Non-Traditional Security (NTS) in Central Asia: Contending Paradigms and Current Perspectives

Abstract

This article describes a new non-traditional security paradigm specifically with respect to security challenges that Central Asia faces due to internal instability and ecological disruptions. While security remains a contested term, more and more analysts studying Central Asia have come to define it in response to broad and often interlinked domestic and foreign threats or challenges to these states. Indeed, the linkages between state failure and domestic pathologies and foreign intervention or diminution of sovereignty are palpable and visible in the policies of local governments and among the rival great powers in Central Asia.