Understanding Afghanistan’s 2014 Presidential Election

Summary

• Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the military operations in eastern Ukraine have overturned the post–Cold War norms that provided stability and development for the former Soviet—now sovereign—countries bordering Russia.
• Neighboring countries are recalculating their security and foreign policies through the lens of Ukraine, assessing their own security and conflict dynamics based on Russia’s newly aggressive policies and practices in Ukraine and the West’s response.
• To understand these newly emerging trends and dynamics, the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) led a scenario analysis, taking a medium-term, regional outlook to identify the forces and factors propelling the potential for further conflict. This analysis yielded a set of compelling narratives that provide a useful structure for understanding emerging conflict dynamics in this region.
• Ukraine has become a signal case, with the conflict there leading to reactions throughout the countries on Russia’s border.
• Countries in the region are actively testing the new contours of Russian and Western engagement, regional alliances and relationships, and regional conflict dynamics. In the context of the regions’ frozen conflicts, these stress tests are risky and could ignite further violence.
• The Georgia-Russia war in 2008 and the annexation of Crimea are emblematic conflicts and demonstrate a strategic pattern to Putin’s interventions. This archetypal constellation of factors—a destabilizing conflict that halts democratic consolidation, the presence of an ethnic Russian population to justify intervention, strategic geopolitical location—has implications for other vulnerable areas along the periphery, such as Transdniester and western Kazakhstan.

About the Report

As the Ukraine crisis escalated, staff at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) with experience in the region mobilized for a comprehensive conflict analysis with the aim of identifying plausible conflict scenarios and the forces and factors that propel them, ultimately pinpointing potential approaches that might prevent, mitigate, or resolve violent conflicts in the regions neighboring Russia. Using scenario analysis, facilitated by Alan Schwartz, Policy Futures, LLC, this report provides a framework for understanding emerging conflict dynamics in post-Soviet countries and identifies conflict prevention and mitigation opportunities.