On 20 September 2024, a book launch, featuring “The EU as an Actor in Central Asia: External Impacts, Regional Responses,” was held at the OSCE Academy as part of the Alumni Conference. The event was led by both editors - Dr. Sebastian Mayer, DAAD Associate Professor at the OSCE Academy, and Dr. Jakob Lempp, full Professor of International Relations and Politics at Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences in Kleve, Germany. The collection will be released in early November and is published in the Palgrave Studies in European Union Politics series. The event was attended by the Alumni Conference participants (in person and online), the OSCE Academy students, and representatives of the EU Delegation in Kyrgyzstan.
As the editors highlighted in their introductory overview, the collection with its framework for analysis places an emphasis on the EU with its decision-making, preferences, and underlying drivers for its Central Asia policy. In the literature to date – often an extension of Central Asian area studies – the EU tends to be underspecified in this relationship. Four chapters on democratization, water cooperation, security provision, and EU action towards Central Asia, were presented in greater detail. Dr. Aliya Assubayeva, Post Doc Fellow in the SDGnexus Network, Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany, Dr. Vera Axyonova, Marie Curie REWIRE Fellow, University of Vienna, Austria, and Tika Tsertsvadze, Senior Policy Analyst at the Open Society Foundations, have contributed to the discussion and presented their chapters online. The editors also briefly mentioned five development path scenarios for the EU in Central Asia which form part of an outlook in the book’s concluding chapter.
Overarching themes in the chapter presentations were the effectiveness of the EU’s Central Asia policy and its tensions between normative and material objectives. In the subsequent Q & A, several participants addressed the extent to which the EU is able to transfer its liberal-democratic norms to the region. Editors and contributors replied that not least the vast distance of the EU from Central Asia largely accounts for it only being a weak normative power and that material interests most often prevail. The highly complex relationships between the EU's institutional actors were also discussed in greater detail. A second launch event for the book will be organized by Dr. Jakob Lempp at the CESS-ESCAS Conference in January 2025 in Lisbon, Portugal.