TAJIKISTAN’S GEOPOLITICAL LANDMARKS

Aloviddin BAKHOVADINOV, Khurshed DODIKHUDOEV

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Aloviddin Bakhovadinov, Leading specialist, Geopolitical Research Center, Russian-Tajik Slavic University (Dushanbe, Tajikistan)

Khurshed Dodikhudoev, Leading specialist, Geopolitical Research Center, Russian-Tajik Slavic University (Dushanbe, Tajikistan)

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Foreign policy of any state is designed to protect its national interests with the help of instruments ranging from military-political and economic to cultural and ideological. At the same time, there is any number of states unable or unwilling to create or to apply such instruments. While pursuing their strategic interests they prefer to coordinate their foreign policies with the policies of the world’s centers of power. Tajikistan belongs to this latter group. Having paid dearly for its newly acquired independence, it is actively developing its contacts with the rest of the world.

In the early 1990s, the country’s leaders regarded cooperation with the CIS, the Russian Federation in the first place, as their absolute priority. Later, however, in the last few years of the 20th century Tajikistan’s foreign policy acquired many more vectors. Before going into details, let’s look at the young Tajik state. It is a small country that covers 143,100 sq km (93 percent of its territory being mountains). Tajikistan is found in the southeastern corner of Central Asia and borders on Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and China. The country is rich in coal, marble, gold, silver (its deposits come second in the world after Mexico), tungsten, lead, uranium, zinc, etc. Sixty-five percent of the Central Asian water resources are also found in Tajikistan.

From time immemorial, its territory was part of the Great Silk Road that stitched together the major Eurasian cultural and………………

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