Post — Soviet Politics and Energy Markets: Introduction
This article series explores the role that hydrocarbon economics plays in the geopolitical dynamics between post-Soviet states, by applying a data scientific methodology that quantifies geopolitical phenomena in case studies concerning regional conflicts after the fall of the USSR.
The term “Post — Soviet” may have sufficed to describe the 15 newly independent republics in the 1990s, as they began navigating the tricky path from socialist planned economies to sovereign capitalist states. However, after thirty years of evolution and soul — searching in the context of a transforming international order, these countries now represent distinct political, economic and social realities.
This motley crew of nation states is also a paradox of opportunity and risk. Perhaps a legacy of the Soviet Union, the countries have highly educated populations and strong manufacturing and research traditions. With an average education index of 0.7574 (excluding Baltic states), the post — Soviet states are in the 70th percentile with respect to their global peers.
They are also well endowed with natural resources such as metals and hydrocarbons. Countries such as Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan are regional and global leaders in hydrocarbon and metal production, and other post — Soviet states also attract significant investment for natural resource extraction and processing.
Well educated and well — endowed with reserves of valuable natural resources, the post — Soviet clique is a potential treasure trove of underfunded growth opportunities.
Nevertheless, the region also hosts some of the most intransigent ethnic and territorial conflicts of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including the Chechen Wars, the Nagorno Karabakh Wars and the War in Donbas. According to Gordon M. Hahn, post — Soviet conflicts have led to the death of at least 196,000 people between 1990 and 2013. Furthermore, the region’s geopolitical dynamics are closely correlated with affairs in the Middle East and Central Asia, due to a more assertive and opportunistic Russian foreign policy, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, resurgent local pockets of Islamic nationalism and the Syrian civil war.
The siren’s call of economic opportunity in the region is formidable, but regional affairs are pockmarked with High-Impact-Low-Probability Events (HILP). Therefore, stakeholders with regional exposure require tools that extract granular insights in real — time, to monitor potential operational risks. Open-source intelligence (OSINT), and unstructured data from media, social media and official channels in particular, are a wellspring of actionable insights that can be harnessed by leveraging cutting edge tools in data science (DS), machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP) and computer science (CS).
In this series, we demonstrate ideas for using NLP and time series analysis to accurately map and analyze socio — economic, political and geopolitical risk in the post — Soviet region. Using pipelines that integrate conventional and unconventional social, economic and political data, we analyse the relationship between hydrocarbon market dynamics and political dynamics in case studies of significant political events in the post — Soviet region.
The first article of the series will focus on the ethnic and territorial conflict between two post-Soviet countries, Republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan, over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. Although the geopolitical and ethnic context may be prevailing factors in this confrontation, we focus our attention on the impact of hydrocarbon market fluctuations on the dynamics of diplomacy and warfare in the conflict.
