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The article contains an overview of the activities of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA), a structure aimed at creating a comprehensive mechanism for developing and reconciling the positions of Asian countries on key security issues. The CICA is a forum that many regional states have joined as permanent participants. Eight countries and five international organizations, including the U.N., currently have an observer status at the CICA, which cooperates with existing regional organizations such as SCO, ASEAN, and OIC in a number of specific areas. The current concept of CICA's work is aligned with five main spheres: military and political collaboration; the fight against new challenges and threats, including terrorism; drug trafficking; transnational crime and human trafficking; as well as the economic, environmental and human dimensions. Cooperation with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, whose members (including the observer countries) are all also members of the Conference, will be of great importance for the further development of CICA. The presence of both resource-producing countries and large oil and gas importers in the organization creates the preconditions for the formation of an energy block within its framework, which will increase the energy security of its member states. The authors note that the interaction between ASEAN and the CICA can be based on five points required for building a "community of common destiny," which were set forth by President of the People's Republic of China Xi Jinping in Jakarta: (1) adhere to the principle of trust and strive for good neighborliness; (2) adhere to the principle of cooperation and mutual benefit; (3) constantly provide mutual assistance; (4) adhere to the principle of "living in perfect harmony"; (5) adhere to the principle of openness and tolerance. The authors note that the problem of Afghanistan can become a point of contact and development of joint approaches and strategies of the CICA and the OIC in the context of international and regional security. The author concludes that the transformation of the CICA into the Organization for Security and Development of Asia, proposed by Kazakhstan, would mean an expansion of the conference format and a turn towards solving new problems. In addition, the urgent task of the CICA at present is the transition to qualitatively new levels of cooperation—preventive diplomacy and conflict prevention.

The authors discuss the evolution of religious identity of Azerbaijan and the impact of Middle Eastern actors (Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey) on the process. Today, the pro-Islamic leaders of the Middle East are attempting, with the persistence that can hardly be overestimated, to move into the Southern Caucasus, one of the world's strategically important regions. Thus, the uncompromising rivalry of religious ideologies is hardly surprising. It means that the national and religious identities of post-Soviet Azerbaijan have come to the fore in the context of Iranian-Turkic, Iranian-Arab and Shi'a-Sunni confrontation. Today, there are enough drivers behind the already obvious awareness of their religious identity among young Azeris. The complicated search for national and religious identities in independent Azerbaijan is driven by an outburst of national and religious sentiments during the protracted Karabakh conflict and two wars with Armenia (in 1992-1994 and 2020). The process is unfolding under the huge influence of theocratic Shi'a Iran, the closest neighbor with its twenty-five million-strong Azeri diaspora; proliferation of the puritanical Wahhabi teaching of Saudi Arabia and Salafism as its export variant throughout the Caucasus, and, last but not least, strategic rapprochement with Turkey that is moving away from nationalism towards Islamism. This has made Azerbaijan a fertile soil for a confrontation within the multipolar Islamic world, which is expanding the geography of its conflicts to the Southern Caucasus. The proxy wars in Syria and Iraq, in which the Shi'a-Sunni confrontation is also obvious may destabilize the Caucasus in the future. Here the authors assess the impact of the Middle Eastern heavyweights—Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey— on the process of shaping the Azeri religious identity as an Islamic political factor.

Realists characterize the contemporary international system as a field of competing units of various sizes and capabilities, struggling by means of strategies of self-advancement to achieve goals that are sometimes common, sometimes contradictory. The nation-state is the fundamental unit in the realist constellation of actors. Large and resourceful states can achieve their goals through partnership, influence, alliance, demand, and coercion. Small and less resourceful states find the strategies at their disposal more constrained. Hence small states are encouraged by realist doctrine to pursue strategies of aggregation, coalition-formation, and integration. Thus, realist prescriptions for the small state encourage strategies that run counter to the realist explanation of international dynamics. Are realist policy prescriptions for the small state necessarily anti-realist? This paper addresses this question through an analysis of realist theory with respect to the foreign policy strategies of a small Central Asian state, Kyrgyzstan. References. Adapted from the source document.