Crude Accountability is proud to announce the publication of its new report, “Turkmenistan: A Model Kleptocracy,” by Tom Mayne, a leading researcher on kleptocracy and corruption. Please join us for the report launch, hosted by George Washington University’s Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, with remarks from the author and commentary by Dr. Alex Cooley of Barnard College and Columbia University’s Harriman Institute and Casey Michel, an independent journalist—both of whom are experts on kleptocracy and corruption and scholars of the region. Also joining us is Bayram Shikhmuradov, a journalist and analyst from Turkmenistan. The discussion will focus on the results of Tom Mayne’s research, placing the Turkmen regime’s kleptocracy in the broader context of corruption, including the implications for human rights.
Speakers:
Kate Watters is co-founder and executive director of Crude Accountability, an environmental and human rights nonprofit working with communities and activists impacted by oil and gas development. She has worked with human rights and environmental defenders in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Russia since the early 1990s, has lived in and traveled extensively throughout the region, and speaks fluent Russian. She is the author of numerous reports and articles on civil society in Central Asia and the Caspian region and has been interviewed for print media, radio, and television about the environment, oil and gas, and human rights in the region.
Tom Mayne is a Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, currently working on a project regarding money laundering by Central Asian elites into UK real estate. For twelve years, Mayne was responsible for Eurasian investigations at Global Witness, an anti-corruption NGO, producing a series of reports about corruption in Central Asia, and the enabling of that corruption by financial service providers in the West.
Alexander Cooley is the Claire Tow Professor of Political Science at Barnard College and Director of Columbia University’s Harriman Institute (2015-present). Professor Cooley’s research examines how external actors—including emerging powers, international organizations, multinational companies, NGOs, and Western enablers of grand corruption—have influenced the development, governance, and sovereignty of the former Soviet states, with a focus on Central Asia and the Caucasus. Cooley is the author and/or editor of seven academic books including, Dictators without Borders: Power and Money in Central Asia (Yale University Press 2017), co-authored with John Heathershaw, and most recently, Exit from Hegemony: the Unravelling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020), co-authored with Daniel Nexon.
Casey Michel is a writer and investigative journalist based in New York, where he primarily covers trans-national money laundering, illicit finance, foreign interference, and kleptocracy. His writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, The New Republic, POLITICO Magazine, and The Washington Post, among others, and he is the author of the forthcoming American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World’s Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History. He is also a former Peace Corps Volunteer in Kazakhstan.
Bayram Shikhmuradov is a journalist and analyst, and editor-in-chief of the Gundogar.org website since its foundation in December 2001. In 1995 he graduated from the Turkmen State University with a law degree and began working in the international department of the National Olympic Committee of Turkmenistan. Later he was engaged in sports management until leaving Turkmenistan in 2001. Since 2001 he has been on the Gundogar.org website as the author of analytical works on the current political and economic situation in Turkmenistan. In 2012, he also took up investigative journalism, covering the problem of corruption in the Turkmen government, as well as the use of doping in Turkmen sports.
Sebastien Peyrouse, PhD, is a Research Professor at the Central Asia Program in the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (George Washington University) and a Senior Fellow with the George H. W. Bush Foundation for U.S.-China relations. His main areas of expertise are political systems in Central Asia, economic and social issues, Islam and religious minorities, and Central Asia’s geopolitical positioning toward China, India and South Asia.