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This special issue aims to analyse the situation of the five Central Asian States fifteen years after independence and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Rather than give an exhaustive “appraisal” of these countries, the objective here is to elucidate the new issues with which they are confronted. It is for this reason that the focus here has been put not on the well-known stakes of the “Great Game” between Russia and the United States in Central Asia but on the less well-known issues that are nonetheless those of tomorrow.

This is also the occasion to reflect upon the umbrella notion of “Central Asia” under which the five republics are generally subsumed. Are the developmental paths of these countries similar or ought rather the paths followed be differentiated from one another? Catherine Poujol opens this debate by re-situating their independence in the long-term and by highlighting the weighty role the Soviet legacy is playing in the orientations of these new States. These States all share a certain unity of culture, language and history, as well as the same soviet heritage, one that, along with Belarus, makes them the countries the most entrenched in soviet logics of authoritarian paternalism.

The evolutions undergone have nevertheless been distinct and the economic choices since independence of, on the one hand, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, have differed from those of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, on the other. Their various policy orientations have also given rise to social and political realities that today can no longer be made to conform to a single schema: despite the fact that all the Central Asian regimes have over many years developed more hard-line authoritarian stances, the daily life of a Turkmen citizen bears no relation to that of the majority of Kazakhs. The future also heralds as much variability: under current conditions, it seems that the only state able to guarantee its citizens an increase in livings standards to compensate for reduced public liberties is Kazakhstan, whereas the other four States lack the means at present to put an end to the rapid and massive pauperization of their populations.

The questions raised here, then, bear as much on domestic policy as on foreign policy, the stakes of both being intrinsically interlinked. The Andijan insurrection, the motivations of which were both religious and political, is a case in point as this local event also worked to accelerate the entire region’s strategic reversal back toward Russia and China and came to symbolize the waning of western influence. More, as Adeeb Khalid shows, the inability of the local authorities, especially those of the Uzbek regime, to manage their relation to Islam in a more detached way contributes to focussing attention on the Islamist threat and at the same time to giving life to it. Also, developments in the political situation in Xinjiang, analysed by Rémi Castets, clarify the gamble China is taking in seeking to achieve stabilization by developing the “Grand West” economically, despite the fact that the separatist tendencies with the Uyghur minority there are still far from extinguished. The migratory fluxes of Central Asians seeking work in Russia will also have long-term consequences on the domestic and foreign policies of Central Asian States. They manifest a re-composition of relations between the former centre and its “colonial” periphery: as Marlene Laruelle shows, Russia has still not left the optic of Central-Asian societies, and is fast becoming one of their main “life-savers” on the economic level.

The increase in drug trafficking, the topic of Sophie Hohmann’s article, is, for its part, as much an object of international concern as it is an issue of domestic public health and a destabilising element for existing regimes, whose complicity with mafia networks is becoming less and less veiled. In addition, Gaël Raballand’s article confirms the impact, on the national and international levels, that the gas and oil issue is having, in particular in Kazakhstan and in Turkmenistan: the ability of regimes to redistribute a share of the income will be a key element for the political stability of these countries in years to come, when the time for a change in power has come and the first presidents vacate, whether willingly or by force, their places to their successors. Finally, China’s rise in influence in Central Asia, analyzed by Thierry Kellner, augurs a shift in the region’s geo-strategic positioning: the economic attraction exerted by their powerful neighbour, despite the concern it provokes in Central Asian societies, is not something regimes who lack allies willing to support their authoritarian political decisions can afford to disregard.

Lastly, it pays to ask whether the region has not, since 2005, effectively entered into a significant period of transition. The question of rotation in power – for want of real alternatives – will be at the heart of future political developments and will reveal the stability or otherwise of these systems formed of fifteen years of independence, the unity of their societies, the extent to which their borders have been interiorized and to which there is a consciousness of constructing a new civic identity. The elites stemming from the soviet nomenklatura, who played their historical role in the accession to independence, will sooner or later have to give up their places to new elites who, albeit no less paternalistic in the way they conceive their relation to society, will not have had the same soviet past and will have partly been shaped by the new realities of a post-bipolar world. The proportion of youths born in the region slightly before or after the disappearance of the soviet regime is enormous and they will come to exert a political influence corresponding to their sociological reality. In addition, in the most open States, like Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, new elites educated abroad, principally in Russia, but also in Europe, the United States and in China, are being educated and their long-term impact cannot be dismissed. As such this report hopes to contribute to showing that the apparent immobility of the Central Asian societies since the disappearance of the USSR should not give us any illusions – the region’s role on the international stage is certain to become greater.

Quinze ans après l’indépendance, quels nouveaux enjeux en Asie centrale ? / Sébastien Peyrouse

L'Asie centrale, bilan : quinze années de discours et de pratiques sur l'intégration dans un espace désintégré / Catherine Poujol

Le tournant ouzbek de 2005. Eléments d'interprétation de l'insurrection d'Andijan / Sébastien Peyrouse

Le narcotrafic en Asie centrale : enjeux géopolitiques et répercussions sociales / Sophie Hohmann

Les hydrocarbures du bassin Caspien : de la construction à l’affranchissement des interdépendances ? / Gaël Raballand

Le nouveau rôle de la Russie en Asie centrale : les migrations de travail des Centre-asiatiques vers la Fédération russe / Marlène Laruelle

La tranquille montée en puissance de la Chine en Asie centrale / Thierry Kellner