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Several destabilizing dynamics persist throughout eastern Central Asia, such as weak governance, poor social and economic conditions, ethnic tensions and religious militancy. While these differ in kind and scope in each country, some conflict drivers are transnational in scope, such as energy insecurity and environmental degradation.

As many as 50,000 people have died and thousands more have been wounded and made homeless by the civil war that has raged in Tajikistan, the poorest of the Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union.  On June 6, 1995 the United States Institute of Peace organized a forum on the Tajikistan conflict to explore prospects for negotiations and an end to the war. It included Ambassador Stanley T. Escudero, who had recently completed three years as the chief U.S. representative in the Tajik capital, Dushanbe, and French scholar Olivier Roy, now at the French National Center for Scientific Research and former head of mission in Tajikistan for the Organization on Security and Cooperation in Europe.