Traditional and Non-Traditional Security Threats to Central Asian Security

Traditional conception of security emphasises territorial integrity and national sovereignty as primary values to be protected. In this notion, traditional threats are essentially related to external military threats that seek to undermine the security of the sovereign state and its territorial integrity. As the present book shows, the threats to Central Asian security are both external and internal. Today challenges from non-traditional threats are greater than traditional ones. Ethnic, religious and linguistic issues can create instability. Similarly, poverty, hunger, unemployment and unequal distribution of wealth as well as environmental issues are going to pose the biggest challenge to the regional states in the near future. The drying up of the Aral Sea is affecting the health and lives of hundreds of thousands of people cutting across republics. Water-related confrontations are not unlikely given the problems related to water-sharing in the region. This book focuses mainly on many of the non-traditional security threats to Central Asian states which can even affect relations between states and transform into traditional security challenges.