Armenia, Georgia, Iran and Russia Plan to Expand Energy Cooperation

In Yerevan, on December 23, the energy ministers of Armenia, Georgia, and Iran as well as the chief executive of the Rosseti joint-stock company, which manages Russia’s power distribution grids, signed a memorandum on cooperation...

Attack in Dagestan Undermines Claims That Republic Is Stable

On December 29, unidentified individuals carried out an attack at the Naryn-Kala fortress, a well-known tourist site in Derbent, Dagestan, killing a Russian border guard officer and injuring 11 other people (Lifenews.ru, December...

Russian Strategy Seeks to Defy Economic Decline With Military Bravado

President Vladimir Putin concluded 2015 with the approval of a revised National Security Strategy, which defines the strengthening of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as a threat and commits to countering it by...

Office of Largest Opposition Party in Georgia Comes Under Attack

On the night of December 9, unidentified assailants attacked an office of the most influential opposition party of Georgia, United National Movement (UNM), in the town of Dedoplistskaro, near the capital of Tbilisi (Civil...

Young Islamic Radicals Carry out Arson Attacks on Sufi Tombs in Chechnya

Chechnya’s two-century-old Sufi tradition experienced its first crisis 30 years ago, when the first Salafists appeared in the republic. The Salafists did not simply proclaim the supremacy of their teachings, but aspired to take...

Russia and the TAPI Pipeline

On December 13, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India broke ground on the constructions of a new natural gas pipeline that will carry Turkmenistani gas eastward toward the other three partner countries (Tribuneindia.com,...

Conserved Conflict: Russia’s Innovations in Ukraine’s East

Russia’s conflict undertaking in Ukraine’s east fits within patterns familiar from other post-Soviet conflicts, initiated by Russia and conserved on Russian terms with international assistance (see EDM, December 17).

However,...

Russia’s Zapad 2013 Military Exercise: Lessons for Baltic Regional Security

Zapad 2013 was a wide-scale military exercise carried out by the Russian and Belarusian military forces in September 2013. The joint maneuvers, which were held in Belarus and western Russia, simulated an incursion by...

Six Years at Sea... And Counting: Gulf of Aden Anti-Piracy and China's Maritime Commons Presence

Now Available from the Jamestown Store

Well over six years of Chinese anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden have directly supported People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) modernization goals and provided invaluable...

Jamestown Fellow Peter Mattis writes on China's Military Intelligence system for War on the Rocks

Jamestown Fellow and previous editor of China Brief Peter Mattis wrote “China's Military Intelligence System Is Changing" for War on the Rocks on December 29th. 

AFP Quotes Jacob Zenn

Jamestown Fellow Jacob Zenn was quoted by the AFP on the possibility of improving relations between Boko Haram (a.k.a. Islamic State West Africa Province) and Islamic State provinces in Libya in the coming year.