakh and made accessible to the public.

    The book presentation was attended by the author of the book Dr. Frederick Starr, member of the Board of Directors of Freedom Holding Corp. Kairat Kelimbetov, and Rauan Kenzhekhan, President of the International Kazakh Language Society (Qazak Tii).

    "This book is a tribute to the brilliant minds of Ibn Sina and Biruni, who made monumental contributions to science and thought long before the European Renaissance. The book also honors other scholars such as al-Farabi, al-Khwarizmi, Omar Khayyam, Abu-Mahmud Khujandi, al-Ferghani, and others whose names have entered the world's intellectual heritage. These two geniuses from Central Asia not only pioneered in various fields of knowledge but also developed research methods that are still relevant today,” said Kairat Kelimbetov, member of the Board of Directors of Freedom Holding Corp. 

     

    Rauan Kenzhekhanuly, the President of the International Kazakh Language Society, emphasized the significance of making Dr. Starr's work accessible to Kazakh readers: "The translation of this book into Kazakh is significant for us. Dr. Starr's work offers profound insights into Central Asia's historical contributions to global knowledge and underscores the region’s role as a vibrant hub of intellectual and scientific discourse during the Enlightenment. By reconnecting with the foundations of our region's 'golden age' and learning from both its successes and declines, we can pave the way for a collective future of prosperity and innovation."

    The book was translated and published by the International "Kazakh Language" (Qazak Tili) Society with the support of Freedom Holding Corp. Thanks to the support of the American Foreign Policy Council and Rumsfeld Foundation for hosting and partnering. 

    The International "Kazakh Language" Society (Qazak Tii: www.til.kz) is the largest non-profit organization dedicated to preserving and promoting the Kazakh language and cultural heritage. Through education, translation projects, and international collaborations, the organization aims to bridge cultures and empower future generations to embrace their identity while contributing to a more interconnected and culturally diverse world.

    Freedom Holding Corp. is an international investment company that provides a range of services, including brokerage, dealer, and depositary services, as well as securities management and banking services. The company was founded in 2013 by Timur Turlov, a Kazakh entrepreneur and financier.

    The book is available in the libraries of educational institutions in Kazakhstan, the digital version can be accessed for free on the Kitap.kz portal.