On 5 November 2015, Assoc. Professor Nargis Kassenova gave a seminar on the topic of “Security in Central: Sources of State Resilience

Director of the Central Asian Studies Center (CASC) assoc. professor of KIMEP University Nargis Kassenova in his seminar on the topic of “Security in Central: Sources of State Resilience” mentioned that the topic of security has a wide coverage and contains many dimensions. Within this broad topic, the focus of the main theme would be the political security and organizational stability. Professor Kassenova provided general information about state weakness and fragility of Central Asian states from number of various international indexes related with the issue.
In liberal democracies legitimacy, state capacity and rule of law are core assumptions for stability. However we cannot consider Central Asian countries as liberal democracies, yet somehow they are managing to stay stable. During the seminar, professor Kassenova mentioned that in their research they try to identify the reasons of this stability and as a result found out that Central Asian countries has a different kind of stability that could explain by the “Machiavellian principality”.
Continuing on this theme professor Kassenova provided brief information about principality theory. Moreover pointed out that Central Asian leaders are successfully implementing the skillful prince, lion and fox techniques from the Machiavelli’s Prince Book and adding to that could adapt themselves to current situations, therefore continuing to maintain their governance. Alongside with these skills the successfully functioning bureaucracy and governors are also contributing to stability by keeping order in their regions. Furthermore, in their analysis Kyrgyzstan has been put in a special case from other Central Asian countries since it has a parliamentary system and President Atambayev couldn’t become a totally prince. Due to such factors, the structure in Kyrgyzstan is more flexible and fluid; this flexibility showed that in some regions, and in some events, there has been cases where the authority has been shared with certain local powerful authorities.
At the end of the seminar participants has discussed different topics related to Security in Central Asia.