Svante Cornell in Forbes on Uzbekistan’s economic reboot
September 14, 2017: Svante Cornell was interviewed by the magazine Forbes about the recent economic reboot in Uzbekistan and its influence in Eurasia.
“The Uzbeks have been self-imposed isolationists and now are about opening up to their neighbors,” says Svante Cornell, director of the Silk Road Program at the Central Asia-Caucusus Institute, with offices in both Washington and Sweden. “Karimov was also putting in place a strategy for fuller engagement with the outside world, but he had a lot of PR problems. Not so with Mirziyoyev. At least on the rhetorical level, I’m pleasantly surprised with how he has implemented foreign policy,” Cornell says from a cell phone while driving through Sweden.