Asia-Pacific Archive

Recent armed clashes in Tajikistan have raised new questions about Central Asia’s stability, just as China is deepening its role in the region and tying it to signature trade and investment plans. Chinese leaders have touted the region as an essential part of Beijing’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative, a land- and sea-based infrastructure network to connect eastern China with Western Europe through what it calls the Silk Road Economic Belt and the Maritime Silk Road. But China is not alone in Central Asia. Overlapping interests with Russia, the long-time kingmaker in a region that was part of the Soviet […]

On Oct. 20, 2014, Joko Widodo, popularly referred to as Jokowi, was sworn in as Indonesia’s new president—a champion of the people and pin-up for clean, open and efficient governance. What a difference a year can make. Over his first year in office, the limits to Jokowi’s power, political agenda and capacity to manage complex relationships have been repeatedly exposed. Powerful political oligarchs, an entrenched and entitled bureaucracy, an army eager to reinvigorate its relevance and a corruption-riddled justice sector—to name a few—were always going to present significant challenges to Jokowi’s presidency, and they didn’t delay. One of the most […]

On Monday, as U.S. President Barack Obama and other world leaders spoke loftily about diplomacy and international cooperation at the United Nations General Assembly, a picture of chaos and destruction materialized thousands of miles away, in Afghanistan, a country whose future depends to a large degree on decisions taken by the people giving speeches this week in New York. As the U.N. gathering got underway, Taliban fighters rolled into Kunduz, one of Afghanistan’s largest cities, and, in a manner reminiscent of last year’s fall of Mosul, Iraq, to the self-declared Islamic State, they took control without much resistance. It was […]