Unlike other Central Asian states, Tajikistan was quite late in starting practical cooperation with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), mostly due to the civil war that raged in the country in the first half of 1990s. It became a member of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council, which was later renamed the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC), in 1992, along with other former Soviet republics, but joined the alliance’s Partnership for Peace (PFP) program only in February 2002.
Dauren Aben holds a Master’s in International Relations from Kainar University, Almaty, Kazakhstan, and a Master’s in International Policy Studies and certificates in nonproliferation studies, conflict resolution, and commercial diplomacy from the California-based Monterey Institute of International Studies. Dauren previously worked as a senior project manager and researcher at the Nazarbayev University Graduate School of Education. In 2011-2014, he worked as a senior research fellow at the Kazakhstan Institute for Strategic Studies under the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan. In 2008-20