China and North East Asia Group -

The Griffith Asia Insitute's China and North East Asia Group invite you to attend

 

 

When: Tuesday 11 August, 2015, 12:30 – 2:00pm

Where: Level 7 Webb Center Board Room, Queensland College of Art, Griffith University

 

 

Over the past two decades, post-Soviet Central Asia has become the focal point of the so-called New Silk Road projects – large-scale initiatives for the improvement of regional transport and communication infrastructure. Subsequently, the regional weight of Northeast Asian donors has been increasing, most recently exemplified by Beijing's Silk Road Economic Belt initiative. Besides geopolitical competition between their proponents and financial sponsors (Beijing, Moscow, Tokyo and Washington), such “connectivity” projects and power relations deriving from them are of crucial importance for national elites in Central Asia. This presentation focuses on the political implications of financial aid flows from China, Japan and South Korea for Central Eurasian regimes. It seeks to address questions, such as: Do Northeast Asian powers compete or cooperate in Central Asia? Is there a link between foreign aid flows and natural resource endowments? Can individual elite factions instrumentalise access to foreign aid as both source of rent and leverage in domestic politics? This analysis is equally important for our understanding of the agency that Central Asian countries demonstrate in international affairs, thus dismissing their objectification as pawns in the so-called New Great Game.

 

Mr Nikolay Murashkin is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge with his thesis focusing on Japanese developmental finance and foreign policy-making vis-à-vis post-Soviet Eurasia: Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan. Prior to his academic career, Mr Murashkin has worked as analyst in a London-based bank on commodity finance transactions in Central Asia and Eastern Europe.  He was once a Japan Foundation Visiting Fellow at Waseda University, Tokyo.  He has published in English and Russian journals and is the winner of the 1st prize of the Russian Association of Japanese Studies for the best 2012 academic paper by a young scholar.

 

Numbers are limited and reservations are essential and a light lunch will be provided.  To RSVP contact Natasha Vary at email: events-gai@griffith.edu.au or tel 37355322 by 5:00pm Friday 7 August, 2015.