Kazakhstan Initiative Brief No. 4, October 2014
On October 28, 2014, the Central Asia Program at the George Washington University held a conference on “Revisiting ‘Great Games’ and ‘New Silk Roads’ in Central Asia,” as part of its Kazakhstan Initiative. The conference was opened by DCM Yerkin Akhinzhanov, from the Kazakhstan Embassy in the United States.
The keynote speech was given by Mrs Fatema Z. Sumar, Deputy Assistant Secre-tary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs at the U.S. Department of State. Mrs Fatema Z. Sumar mentioned that these last few months there are been significant events that impacted the state of regional cooperation in Central Asia: globally the Ukrainian crisis and the following sanctions that marginalized eco-nomically Russia, the decrease of world oil prices, and the deterioration of the sit-uation in Syria and Iraq. But there have been simultaneously positive outcomes in the region, especially the peaceful management of the presidential elections in Afghanistan and the signing of a US-Afghanistan Strategic Partnership Agreement.
