Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili is a nonresident scholar in the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is the founding director of the Center for Governance and Markets and associate professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on issues of self-governance, security, political economy, and public sector reform in the developing world.
Murtazashvili is the author of Informal Order and the State in Afghanistan (Cambridge University Press), which received the Best Book Award in Social Sciences by the Central Eurasian Studies Society and received honorable mention from the International Development Section of the International Studies Association. Her second book Land, the State, and War: Property Institutions and Political Order in Afghanistan (with Ilia Murtazashvili) is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Murtazashvili has advised the United States Agency for International Development, the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, World Bank, the U.S. Department of Defense, the United Nations Development Program, and UNICEF. She served as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer in Samarkand, Uzbekistan.
She is the president-elect of the Central Eurasian Studies Society and an elected board member of the Section for International and Comparative Public Administration of the American Society of Public Administration and a member of PONARS Eurasia, a research organization focused on security issues in Eurasia. She previously served as a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center.
A conversation: Terrified by the economic devastation which gripped Russia in the 1990s, Karimov decided that he would rather close the door firmly on market economics if the transition towards it risked even slightly going the same way as Uzbekistan's former masters.
Evan Feigenbaum, Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, Temur Umarov, Nicole Grajewski, and Asel Doolotkeldieva focus on strategic dynamics in continental Asia and how regional players—not the United States or the transatlantic West—are driving both diplomacy and regional integration.
Although the relationship between Afghanistan under the returned Taliban and Central Asia started with confrontation and confusion, it has evolved into a cooperation based on shared norms.
Foreign Affairs has recently published a number of articles on how the United States should engage with the Taliban government in Afghanistan, extremist forces within the regime, how the West can help ordinary Afghans, and the fate of the country’s women.
Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili joins to discuss the evolving geopolitical landscape in Central Asia - Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan - and how the Russo-Ukraine War is redrawing old spheres of influence and empowering Central Asian countries to pursue their interests.
Russia is facing some real challenges in reproducing and replacing their population which has huge implications for economic growth but also for relations with Central Asia.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has upended geopolitics in Central Asia, but perhaps nowhere more than in Kazakhstan, where President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has been increasingly emboldened in managing ties with Moscow.
As the United States moves forward in Afghanistan, it should have one primary objective: supporting the resilience of the Afghan people to weather the storms they have in front of them.
By already pouring vast amounts of aid into Ukraine, now the world’s biggest recipient of foreign assistance, with minimal supervision, the international community seems poised to repeat its earlier mistakes in Afghanistan.
This time Uzbekistan brought together special representatives and policy experts researching Afghanistan from around the world.
