Welcome back to the podcast, bribe, swindle, or steel.

I'm Alexandra Rogi, and today we're talking about China's massive one-belt, one-road initiative across Central Asia.

My guest is Dr. Alexander Cooley.

He is the Clare Tau Professor of Political Science

at Barnard College and Director of Columbia University's

Harriman Institute.

He's also the author or editor of six books,

including ranking the world, grading states

as a tool of global governance,

and the wryly named Dictators Without Borders.

He's written an excellent paper for CSIS called the

Emerging Political Economy of Obor, which we'll be discussing today. Alex, thanks so much for joining

me. Oh, it's my pleasure to be here. What do you start by summarizing the Obor Project,

One Belt, One Road project, with respect specifically to Central Asia. I've been a long time observer of Central

Asia and especially interested in how the Central Asian governments interact with outside powers

and outside patrons. China certainly and China's right in the region has been a research

interest, but also Central Asia's relationship with Russia and with the U.S.

So when plans for the Belt and Road were announced, I thought we already had a body of observations and some research findings over how Chinese investment had impacted the politics and society

of Central Asia for a good deal of time already. So what I wanted to get beyond in the CSIS paper,

but also with a lot of my research, is this question of, is connectivity good or bad, right? Which I found a lot of the

initial approaches to Obor were trying to stress and rather look at what are some of the

political and economic relationships and impacts that might be of interest. And how do we parse

...